Ignorance is (MAGA) Strength: Trump's War on the Department of Education
A discussion with John B. King, Jr., former U.S. Secretary of Education, current SUNY chancellor, & author of a powerful and profound new memoir, “Teacher by Teacher: The People Who Save Our Lives.”
On March 20, 2025, exactly two months into the Redux, President Trump issued an executive order directing his Secretary of Education—Linda McMahon, who has no background in education but did operate an outfit that promotes steroidal men in tights hitting each other with metal folding chairs in scripted “wrestling” matches—to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
To hear Donald and his minions talk about it, the Department of Education is some sprawling Deep State enterprise that, since its founding in 1979, has methodically indoctrinated generations of impressionable students with some nebulous gay/Marxist/woke agenda set by faceless lefty bureaucrats in Washington. (Fact check: It is not.) Language in his executive order, bearing the Orwellian title “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities,” implies that President Jimmy Carter created the Department in exchange for the support of the teacher’s union—a transactional, Trumpy quid pro quo. (Fact check: He did not.) “The Department of Education has entrenched the education bureaucracy and sought to convince America that Federal control over education is beneficial,” Trump writes, suggesting that part of its budget is for “public relations,” which is clearly meant to be read as a euphemism for “Communist propaganda machine.”
Needless to say, this is all bunk.
“They say they want to send education back to the states, but in fact, the vast majority of activity already happens at the state and local level,” John B. King, Jr., my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, tells me. And unlike Trump or McMahon or whatever MAGA dimwit actually wrote up the E.O., King knows what he’s talking about. After an extensive and influential career in education, he served as the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education, appointed by President Obama.
The Department has four core functions, King explains, all of them essential to maintaining a nation of well educated citizens:
One is getting resources to vulnerable students—so you think about the Title I program that gets money to schools for low-income kids, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funding, which provides services for students with disabilities.
The second major area of work for the department is the federal financial aid system: the Pell Grant program, the student loan program that makes it possible for low and middle-income students to access college.
The third major area of work of the department is civil rights enforcement. It’s the place you go if you’ve experienced discrimination on the basis of race or sex or disability. And in fact, a very large share of the complaints that go to the Office for Civil Rights of the Education Department are from families whose kids are not getting the services they’re entitled to—particularly students with disabilities.
And then the fourth area of work, which is maybe less visible but crucially important: data research. It’s how we know where we’re doing well and where we’re struggling.
All four of those areas together reflect a sense that education is a national imperative. And that used to be a bipartisan principle. But, sadly, the current administration doesn’t see it that way.
No, it does not. Fascists tend not to embrace bipartisanship.
The MAGA propaganda machine has plucked three letters out of the alphabet (D, E, and I, which are also, coincidentally, the first initials of Trump’s three oldest children), imbued them with a sort of imaginary woke/gay/Communist menace—a Red Scare for the 21st Century—and turned them into a monogrammatic scapegoat, on which the shortcomings of our education system, and pretty much everything else, can be blamed.
For an example of this, we need look no further than the aforementioned executive order, which commands the wrestling lady to “ensure that the allocation of any Federal Department of Education funds is subject to rigorous compliance with Federal law”—as if the Department had been founded by John Dillinger and spent the first four decades of its existence on a Russia-styled crime spree, like it was the Trump Organization—“and Administration policy, including the requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”
Once again, this is a bunch of malarkey.
“I think the administration is intentionally misrepresenting what diversity, equity, inclusion work looks like,” King tells me. “And what we’re talking about on campus is really an effort to create a sense of belonging so that all students are successful.”
Take the Department’s Office of Civil Rights Enforcement. The Trump people want us to think “Civil Rights” is exclusively a shorthand for “race, sex, and gender.” But the lion’s share of the Office’s complaints, as King points out, concern students with disabilities. There’s nothing “woke” about making sure that students with special needs are having those needs met, and that should be neither controversial nor partisan; Republicans have autism, too.
“What the administration has done is try to reframe it by saying, ‘Well, DEI means preferences that are giving advantages to students of color over white students.’ They’ve tried to frame it as anti-American, as woke indoctrination,” King says. “And when you frame it that way, I do think it resonates with the administration’s base, unfortunately.”
It may resonate, but it remains illogical—like, Mr. Spock would throw up his hands—and ultimately self-defeating.
But then, whether it’s tariffs, immigration policy, or foreign affairs, Trump thrives on illogical. His bizarre directives could be logic problems on some standardized test. Take this paragraph from his (not terribly long) executive order:
Closure of the Department of Education would drastically improve program implementation in higher education. The Department of Education currently manages a student loan debt portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion. This means the Federal student aid program is roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo. But although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid. The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students.
If Wells Fargo requires two hundred thousand employees to perform a function that the Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid needs only fifteen hundred people to do, isn’t that, like, a good thing? It isn’t the D.O.E. that needs a visit from DOGE; it’s Wells Fargo!
(It’s telling that, of all the banks, Trump chose Wells Fargo, which in 2022 was found to have “repeatedly misapplied loan payments, wrongfully foreclosed on homes and illegally repossessed vehicles, incorrectly assessed fees and interest, charged surprise overdraft fees, along with other illegal activity affecting over 16 million consumer accounts,” and was hit with $3.7 billion in fines by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—another federal agency Trump has tried to shutter.)
I asked King what we have to look forward to, if Trump gets his wish and dismantles the Department of Education:
If they make huge cuts to the Title I program, that means that schools serving low-income kids are going to have larger class sizes. They’re going to lay off teachers, they’re going to have fewer extracurricular activities, going to have fewer advanced placement classes, fewer support services for students who are struggling.
If they cut the IDEA funding—the Individual Disabilities Education Act funding— that means you’re gonna see students waiting much longer to get their services—and some students not getting services at all. These are students who might have various kinds of disabilities. These are students who might be on the autism spectrum, students who might need speech and language services, students who might be deaf or blind. All of these students will be deprived of vital services.
And then the attack on higher education is terrifying because the Pell Grant program, the student loan program, not only makes college possible, but [are] critical to our economy. Employers are counting on a prepared workforce with higher education. And so if you take away that system, that will mean many colleges serving fewer students—some closing because they won’t be able to serve students. And it will mean employers struggling to find the workforce they need.
This whole approach of the administration is just so counter to the national interests, the interests of our economy, the interests of national security.
“Counter to the interests of national security” may as well be Donald Trump’s tagline. Putting the Department of Education on the chopping block is consistent with his grand strategy—which is also the Kremlin’s grand strategy—of making Americans poorer, sicker, weaker, dumber, and more likely to die in a hail of gunfire from an AR-15, all while extracting as much plunder as possible.
All of this doesn’t even consider the potential consequences of Donald’s quixotic war on the Ivy League and higher education in general. Harvard is up for the fight, and has the resources to take it to the Administration. In time, the Crimson will prevail. But this is a war that helps no one.
“I think the courts ultimately are going to step in and stop some of what the Administration is trying to do,” King tells me. “I just worry that it will take too long. And in the interim, so much damage will be done. You know, there are right now universities in Canada and Europe that are actively recruiting American faculty members because faculty members are looking around and saying, ‘If I can’t get funding to support my research, I can’t pursue my career here.’ And so I worry that if the courts don’t move quickly here, we could be looking at years of losing faculty members, losing young graduate students who are really the future of these disciplines—whether it’s healthcare research or renewable energy research. And we will then lose out in the global economic competition because we won’t be generating the next generation of ideas.”
Congress must act to safeguard the Department of Education and defend our colleges and universities against fascist MAGA incursion. Otherwise, the United States will not be generating the next generation of brilliant ideas, but recycling bad ones that were in vogue in 1930s Germany.
Ignorance is not strength.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
John B. King Jr. served in President Barack Obama’s cabinet as the tenth U.S. Secretary of Education. Over the course of his extensive and influential career in public education, he has been a high school social studies teacher, a middle school principal, the first African American and Puerto Rican to serve as New York State Education Commissioner, a college professor, and the president and CEO of the Education Trust, a national education civil rights organization. King is currently the chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY), the nation’s largest comprehensive system of public higher education.
I spoke to King about what the Department of Education actually does; what proposed cuts to the D.O.E. mean for students, teachers, parents, and communities; the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning; the stakes of the Trump Administration’s ongoing attacks on higher education; and his excellent new book, Teacher by Teacher: People Who Save Our Lives, which I can’t recommend highly enough.
Follow John:
https://x.com/JohnBKing
The title of the episode comes from this paragraph, one of the countless moving passages from Teacher by Teacher:
Photo credit: Ajay Suresh. Department of Education, Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building, US DOE, United States Department of Education, Washington DC, Washington, District of Columbia, United States.
He told us early on that he loves the poorly educated. He’s doing everything he can to broaden that segment of the population.
A Tuesday rant, apologies.
Both Stalin and Khrushchev spoke of destroying the US peacefully from within. Putin via his puppets and playing the long game is trying to (close to?) accomplish this elusive, long held dream. The EO on the DOE is a prime example of this. Peaceful destruction from within requires We the People declare war on the perpetrators. They act with the impunity of making America white again, a nation of the white people, for white people and by white people. Realistically a minority working to dismantle our way of life. This does not mean a race war, rather a movement of like minded people regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or nationality who believe in Democracy and the need to preserve it, i.e.the majority of Americans. Call it a peaceful war (an oxymoron if ever there was one) of preservation of the right way of life. Wars are not one big event, rather multiple skirmishes fought on multiple fronts, in the courts, in state legislatures, in local government and school boards. Inundate elected officials with calls, letters and emails, exhorting defeat of bills against public interest. Show up at local council and school board meetings whose agenda includes implementation of parts of misguided EOs.
Democracy is more than an ideology, it is a way of life, one whose intent is that we operate in a way that benefits all people, even those who disagree with certain tenets. Democracy exists because We the People want it and are willing to fight for it.