DONALD Trump is such a lawless, reckless oaf: Taking over Canada, taking over Greenland, slapping on 200 per cent tariffs – it’s hard to keep up. But one area in particular has been targeted by him in recent days – universities and their students. 

One example: Rumeysa Ozturk is a 30-year-old Turkish national and Fulbright Scholar. On the evening of Tuesday last week, she was walking across the campus of Tufts University, Somerville Massachusetts, where she is a PhD student in the Child Study and Human Development programme. Suddenly, without warning, she was detained and arrested. Video footage shows several men in plainclothes and faces masked surrounding her and telling her "We’re the police." Ozturk is heard shrieking in fear, then she’s bundled into an SUV and driven away.

Other similar cases of students being arrested include that of a husband expecting the birth of his child, a former high-school valedictorian and an architect and professor of Urban Planning. 

So far 300 students have had their visas revoked. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a press conference last week: “It might be more than  300 at this point. At some point I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them, but we’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up."

What Rubio describes as crazed activity is in fact legal protest against the slaughter in Gaza. And it isn’t just students who are suffering; universities where such demonstrations are held stand to lose government funding for allowing  the demonstrations to happen. Most of the threatened universities, to their shame, have complied with Trump’s threat and have banned on-campus demonstration. 

What Trump and his gang are doing is loading the dice. If a student demonstrates against the havoc wreaked in Gaza and the West Bank by the Israeli army, then it is deemed anti-Semitic. They can find themselves pursued by ICE and their university can be crippled financially by the government defunding them. 

During the Vietnam War, student protests were a major factor in the US ultimately withdrawing from Vietnam. Trump and his henchmen have found a way to have US universities on their side – by threatening defunding. Columbia University has already  had $400 million withheld because of pro-ceasefire demonstrations.

There are shocked American citizens who thought this kind of attack on free speech could never happen under the auspices of their own government. They might receive some consolation from peeping back into recent  Irish history and what happened there. 

On August 8, 1971, the British army carried out mass arrests of more than 240 people from Catholic and nationalist backgrounds. Scores of those arrested had nothing whatever to do with the IRA. Despite this, the unionist Prime Minister of the time, Brian Faulkner, said the move would smash the IRA.

Between 1971 and 1975, just short of 2,000 people, the vast majority Catholic, were arrested and interned. There were no trials for such people. A considerable number of those arrested without evidence were tortured and mistreated. 

This is how governments operate when they have the power to act against what they see as their enemies. Lest we forget, there are still prisoners in Guantanamo Prison, flown there from the Middle East by the US military, with the Irish government kindly providing an opportunity to refuel and rest at Shannon airport en route. In all, some 780 prisoners have been sent to Guantanamo.  President George Bush issued a military order allowing for the indefinite detention of foreign nationals without charge and preventing them from legally challenging their detention.

Trump is an oaf, but he’s not too different  from his predecessors. The realisation that the US government could, when it chose and on the flimsiest of evidence, arrest and imprison in a distant place those involved in legal demonstration is at once an attack on free speech and, even more alarmingly, a way to get universities such as Columbia to co-operate in this crack-down against its own students. 

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you Trump is crazy. He’s worse than that – he’s ruthless.