As President Trump’s assault on America’s civic institutions approaches its 100th day, the question is whether those charged with maintaining the integrity of Congress, the law, the courts, the media, academia and the civil service recognize the seriousness of the threat they face.
With the exception of Harvard, three law firms and a small set of federal judges, the track record so far does not inspire confidence.
A crucial tactic adopted by Trump in his second term is to isolate a specific target. Justin Gest, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, elaborates on that point in an email:
Trump’s key method is to, one by one, eliminate as many independent institutions as possible that are free enough to resist or criticize him.
In the private sector, Trump has cowed otherwise independent companies by threatening them with arbitrary penalties. Rather than collectively resist Trump’s extortive tactics, companies from law firms to tech giants have sold out the long-term stability of a democratically governed free market to protect their earnings in the short term.
This collective action problem extends to universities, which are independent from government control but rely on governments for research funds, tax-exempt status, and the admission of international students and scholars.
In each case, the president isolates key targets and threatens them, and seemingly them only, if they don’t bend to his will. And for each target, the calculation is simple: Resisting entails concentrated costs to their organization and diffuse public benefits to American democracy, whereas capitulating transfers diffuse costs to American democracy and concentrated benefits to their organization.
On April 14, Harvard publicly rejected Trump administration demands for changes in university teaching, hiring and admission policies. The decision put at risk as much as $9 billion in federal grants but appeared to stiffen the spines of the leaders of other colleges.
Alan M. Garber, the university’s president, explained the reasons for the Harvard decision in a separate message sent that day to the Harvard community. Garber wrote that what the Trump administration would require of the university
violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. 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.
Less than 12 hours after Harvard rejected the Trump administration demands, Claire Shipman, acting president of Columbia University, effectively renounced Columbia’s March decision to submit to Trump’s ultimatums calling for major alterations of academic policies:
We would reject heavy-handed orchestration from the government that could potentially damage our institution and undermine useful reforms that serve the best interests of our students and community. We would reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire.
What appears to be happening is that recognition of the fact that making even small concessions will only encourage the administration to keep asking for more is spreading.
Why? Because Trump is insatiable.
Take the early interactions between the Trump administration and Columbia.
On March 21, according to The Times, Columbia University, facing the threatened loss of $400 million in federal grants, acceded to demands to toughen policies governing protests, antisemitism and campus security.
Columbia also agreed to appoint a new Senior Vice Provost on March 21 “with a focus on promoting excellence in Regional Studies,” with a focus on Mideast Studies, and to “appoint new faculty members with joint positions in both the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the departments of Economics, Political Science, and School for International and Public Affairs” in order to reinforce “the University’s commitment to excellence and fairness in Middle East studies.”
Columbia’s concessions were still not enough to satisfy Trump. On April 10, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Trump administration intended to demand that Columbia agree to a consent decree under which a federal judge would oversee and enforce Columbia’s “reforms” for as long as four years — an exceptional intrusion by the judiciary into setting university policies.
The same pattern emerged in the case of nine law firms, according to The Associated Press, that Trump pressured into providing nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services. Initially, the work was to be for uncontroversial causes and clients selected by the administration.
Unsatisfied, Trump suggested that these firms submit to demands that they defend the coal industry, negotiate trade deals and represent Trump and his allies in civil and criminal proceedings.
“They thought they made one-shot deals which they would fulfill,” Harold Hongju Koh, a professor of international law at Yale, told The Times. “But the administration seems to think that they have subjected these firms to indentured servitude.”
There are some clear precedents for Trump’s behavior.
In an April 9 essay, “Universities in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union Thought Giving in to Government Demands Would Save Their Independence,” Iveta Silova, associate dean of global engagement and a professor at Arizona State University, writes: “Across the United States, many universities are trying to avoid being Trump’s next target. Administrators are dismantling D.E.I. initiatives — closing and rebranding offices, eliminating positions, revising training programs and sanitizing diversity statements — while professors are preemptively self-censoring.”
While some universities, Silova continues, “may believe that compliance with the administration will protect their funding and independence, several historical parallels suggest otherwise.”
In Germany after Hitler took office in 1933, Silova notes, “his regime moved swiftly to purge academic institutions of Jews and political opponents.”
What made Hitler’s orders stick, Silova argues, “was the eagerness of many academic leaders to comply, justify and normalize the new order. Each decision — each erased name, each revised syllabus, each closed program and department — was framed as necessary, even patriotic. Within a few years, German universities no longer served knowledge — they served power.”
Now, in the United States, she writes,
Faculty at some institutions are being advised not to use ‘D.E.I.’ in emails and public communications. And students here on visas are being warned not to travel outside the U.S. after several were deported or denied re-entry due to alleged involvement in protests. Meanwhile, people inside and outside academia are combing websites, syllabi, presentations and public writing in search of what they consider ideological infractions.
The result?
When universities start regulating not just what they say but what they teach, support and stand for — driven by fear rather than principle — they are no longer just reacting to political threats, they are internalizing them. And as history has shown, that may mark the beginning of the end of their academic independence.
“The fundamental question,” Guy-Uriel Charles, a law professor at Harvard, wrote by email in response to my queries, “is whether Americans sufficiently value their freedom to stand up against autocracy”:
The American presidency is the most potent executive institution in the world. That power becomes a clear and present danger to individual liberty when it is wielded by a person driven by retribution, who seeks to bend institutions and people forcibly to his will and characterizes constitutional checks and balances as speed bumps.
In those circumstances, Charles wrote,
The stakes are clear: whether there is a broad commitment to a constitutional republic that protects individual liberty and maximizes the opportunity for human flourishing. If these are the stakes, public and private sector institutions, except for the lower federal courts, are not yet meeting the moment.
I asked a group of scholars to assess how well Trump’s targets among America’s civic institutions, both public and private, are standing up against the assault.
There was unanimous agreement that both branches of Congress have surrendered without a whimper.
Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote by email:
Republicans in Congress have done nothing. They are fully beholden to Trump and will do nothing to resist his authoritarian inclinations. It is one of the most shameless capitulations in American history.
It is hard to believe these people genuinely love their country. They have confirmed cabinet nominees who are the most unqualified in history. And they have raised not a finger to resist DOGE’s assault on Congress’s constitutional powers to appropriate funds and create federal offices.
The Supreme Court, in Klarman’s view, has thus far mostly ducked the issues raised. The Trump administration, Klarman continued, is preparing to put the court to the test over Abrego Garcia
And we will see how many of the Republican Justices care about the rule of law. The administration’s position is (1) that it can send US citizen prisoners to El Salvador’s torture chamber; (2) that even an American citizen accused of no crime wrongly sent to El Salvador has no remedy in court. It is hard to imagine a more authoritarian position.
Klarman’s overall assessment is bleak. “The corporate media has largely capitulated,” he contended, when faced with a Trump administration that “has shown it will exercise the awesome powers of the federal government to punish critics”:
The billionaire class has behaved the most despicably, as they have so much money and thus potential to be independent and fight back. But it turns out that those with the most to lose are not the ones to defend principle and resist authoritarianism. They are too loss averse.
“Law firms, he added, “have varied considerably in their response to the obviously unconstitutional actions of the administration” but “almost all of the most lucrative firms have folded. Again, how can one not call it despicable that partners making millions of dollars a year would not take a chance of losing a portion of their salaries to stand up for democracy and the rule of law?”
One institution stood out in Klarman’s view: “Harvard took a heroic stand, which surely will influence other universities, which have to compete with Harvard for students and faculty and will not wish to appear craven and submissive, while Harvard has boldly entered a war with the administration.”
Randall Kennedy, also a law professor at Harvard, wrote by email that he was “in the midst of writing you a woeful, pessimistic response when I received an email from President Alan Garber stating that Harvard declines to accept the Trump Administration’s proposed encroachment on the university’s autonomy. I am beside myself with joy and gratitude.”
Despite Harvard’s decision, Kennedy continued, “There is good reason to be worried.” Not only has the Republican majority in Congress “exhibited little interest in monitoring, much less checking, the president,” but “the ultimate guardrail against tyranny, the electorate,” cannot be relied upon:
A decisive chunk of the American electorate elevated Trump to the presidency after he had shown his authoritarian proclivities. And even now after Trump has menaced the civil service, unions, universities, news media, and professions in a reckless, dangerous, dictatorial fashion, the number of Americans vocally upset is disturbingly small.
Trump’s threats to impose debilitating cuts in federal funding for the nation’s universities and colleges come at a time when popular support of higher education is at a low point.
From 2015 to 2024, the percentage of American adults who say they have either “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education in the United States has fallen from 57 percent to 36 percent, according to Gallup. Over the same period, the share saying they have very little or no confidence has risen from 10 to 32 percent.
Of those who lack confidence, “41 percent mention colleges being ‘too liberal,’ trying to ‘indoctrinate’ or ‘brainwash’ students, or not allowing students to think for themselves as reasons for their opinions,” according to Gallup.
The share of adults voicing very little or no confidence in higher education fell throughout the nine years covered in the Gallup surveys, but by far the sharpest drop occurred in the last year between 2023 and 2024.
One major event stands out in this 2023-24 period: the pro-Palestinian protests on campuses across the nation following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel — and Israel’s subsequent attacks on Hamas forces in Gaza.
More specifically, the weak responses of Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, and Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, at a Congressional hearing in December, to charges that their institutions failed to counter antisemitism, led to the resignation of both presidents, laying the groundwork for Trump’s attacks on higher education.
There is an interior logic to Trump’s assault on the civic state.
Vicki Jackson, the a Constitutional law professor at Harvard, replied to my inquires by sending a March 28 essay in which she argues that the Trump administration is conducting a calculated, “multipronged attack, heedless of academic or press freedoms and the rule of law, against institutions of knowledge and of law.”
In order to function effectively, Democracies depend on the ability of the electorate to make what Jackson calls “informed choices.” In this context, Jackson writes, “Knowledge institutions — including universities, the truth-oriented press, government offices with data collection or scientific responsibilities — are crucial for constitutional democracies.”
Without free discussion based on knowledge, Jackson continues,
The democratically legitimating role of public participation in elections and policy processes declines. Elections become less meaningful indicators of public views; public checks on poor policy choices, or abusive or corrupt governance, dwindle.
A constitutional democracy is committed to the rule of law and the equal protection of rights — to which ends the public must be able to know what the laws are, what their rights are, how to protect those rights, and how well the legal system is functioning.
Robert C. Post, a law professor at Yale, argued in an email that by acting with such speed that his adversaries have been caught by surprise, Trump has been unexpectedly successful in the opening months of his second term:
The entire society has been taken aback by the suddenness and violence of Trump’s first 100 days. He has worked astonishing innovations in the exercise of executive power. Much of what he has done is obviously lawless.
Trump has seized the high ground in the belief that possession is nine tenths of the law. He has dared the courts to defy him. And the courts are on this point cautious, because, as has been true for hundreds of years, their authority depends upon the force of their reason.
Many of Trump’s executive orders suggest that he cares little about legal reason. To speak figuratively, Trump cares only how many divisions the courts can mobilize. In such circumstances, the force of judicial reason depends upon public opinion, and Trump is presently still on a honeymoon with the sectors of the public that elected him.
Trump’s strategy is to divide his adversaries, Post wrote:
Unbound by law, immune to shame, the Trump administration has unleashed the full force of the executive branch on institutions of civil society like universities and law firms.
Civil society is splintering under the assault. Harvard resists; Columbia bends the knee. Paul, Weiss bows in obeisance, Perkins Coie sues. Resistance is genuinely difficult, because the main institutions have left themselves exposed to blackmail from the federal government that has determined to trash all previous norms of behavior.
What, then, will be left in the wake of Trump’s onslaught?
Jack Balkin, a colleague of Post’s at Yale Law School, argued in an email that the wreckage will be hard to repair: “A great danger of the Trump revolution is that it may be very hard to reconstruct the public and private institutions that he has damaged. Even when Trump leaves office, he will have created a playbook for future administrations to follow.”
Already, Balkin wrote,
Enormous amounts of expertise and institutional memory have departed from the U.S. Government in multiple areas. The purges have badly compromised the professional culture of government institutions. That culture was premised on people making long-term career commitments to gaining expertise and working in the public interest.
Along the same lines, the Trump administration’s attacks on the independence of institutions of higher education will have lasting consequences, even if they are brought to a halt by the courts or by the election of a new president.
As Balkin put it:
Universities and researchers will know that the next administration, or the one after that, might begin the bullying and targeting once again, perhaps asking for the opposite of what the last administration demanded.
Trump has created a climate of fear and defensiveness that will be difficult to dispel. Even if a later administration tries to repair the damage, university administrators and foreign students will be fearful that Trumpist tactics can return as the result of a single election.
Balkin raised a legitimate point about the durability of Trump’s attacks on the pillars of democracy, but his comments also raise another question.
What if the revolt against Trumpism fails to emerge as a dominant counterforce and such figures as JD Vance, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton are able to maintain what Trump has started as a competitive — perhaps even dominant — movement in American politics?
What will the American future look like then?
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @edsall
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