President Trump is trying to seize power that he is not entitled to under the law or the Constitution.
But Mr. Trump will fail in remaking American politics if people and institutions coordinate against him, which is why his administration is targeting businesses, nonprofits and the rest of civil society, proposing corrupting bargains to those who acquiesce and punishing holdouts to terrify the rest into submission.
This is one part of Mr. Trump’s bigger agenda to remake American politics so that everyone wants to be his friend and no one dares to be his enemy. If the administration can reshape politics in such a way, it can create an enduring advantage for itself, as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey have done.
The most recent example: Last week the Trump administration announced that it was sending an academic “compact” to nine universities. Administration officials are weaponizing federal funding to make universities more congenial to Trumpism, saying that those who sign the compact will be at the front of the line for government money.
The administration is targeting a small group of schools, which it describes as possible “good actors.” It hopes that if institutions like Brown and the University of Virginia roll over, others will submit, too.
It wanted to signal strength. Instead, it’s revealing its weakness. The administration’s need to break the academy is forcing it to make a desperately risky gamble.
As political theorists like Russell Hardin have explained, power is a “coordination game,” in which everything depends on what the public believes and does together. Even the most brutal tyrant does not have enough soldiers and police officers to compel everyone to obey at gunpoint. Authoritarian regimes need civil society — the realm of people and organizations outside government control — to acquiesce to their rule. East Germany’s dictatorship collapsed when multitudes began to march and organize against it, collapsing the illusion that everyone accepted tyranny.
The struggle over regime change is about whether the aspiring authoritarians can subdue civil society. Their strategy is to play divide and conquer, rewarding friends and brutally punishing opponents. They win when society cracks, creating a self-enforcing set of expectations, in which everyone shuts up and complies because everyone expects everyone else to shut up and comply, too.
Those who oppose authoritarianism have to play a different game, creating solidarity among an unwieldy coalition, which knows that if everyone holds together, they will surely succeed. This too can become a self-reinforcing set of expectations — but only if the coalition’s members resist the threats and promises of those who are trying to break it.
The public can be extraordinarily powerful when it pushes back. When ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show under administration pressure, its parent company, Disney, reportedly began hemorrhaging subscribers. Public outrage made Disney change its mind and bring Mr. Kimmel back. Other businesses — especially businesses that are exposed to the public — may be less likely to concede to noxious administration demands.
Mr. Trump’s basic untrustworthiness is another big turnoff for would-be turncoats. He never lets gratitude get in the way of self-interest. Those who submit to him just expose themselves to relentless demands for more.
Universities have taken note. Although the Trump administration forced Columbia into humiliating subjection and has won some concessions from other universities, it hasn’t succeeded in creating the general sense of self-reinforcing hopelessness in the academy that it wanted to. Some institutions are negotiating, but few seem on the verge of folding to the same degree.
That explains why the Trump administration has announced the compact, and why it is unlikely to work. The compact aims both to break any opposition and to create a system under which universities will agree to what amounts to ideological oversight. If every university that depends on federal funding believes that every other university will sign, no one will want to be the last one left behind on Mr. Trump’s enemy list.
That is likely why the compact was sent to the group that it was, combining elite private and public institutions that might be wobbly, with the University of Texas at Austin, whose Board of Regents is chosen by a Republican governor and confirmed by a Republican state senate and has already expressed its enthusiasm for the deal. If the other schools follow U.T. Austin’s suit, they might break solidarity and provoke a rush to agree to the administration’s terms across the whole academy.
But that depends on fear of a credible threat. The administration would have played its cards differently if it had a stronger hand. Its best outcome would have been a private deal under which the nine universities announced simultaneously that they were signing onto the compact. Such an announcement might indeed have panicked other universities around the country.
That this didn’t happen suggests that the administration’s threats aren’t enough on their own to compel submission.
Instead, the Trump administration is betting its chips on public pressure. That is enormously risky, because it provides a big opportunity for the opposing coalition and encourages the public to get involved on the other side. Alumni will get organized, pressing university leaders not to sign a compact that could well permanently ruin their reputations. Students demonstrating against the imposition of ideological controls will likely win broad support and sympathy, even from those who have opposed recent campus protests. Some academics are condemning the compact and threatening boycotts, while Dartmouth College’s president has responded by saying she will always defend her university’s “fierce independence.” California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has threatened to pull state funding from any institution that signs. U.T. Austin’s academic superstars might well have begun to get emails from other institutions, asking if they are interested in moving.
This battle holds bigger lessons. The greatest weapon that the forces of regime change possess is the fear of inevitability. If everyone believes that Mr. Trump will succeed in reshaping America, he will.
The best defense against this weapon is solidarity among groups who disagree ferociously on many questions, but who agree on the need to keep America democratic and rebuild institutions and social connections to make democracy more robust. As the political scientist Adam Przeworski points out, Polish pro-democracy forces won only when they agreed to leave aside their bitter divisions over abortion until after they had succeeded.
Our future depends on who can coordinate best and how Americans answer the two most urgent questions in our politics: Will the administration succeed in picking off enough of the opposition such that resistance seems useless? Or will civil society hold firm against a regime that wants to center all power on itself?
Henry J. Farrell, a professor of democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins, is an author, with Abraham L. Newman, of “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy” and writes the newsletter Programmable Mutter.
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