That’s the ticket! Harass the scientists until they get fed up and leave. Who needs scientists? We want advertisers and PR geniuses and movie stars, not scientists.

As the Trump administration slashes support to research institutions and threatens to freeze federal funding to universities like Harvard and Columbia, European leaders are offering financial help to U.S.-based researchers and hoping to benefit from what they are calling a “gigantic miscalculation.”

“Nobody could imagine a few years ago that one of the great democracies of the world would eliminate research programs on the pretext that the word ‘diversity’ appeared in its program,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Monday.

One of the former great democracies. We’re one of the crappier autocracies now.

He was speaking at the Sorbonne University in Paris during an event called Choose Europe for Science that was organized by the French government and the European Union.

It was unthinkable, Mr. Macron said, alluding also to the withdrawal of researchers’ visas in the United States, that a nation whose “economy depends so heavily on free science” would “commit such an error.”

It may be unthinkable that the US would, but it’s all too thinkable that Trump would.

Alarms in Europe began sounding when the Trump administration slashed jobs and froze science grants at leading American institutions as part of cost-cutting measures. European dismay increased when the U.S. government attacked diversity programs and attempted to dictate to universities “whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” in the words of Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber.

Harvard has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its $2.2 billion federal funding freeze. Mr. Trump mused last week about ending Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

The U.S. government has also fired staff at U.S. centers deemed to be at the pinnacle of scientific research, including at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research.

At the same time, some federal agencies have removed words from websites and grant applications that were deemed unacceptable to the Trump administration. Among the terms considered taboo are “climate science,” “diversity” and “gender.”

Taken together, the actions have sent a chill through academia and research institutes, with scientists worried not just for their jobs but the long-term viability of their research.

Our loss is their gain.

Good move, Don.