Joan Brugge has worked for nearly 50 years as a cancer scientist, studying the earliest signs that someone might become sick. Then the Trump administration canceled her lab's funding. The administration's attacks on medicine, culture, and education'which include verbal threats and funding cuts'are about more than just budgeting and bravado. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. She argues that this effort is part of a larger autocratic project to maintain power. Joan Brugge: I was actually at a breast-cancer retreat. And during the coffee break, I looked at my emails to see, you know, if there's anything that I had to deal with. And I got this email from the university, and it was a real gut punch. My knees basically buckled, and I had to sit down. Brugge: I never imagined that it would be possible that funding for lifesaving research would be terminated for issues that were totally...
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