Appeasing Donald Trump Won’t Work

When Donald Trump took office in January 2017, he was greeted by massive demonstrations. Millions participated in women’s marches in Washington, DC, and elsewhere, with more protests to follow, giving rise to a resistance movement. We’re seeing a new one develop, with people mobilizing against Trump’s authoritarian agenda, complete with trade wars and culture wars, as well as Elon Musk’s dismantling of federal agencies. While everyday Americans are pushing back, some elite entities, in law and academia, have been responding to Trump’s radical agenda and demands with appeasement—which already looks like a losing strategy—as other institutions fight back.

“Law Firms Made Deals With Trump. Now He Wants More From Them,” declared The New York Times last week in a piece detailing how efforts to avoid retribution haven’t insulated firms “from his whims.” Pretty clearly, appeasement in the face of executive orders and threats provides an opening for Trump to ask for more, just like any would-be autocrat might. According to the Times, Trump “has mused about having them help with his goal of reviving the coal industry.” Ahh, just what every ambitious young associate has always dreamed of: doing pro bono work for Big Coal. There’s reportedly talk of firms, which have collectively pledged close to $1 billion in pro bono work, being tasked with helping out the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Meanwhile, four law firms that opposed Trump’s executive orders have already had wins in court.

Over in academia, Columbia University has provided a great example of how not to survive Trumpism. In trying to reinstate $400 million in federal funds, the school caved to a number of administration demands, such as “banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to remove or arrest individuals, and taking control of the department that offers courses on the Middle East from its faculty,” according to The Guardian. While the brand has been tarnished, the money still hasn’t been restored because, as you may have guessed, the administration has more demands. (Oh, and amid all this came a weird story about how Trump demanded Columbia pay him $400 million 25 years ago due to a proposed real estate deal.)

Now let’s look at Harvard, an Ivy League school that has pushed back against Trump’s demands. The university received a letter, signed by officials from three major government agencies, ordering everything from “governance and leadership reform” to “admissions reform” to the nebulous “viewpoint diversity in admissions” (which sounds like an affirmative action program for Trumpers). The letter reads as if the Trump administration plans to make the venerable Harvard into something more like the conservative vassal Hillsdale College. The university’s decision to make the government’s demand letter public was smart because the missive drew quick blowback; according to The Wall Street Journal, there were even “some on the right who publicly said it was overreach.”

Since the publication of the letter, the Trump administration has put in jeopardy the institution’s ability to enroll foreign students and threatened to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status. Just like Joseph McCarthy used fears of communism in the 1950s to squash dissenting views—something my family knows all too well—the Trump administration has tried to cast its campus clampdown as an effort to root out antisemitism. Inconveniently for Trump, though, Harvard president Alan Garber, a “mild-mannered” Jewish doctor and economist, had already been responding to concerns about antisemitism on campus and had deliberately steered the university away from responding to world events, such as the Israel-Hamas war.

Yet Garber has been anything but mild in response to Trump’s threats, declaring in a message that “no government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

Harvard is digging in for a long legal fight, which could eventually wind up in the Supreme Court. In a lawsuit filed Monday, Harvard accused the Trump administration of using the threat of slashed funds as “leverage” in a “pressure campaign” against the school, according to CNN, and dismissed the idea of the cuts being in the interest of fighting antisemitism. “The Government has not—and cannot—identify any rational connection between antisemitism concerns and the medical, scientific, technological, and other research it has frozen that aims to save American lives, foster American success, preserve American security, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation,” read the lawsuit.

The elite university might face even more attacks, but it’s still in a better position than Columbia, and can boast of having the public in its corner: The Onion captured this unlikely moment with its headline “Nation Can’t Believe It on Harvard’s Side.” Harvard, already America’s wealthiest university, received “nearly 4,000 online gifts totaling $1.14 million” in less than 48 hours after Garber’s email, according to The Harvard Crimson.

Like so many things in Trumpworld, there’s been plenty of confusion in the rollout of the attack on Harvard, along with some backpedaling over the letter. “There were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled,” according to the Times, as “some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely.”

The Trump administration is waging several different wars at the same time—from trade wars to culture wars—along with assaults on science, higher education, and public health. And that’s not to mention its attacks on the media, with the Associated Press providing another example of pushback. A federal judge recently ordered that the AP’s presidential access be restored after the White House barred the outlet from events for refusing to go along with Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, which he says should now be called the Gulf of America.

This is all happening simultaneously as the Trump administration continues to be dogged with problems of incompetence, from the secretary of defense’s reported problems with Signal chats to a tariff rollout—and walkback—that caused global market havoc. There is no way for one administration (especially one this incompetent) to fight so many wars at once. The lesson from Harvard is: Stay visible, stay loud, and stay fighting. That’s the only way for institutions to survive what’s coming.