Trump’s Assault Demands a United Front

Donald Trump has been in office for only about two months, but his administration is on a supercharged march to exert complete control over both the media and academia. So much of this is right out of Project 2025, which involves concentrating executive power while castrating the judicial and legislative branches. I predicted last month that the latter two might be something of a bulwark, as they were last time, against Trump’s worst instincts. This time, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case: Congressional Republicans will seemingly rubber-stamp just about anything Trump wishes, while Democrats appear increasingly powerless against the GOP’s groupthink. Only the courts and the cratering financial markets have provided some checks on Trump—and he has unsurprisingly decided to ignore both.

That’s why I’ve spent so much time lately thinking about how we can protect the norms and institutions we still have. Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse appeared on my podcast last month to argue that Democrats should fight the “corruption” and “chaos” of “Trump and his creepy billionaires” by “hang[ing] together with persistent and relentless focus on the real danger we are facing.” That call for solidarity isn’t just applicable to Democrats; it also applies to the media and the university system, which Trump is targeting through a process of divide and conquer.

Trump has slapped networks like CBS and ABC with lawsuits, and in a recent speech, he called broadcasters “corrupt” and described their work as “illegal”—labels we have to assume apply to any entity that covers him critically. (ABC News settled with Trump for $15 million in December, also paying an additional million for his legal fees.) “I believe that CNN and [MSNBC], who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party,” Trump said. The administration has also gone to war with the White House press pool, banning the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One for not calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The idea, in other words, is to separate different outlets from one another with either lawsuits or bans. Otherwise, their combined power might present a serious obstacle.

The Trump administration is taking a similar tack in its assault on universities. Most notably, it has singled out Columbia University over the pro-Palestinian protests that took place on campus last year, attempting to disappear Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. (Khaill remains in a detention center in Louisiana.) Trump’s administration has also pulled $400 million in federally funded grants and contracts to Columbia—a move that dovetails with Elon Musk’s baseless crusade to rid the NIH of “wokeness,” which has potentially endangered clinical trials. Eventually, Trump will make his way to other universities, but the goal is to separate them all by making an example of one. To justify all of this, the Trump administration has said it is trying to eliminate DEI and combat antisemitism—and has even published a list of 60 colleges that are under scrutiny for the latter. (Meanwhile, the president seemingly has no problem with Musk’s straight-armed salute.)

So how to push back? How to protect universities and the free press? Well, one thing’s for sure; acquiescence will only encourage bullying, as political scholars Steven Levitsky and Ryan Enos argue in The Harvard Crimson: “Not only is silence in the face of mounting authoritarianism morally objectionable, but, as the Columbia case suggests, it’s not working. Columbia’s leadership made repeated concessions to right-wing critics, only to be the first to come under attack.” Harvard University, they add, “remains silent. With American democracy on the line, the University has crawled into a protective shell.” Instead of taking a wait-and-see approach, those in higher ed need to stand up for themselves as a united front and make the case that an attack on one is an attack on all.

Of course, voluntarily choosing to put yourself in Trump’s crosshairs is easier said than done. “It is tempting, in these moments, to protect one’s turf, silently agreeing with critiques of other institutions,” as Yale professor Jason Stanley told me. “Maybe you too think the media has been flawed, or the universities have been elitist or too ‘woke.’ There is some legitimate criticism of each democratic institution. But they are all being attacked together and will stand or fall together.” We must—and I say this as a Jew—not allow a war on any form of bigotry, including antisemitism, to be hijacked by people who are using it in bad faith. You may not like the protesters, but we must protect our norms and institutions, even if we don’t agree with them.

There is a reason the right has always hated unions; they’re rooted in a philosophy of shared strength. The only possible way for American institutions to survive this administration is for them to collectively bargain, like unions, and to come to one another’s defense. This is not about one university, one media outlet, or one ism; this is about an autocratic war on free thought, which is severely undermining the media and academia writ large. The administration is on a quest for power over the narrative; we can’t let it take it.