Trump no longer needs to indoctrinate the world - only Americans
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has embarked on a two-pronged project: dismantling the global arm of US imperialist ideological indoctrination, now deemed unnecessary, while insisting that US universities impart conservative American ideological indoctrination at home.
These policies, as I will show, are complementary and not as contradictory as they may initially seem.
Trump's principal target has been USAID, which he has described as a "criminal organisation". Established in 1961 under then-President John F Kennedy - the darling of American liberals - USAID was one of the chief instruments of US imperialist policy, tasked with controlling "Third World" economies and combatting the rise of the welfare state, socialism, and what the US perceived as Soviet and non-Soviet communism.
It was also conceived as a major tool to indoctrinate developing world intellectuals and the emergent middle classes in anti-communism and pro-American capitalism. It supplanted former President Dwight D Eisenhower's International Cooperation Administration (ICA), whose task was to eliminate communist influence abroad.
USAID's programmes span socioeconomic development (read: promotion of classical and later neoliberal capitalist economics and the dissemination of white American liberal ideology), environmental protection (within the limits of neoliberal capitalist economics), democratic governance and education (again, code for neoliberal capitalist ideology and liberal values).
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It also accounts for most of US foreign aid. USAID's ideological roots trace back to ICA, which pioneered indoctrination in Chile in 1953, dispatching dozens of Chilean students to study neoliberal economics at the University of Chicago.
These students played a key role in imposing neoliberalism on Chile after the US coup overthrew the elected socialist President Salvador Allende.
In contrast, the Trump administration now seeks to scale back USAID's ideological functions as part of a broader effort to eliminate foreign aid programmes that promote liberal values, which the administration opposes.
This move reflects a strategy to reduce foreign aid expenditures and shift US ideological indoctrination towards domestic concerns, while lifting the long-standing pretence of "promoting" governance and human rights.
Imperialist interests
Whereas liberal imperialists protest the dismantling of USAID, describing it as "the US agency that helps to fight starvation and poverty overseas", anti-imperialists have long argued that the agency promotes starvation and poverty.
USAID devastated Egyptian agriculture, deepened poverty, and helped compile kill lists in Indonesia
Noam Chomsky has demonstrated this in the context of Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world, thanks to US and USAID policies.
Others have shown how USAID devastated Egyptian agriculture from the 1980s onward, deepening poverty across the country.
In other countries, it assisted in overthrowing governments and provided lists of names of alleged communists who were later killed, as it did in Indonesia.
In 1965, USAID's Office of Public Safety "assisted in the modernisation of record keeping functions through police training programmes, which aided in the creation of blacklists".
At least half a million people were killed in Indonesia that year. Perhaps Trump is not wrong in labelling USAID a "criminal organisation".
Yet the liberal press continues to focus exclusively on the danger that dismantling USAID may increase famine, while omitting any mention of the ideological operations it has carried out globally.
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The agency's defenders argue that dismantling this arm of US imperialism would open up "a window for China and Russia".
They insist that it will "lead to American influence waning in Africa, South America and Asia, where it addresses a range of needs from health care to clean water, distributing aid to nongovernmental organisations, aid agencies and nonprofits. USAID has also provided millions of dollars in military aid to Israel and Ukraine."
These concerns are not misplaced.
USAID has indeed been central to advancing US imperialist interests. Still, the emphasis on its alleged "humanitarian" function conceals its far more expansive role in destroying welfare states in the Third World, dispensing weapons, encouraging wars, and conducting ideological conditioning through education, media and journalism training.
This also includes the inflated salaries paid to local intellectual and technical classes subcontracted to advance these programmes across US-dominated countries.
'Insane priorities'
The Trump administration understands that it can continue to dispense weapons and other forms of necessary imperialist "humanitarian" aid through different channels, without maintaining an agency that spends large sums on the propagation of values the administration and the conservative wing of US imperialism oppose or deem superfluous.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt denounced USAID's "insane priorities", citing examples of its indoctrination, including "crap" like "$1.5m to advance [diversity, equity, and inclusion] DEI in Serbia's workplaces, $70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, and $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru".
The administration has already proposed a replacement agency that would deliver aid without ideological programmes.
Alongside USAID, the Trump administration is also shutting down other arms of US imperialist ideological indoctrination, notably the US Agency for Global Media, which operates Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe and funds Alhurrah Television.
These outlets have long disseminated US imperialist propaganda around the world as part of a Cold War-era project to promote US-style capitalism and neoliberal ideology - and, in the case of Alhurrah, to promote Israel and pro-American Arab dictatorships.
Today, all remaining Arab dictators are, without exception, servants of the US.
By law, these propaganda arms of US imperialism are prohibited from broadcasting within the US.
The Trump administration has dismissed their messaging as "radical", labelling VOA the "Voice of Radical America". Even so, some Republican imperialists worry that decommissioning these outlets would hand the US's global "information war" to its adversaries.
Domestic focus
Since the fall of the USSR, a large part of developing world elites, middle classes, and intellectuals have been effectively transformed into ideological parrots of US liberal propaganda through USAID-funded NGOs, educational and media projects.
In the absence of any competing political or intellectual framework, support for US economic doctrine and political liberalism has remained unchallenged.
Yet USAID's emphasis over the last three decades on white American liberal ideas about multiculturalism, gender and sexual rights is now anathema to American conservatives.
This, more than anything, has prompted the administration to discard the agency altogether.
For Trump, there is no need to continue indoctrinating developing world elites and middle classes in capitalism and anti-welfare policies - they already believe in them, especially if objectionable liberal American ideas must accompany such indoctrination.
The US, he realises, can now solely rely on hard power to impose its will, sparing itself the cost of investing in "soft power".
In fact, in his war against ideological brainwashing abroad, Trump is going as far as to want to shut down dozens of US embassies around the world, including eliminating "offices which work on climate change, humanitarian support for refugees, democracy and human rights policy."
In stark contrast, Trump is highly committed to domestic ideological indoctrination. This is what propels the administration's recent war on universities.
While he understands that military force and economic coercion can bring recalcitrant countries into line, constitutional constraints at home require more creative tools.
This does not mean that the militarised police, which has roamed US cities since 9/11, has not been mobilised for repression - its record under Presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden speaks for itself - but economic pressure, as recently used against US universities, can often do the job more effectively.
It is this method that the administration has turned to in order to transform universities into venues for conservative propaganda and push them to abandon their purported commitment to liberalism.
Understanding that the US can bomb countries out of existence without needing to indoctrinate them - but cannot do the same to its own population - has made it cheaper and more urgent for the Trump administration to abandon ideological indoctrination abroad while intensifying it at home.
University complicity
American universities, for their part, had already taken steps to support the broader effort of crushing dissent.
Since last year, many, on their own initiative, deployed the repressive force of the police to dismantle student protests and encampments demanding an end to Israel's genocide in Gaza and the complicity of US universities in it.
But for Trump, this is not enough. His administration wants to accelerate the trajectory and push universities further in the direction they were already heading before he assumed office.
The government now seeks to coax universities into advancing reforms they had already begun implementing to prevent a repeat of the student revolts
Columbia University admitted as much in its public response to the administration's demands.
The Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci long understood the central role education plays in modern capitalist governance, as a means of producing ideological hegemony to minimise dissent.
But that hegemony has faltered since October 2023, especially on the question of uncritical US support for genocidal Israel. In order to reimpose it, something had to be done. The deployment of police was the first step.
The government now seeks to coax universities into advancing reforms they had already begun implementing to prevent a repeat of the student revolts - and to coerce those that hesitate or object to its heavy-handedness into continuing down a path they themselves had already chosen.
Both Harvard and Columbia universities, to take the two most prominent examples, acknowledge the need for many of the administration-demanded reforms to discipline students and faculty and reassert ideological control.
The difference lies in method: while Columbia has openly collaborated and capitulated, Harvard prefers to impose these measures without the appearance of government coercion.
What this dual policy reveals is that the Trump administration perceives the greatest threat to the hegemony of the US wealthy elite as domestic, not foreign.
Ideological hegemony
As I have argued since 2005, and emphasised more recently in this publication, the question of Israel and Palestine is merely an entry point to upend academic freedom and freedom of expression at US universities.
Given the total consensus across US political culture in support of Israel - echoed in the mainstream and the right-wing and left-wing press - then this becomes the most expedient means of attacking academic freedom more broadly.
If Fox News, CNN, ABC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, and The New York Daily News all agree on the "facts" about Israel and its policies, then surely critical scholarship on this question will find little popular support when facing academic repression and can be easily eliminated.
This sets a precedent - and a chilling effect - for suppressing dissent in other, potentially more disruptive areas that command broader public support than do the Palestinians: the social programmes of the welfare state, the rights of US racial minorities, immigrant rights, and the rights of women - all of which Trump and white conservatives want to eliminate.
At the centre of the Trumpian worldview is the myth of discrimination against white men, and the "replacement theory", which portrays the demographic decline of the white US population as a major source of anxiety and a threat to white supremacy.
The use of women's rights and the right to abortion to explain the demographic decline animates the ongoing abrogation of those rights.
Convenient scapegoats
Similarly, the administration's scapegoating of racial minorities and immigrants for economic inequality in the US - especially among white people, who make up the majority of the poor - is most germane.
Without these scapegoats, the wealthy white class and its economic policies would be exposed as the principal cause of poverty and the growing inequality since the 1980s.
The goal of Trump's astute manoeuvre is to consolidate US-led capitalist imperialism and ideological hegemony in order to advance US imperial interests, not weaken them
The goal of Trump's astute manoeuvre, which abandons soft power abroad in favour of domestic ideological control, is to consolidate US-led capitalist imperialism and ideological hegemony in order to advance US imperial interests, not to weaken them, as some fear.
His focus on eliminating a rising domestic threat to US elites and their ideological hegemony is entirely consistent with this logic, as is his confidence that countries in the US orbit will obey his diktat, come what may.
That cutting costs is part of the deal is just a bonus.
While liberal - and some conservative - elites and imperialists worry this may not be the right way forward, Trump is certain that there is no other path.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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