Trump et Gay

I love that word—et. It means “and” in French. I’m borrowing it to title this essay, to dress up a dreadful topic.

From Sam Moyer’s Circle of Confusion exhibition at Blum Gallery, Culver City

If you follow me on Instagram and regularly watch my Stories, you may have noticed that I stopped reading the news for a while. It took time to ease back into my morning routine after the headlines about former presidents Trump and Gay finally began to fade. It was simply too much—two of them at once.

Of course, being accused of plagiarism in academia is serious—especially when you’re the president of Harvard University. But Claudine Gay’s plagiarism seems pale compared to what Donald Trump is accused of. I won’t leave out that former President Gay was also accused of antisemitic remarks during her congressional testimony, for which she later apologized. But does an apology change the accusation?

Her words during that hearing had me questioning how hateful speech could be treated as context-dependent. Was I twisting her meaning? She later described it as an error—a moment where she lost herself amid hours of exchanges. I felt that. How many of us have gotten lost in the swirl of confrontation, gaslighting, or what feels like bullying meant to provoke a reaction? Despite our best intentions, we get triggered.

After the testimony, accusations of plagiarism followed, intensifying the criticism against her. I read one of her plagiarized works. I’m not sure if “classic” is the right word, but it was textbook plagiarism—so much so that it could be used as an example of what plagiarism looks like. Did she simply forget that she had read the words she later wrote? Forget to cite sources buried beneath hours of research and study? To her credit, she acknowledged the oversights and took action to correct them, as many scholars have done when confronted with similar mistakes.

Still, was Claudine Gay a victim of racial animus, as she claimed in her resignation letter? It would be naïve to think her skin color had nothing to do with her becoming the shortest-tenured president in Harvard’s history—just 185 days. Was she an easy target for conservatives eager to discredit higher education?

Her antisemitic congressional remarks and her plagiarism—two different controversies, yet intertwined in the public eye. I doubt her plagiarism would have been uncovered if she hadn’t already been in the crosshairs of conservative critics. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t commit it. Would I have been as forgiving, even empathetic, if a white man had made those same antisemitic remarks? Would I have believed his apology?

I know myself too well—the answer is no to both. Maybe that’s the uncomfortable truth conservatives are pointing out. Maybe that’s why Trump still holds such power over his 74 million voters—the sense of perceived injustice. The belief that we forgive a Black woman but cancel a white man for the same words.

What’s often missing from that argument, though, is context: that in the long and brutal history of this nation, Black women have been victims, not perpetrators, of systemic cruelty. Perhaps conservatives understand that better than we think. Perhaps that’s why they’re working so hard to erase white men’s cruelties from our history books.

___

More essays:

Can There Be Such a Thing as Humanity in War?

And Just Like That, It Isn’t Easy Being Us

Are We Abusing Self-Care?

Because We Don’t Live in a Perfect World

Breaking of Invisible Minorities

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