It is a strike with surgical precision – and with an ideological scalpel. What President Donald Trump is doing to the Digital Equity Act is not an ordinary budget cut. It is a programmed regression. A digital lockdown. A form of information control long practiced by authoritarian regimes: those who know nothing demand nothing. Those who stay offline stay silent.
The Digital Equity Act was meant to do nothing less than bridge America's digital divide. Laptops for schoolchildren in Iowa. Internet access for seniors in Alabama. Digital training for veterans. Community projects in North Carolina to help people get back online after disasters. The law was a corrective measure against quiet exclusion – against that invisible form of poverty that begins where Wi-Fi ends.
But Trump wants to end the program. On Truth Social – his self-made propaganda channel – he declared the law “RACIST,” “ILLEGAL,” and “woke.” He called it a “$2.5 billion dollar giveaway,” a handout to minorities. In truth, it passed with broad bipartisan support. The word “race” appears exactly twice in the law – in one passage that explicitly states no group may be discriminated against.
So what is Trump’s real motive?
Perhaps a glance at the map of his voter base is enough. At the white rural regions, the farms in Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia – places where dead zones are part of everyday life and kids do homework in McDonald’s parking lots. It is precisely there that the Digital Equity Act was designed to work. Precisely there, digital access would be a step toward empowerment. And that seems to be the problem.
Because a connected citizen is an informed citizen. One who can compare. One who can question. One who can detect the lie – even when it comes in all caps. Those who listen to Trump hear the anger. But those who believe him had better not google what the law actually says. Had better not gain access to information that might challenge his worldview.
What is happening here is censorship by infrastructure denial. Not book burning, but the removal of letters. Not a broadcast ban, but the cutting of cables. It is the quiet hope that truth won’t reach the countryside. That the big lie will stand as long as the screen stays black.
Angela Siefer, director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, puts it plainly:
“Who doesn’t want grandma to be safe online? Who wants a veteran to drive two hours to see a doctor instead of getting a telehealth appointment? Who wants kids not to be able to do their homework?”
The answer: A president who counts on votes but not on education.
Trump governs as if ignorance were his best strategy. As if every hotspot were a potential loss of control. As if every learned keyboard shortcut were a small act of liberation. His decision to dismantle the law is not a budgetary measure. It is an ideological rampage. Against dignity. Against progress. Against the web – in every sense.
America is not being isolated by building walls. It is being digitally locked down from within. And while Trump boasts about his “great numbers” in Iowa, millions of Americans are staring at blank screens. The dictatorship of ignorance is taking shape. And it doesn’t begin with bans. It begins by cutting the connection.
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