Day: April 20, 2025

President’s attack on universities echoes efforts by Reagan and McCarthy – but experts say ‘we’re seeing much worse’

The showdown between Donald Trump and Harvard University may have exploded into life this week, but the battle represents just the latest step in what has been a decades-long war waged by the right wing on American academia.

It’s a fight by conservatives that dates back to Ronald Reagan, the hitherto spiritual leader of the Republican party, all the way to McCarthyism and beyond, experts say, as the rightwing scraps to seize more control in a manner that is “part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism”.

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Chris Whipple’s third book, Uncharted, hits Biden and aides like a bludgeon, with key sources who speak on the record

“Biden was mentally sharp, even if he appeared physically frail,” Chris Whipple wrote in The Fight of His Life, his 2023 book on the 46th president, who was then warming up his re-election bid at the age of 80.

In that book, Whipple quoted Bruce Reed, a senior aide, describing a long-distance flight. When others appeared exhausted, Biden was raring to go, Reed said. Biden showed “unbelievable stamina”.

Uncharted is published in the US by HarperCollins

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