Appeasing
Donald Trump Won’t Work
Big Law is learning this lesson—Columbia too. Harvard,
meanwhile, is putting on a master class in how powerful institutions can fight
back.
April 22, 2025
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.
