It is not a good time to be a fancy lawyer in America right now. Or an academic, a journalist, a corporate consultant, a government bureaucrat, or a scientist. President Donald Trump has declared war on America’s office elite. It’s the White House vs. the eggheads.
The president has set out to make the American workforce “manly” again. The stated goal of his tariffs is to revive manufacturing and bring back jobs in factories, mining, and construction. It’s not clear whether this mission will pan out — reshoring manufacturing plants is a tall order, and Americans aren’t exactly scrambling to return to assembly lines — but it’s Trump’s dream.
On the flip side, the president has gone knives out to undermine white-collar work. He has targeted leading universities and students whose political views he dislikes. He has slashed federal spending for consultants and scientists. He has fired tens of thousands of government workers, many of whom are responsible for processing information vital to public health and economic growth. He’s taken some of America’s leading journalism organizations to court and initiated an unprecedented crackdown on big-name law firms and federal prosecutors.
The one thing all these jobs have in common is that they involve what sociologists call “knowledge work” — tasks that require workers to use cognitive skills and expertise to solve complex problems and make creative decisions. It’s intellectual labor, as opposed to physical labor. Trump won’t be able to wipe out brain-driven professions, but his agenda is designed to make the people in them uncomfortable — and leverage social and cultural animosity against them to score political points.
“What it’s channeling is class anger against white-collar professionals,” said Joan C. Williams, a law professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and the author of “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back.” “These professions interact quite a bit with working-class people, and there’s a lot of class anger against them, whether they’re government bureaucrats or whether they’re lawyers.”
For the highest echelons of professional life, there’s nowhere to hide in Trump’s second term. The president has targeted multiple big-name law firms via executive orders, seeking to revoke their security clearances and limit their business opportunities unless they do his bidding. In one order, he described Perkins Coie’s work as “dishonest and dangerous,” citing its representation of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race. In another order, targeting WilmerHale, he said his administration was committed to addressing “significant risks” posed by Big Law firms that “engage in conduct detrimental to critical American interests.”
It’s a similar story in academia. Columbia University has acquiesced to many of the president’s demands so it can avert his threat to cut $400 million in funding, including banning face masks on campus and appointing a senior vice provost to oversee its department of Middle Eastern studies. Harvard, on the other hand, has dug in its heels despite Trump’s funding threats, though it has extended some olive branches.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, has had a role in the firing of thousands of federal workers, and the jobs of countless others remain in limbo. DOGE’s spending reductions have taken a bite out of the consulting class, while its cuts to federal grants have undermined the work of researchers and scientists nationwide. The Associated Press and other journalists have been barred from White House briefings and press conferences (though the AP has been reinstated by a court ruling). The message is clear: If you’re in a profession that requires you to think for a living, you better think again.
Trump has long channeled anti-elite sentiment for his political benefit — it’s a cornerstone of the MAGA message that helped propel him to the White House. He knows that for many Americans, highfalutin lawyers and university professors aren’t exactly popular figures. And he knows that attacking knowledge workers won’t cost him or his party much support, since they’re less likely to vote for Republicans than Americans without a college education.
“The dominant political cleavage right now in this country is if you have a college education, you’re much less likely to vote for Donald Trump or vote Republican,” says Daniel Drezner, a political scientist at Tufts University. “If I was drawing up a master plan of how I would weaken the groups that are opposed to me, it wouldn’t look that different from what he’s doing.”
Trust in the professions Trump is targeting is in steep decline. A Gallup poll of Americans found respondents had net negative views of lawyers, reporters, bankers, and business executives. In terms of public opinion, TV reporters ranked below car salespeople. And when it comes to institutional trust, another Gallup poll found newspapers, big business, and television news were among those with the least.
In the public imagination, the jobs Trump is going after aren’t ones typically thought of as authentically American in the way, say, an autoworker or a coal miner is. Unless they’re directly affected by Trump’s actions, many Americans aren’t losing sleep at night wondering what will happen to some nondescript professor in a suit they saw on CNN. A recent episode of “The Daily Show” tapped into the sentiment. “Look, I don’t usually root for Harvard, because they’re Harvard. They’ve got everything,” the host Ronny Chieng joked. “It’s like rooting for Jeff Bezos to win the lottery.”
Trump’s base, in particular, feels slighted by institutions. Katherine Cramer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and the author of “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” sums up the prevailing attitude: “It’s this sense that, ‘Hey, wait a minute, things aren’t working out for me the way they should, and it seems like the way everything is set up is not set up for people like me.'” By taking aim at those seen as “elites,” Trump is able to create a clear target for voters angry about what they view as a rigged system.
Trump is hardly the first political figure to decipher this code. As the historian Julian Zelizer pointed out in a recent column for Foreign Policy, you can trace the anti-intellectual political appeal back to Richard Nixon calling his vice presidential opponent an “egghead” in the 1950s and George W. Bush’s regular-guy schtick in the 2000s. “They were very adept at stepping in and deflecting the anger, the class anger, so that it wasn’t expressed against economic elites,” says Williams, the law professor. “It was expressed against cultural elites — namely, these college grads in government jobs, lawyers, doctors, science.”
Trump’s emphasis on masculinity, in fact, doesn’t just manifest in his rhetoric about bringing back manufacturing jobs — both he and Musk have channeled it into the way they’re firing federal workers. Part of the way the president rose to fame was by telling people, “You’re fired,” on national TV. Musk’s business playbook has similarly involved swooping in on companies and axing thousands of employees. Now they’re bringing that same “off-with-their-heads” style to Americans who work with their heads.
To be honest, knowledge workers share some of the blame for their own unpopularity. Intellectual elites can be smug and condescending. Some of them look down on Trump and his voters, or at least make them feel like they do. College-educated people are also a minority — about 38% of Americans have a college degree — who have outsize power in our society. “We tend to be the ones in professions,” Cramer says. “We’re the ones making decisions, and there’s lots of people feeling like whoever is making the decisions does not understand my challenges.”
The professions Trump is targeting are important ones. Nobody likes lawyers — until they need one. (Sorry, lawyers.) Universities are a critical and cost-effective engine of economic growth and technological innovation. Federal workers deliver essential aid and services to millions of Americans every day. Journalists help hold the powerful to account. The more we undermine these professions and deter people from entering them altogether, the more everyone will suffer. A thriving economy needs workers of all kinds, even the fancy ones in nice offices who may not know how to change a tire.
But for now, America’s knowledge workers find themselves in a pickle. The president has figured out they’re an effective foil. And thanks to the white-collar recession, things aren’t great for them economically, either. In Trump’s calculus, professional elites have become boogeymen on par with immigrants in the country illegally and wind farms.
What’s unclear is whether the attack on intellectual elites is an actual vote getter, or whether it’s just reinforcing preexisting divides. Jason Husser, the director of the Elon University Poll, says it’s not clear whether moves like Trump’s executive order penalizing law firms will cause swing voters to abandon Republicans in 2026 or 2028. It depends, he tells me, on how the battle against knowledge workers is framed. “When it’s conveyed as a story where Trump is the protagonist and the intelligentsia is the antagonist,” Husser says, “then he’s better able to capture his party and move a few independents.”
But if Americans come to realize how much their lives depend on the work of white-collar professionals, Trump’s attacks on college-educated elites could wind up costing him in the long run. Cutting funding for an Ivy League university may sound good to voters — until they realize it also means cuts to cancer research. Getting rid of federal workers may seem inconsequential — until they realize that they can’t visit a national park or count on the safety of their food and drugs. “That kind of thing has a pretty quick backlash potential,” Husser says. Meaning the war on eggheads may seem like a good thing, until it starts to affect the price of eggs.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
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