The sins of the past

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s assault on higher education threatens to repeat them — or worse

Jefferson looks over his university; source: PresidentsUSA.net

Founded by slaveholder Thomas Jefferson in a state where 20 percent of the population is now Black, the University of Virginia might reasonably be a place that owes the state’s minority population something. And yet, only a fraction of the undergraduate UVA student body is Black (variously reported as 6.2 percent or 8 percent). And, after other minorities are counted, nearly 57 percent of undergrads are white, College Factual reports.

Diversity has been even more of a nonstarter among the faculty at Mr. Jefferson’s university. More than 82 percent of the faculty are white, according to College Factual, with the share of Black faculty variously reported as 5 percent or 9.8 percent.

So, it’s not terribly surprising that James E. Ryan, a UVA Law graduate, saw a need to boost diversity, equity and inclusion efforts when he took over as the school’s president in 2018. In his inauguration speech, Ryan committed to redressing UVA’s longstanding racial imbalances.

As The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, he said the campus community should “acknowledge the sins of our past,” including slavery, eugenics, and the exclusion of Blacks and women well into the 20th century. The university needed to recognize both Jefferson’s “brilliance and his brutality,” he argued.

Ryan also praised that fact that most UVA students at the time were women (a demographic reality at many campuses) and spoke highly about hundreds being among the first in their families to attend college. He warmed to the idea that the freshman class then was the most diverse in the university’s history.

As might be expected, this all didn’t sit well with some alums. A couple of the good ol’ boys in 2020 co-founded the Jefferson Council, an advocacy group that the Chronicle described as “committed to reducing the influence of progressive students, faculty, and staff, and restoring a more traditional UVa.”

The alums involved saw the university’s investment in DEI as wasteful, the news outlet reported, and they argued that it forced leftist dogma down the throats of Wahoos, as UVA students are known. They lambasted efforts to rename buildings, diversify admissions, and spend millions on DEI-focused administrators. Through blogs and social-media posts, they documented what they saw as the university’s mistaken priorities, and they put New Jersey-born Ryan into their gunsights.

With Donald J. Trump leaning on the school, the good ol’ boys have now won. Ryan quit after Trump’s Justice Department bridled at his refusal to dismantle the DEI programs and demanded his scalp, according to The New York Times. He stepped down rather than having the school risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds, as other universities have.

“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in an email to the school community, The Wall Street Journal reported. “To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

Of course, this is just the latest university administrator’s head Trump or his supporters can claim. Their trophies now include Katrina Armstrong, driven out at Columbia in March after Minouche Shafik was forced out last August; and M. Elizabeth Magill, ousted at the University of Pennsylvania in December 2023, just a short time before Claudine Gay was driven out at Harvard. A fifth university chief, Martha E. Pollack surprised the Cornell University community in May by stepping down amid a threatened $1 billion in funding cuts.

Trump has put some $9 billion at risk at Harvard, with another $3 billion or so at risk at those above and other prominent schools. Those under the gun also include Princeton, Brown and Northwestern, as well as Johns Hopkins, a research gem where $800 million in cuts have led to hefty layoffs and where up to $4.2 billion in federal support is in danger.

The attacks are personal to a degree – Trump has a particular animus to Columbia, which once refused a $400 million land purchase he tried to foist on it (it’s not accidental that he cut $400 million from the university, or that the money hasn’t been restored even as Columbia largely capitulated to his demands). Also, recall that Trump himself was a middling transfer student into the University of Pennsylvania, where a professor of his said “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!’”

But the assaults also reflect the longstanding hostility rightists have had against the academic world, dating back at least to the days of Richard Nixon. Recall that Nixon famously said, “the professors are the enemy,” a phrase JD Vance reprised in late 2020 at a National Conservatism Conference.

Recall racist Gov. George Wallace’s assault on “pointy headed intellectuals,” which was mirrored decades later by Trump’s attack on “those stupid people they call themselves the elite.” The attack played well with Wallace’s undereducated followers back then and still resounds with Trump’s underschooled loyalists now.

It’s all something of a replay, though those earlier assaults had none of the teeth Trump’s latest ones have. The broad-gauge attack the president and his acolytes have mounted has been enormously costly. Consider what The Atlantic reported at the end of March:

“But college life as we know it may soon come to an end,” the magazine reported. “Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future.

“Higher education is in chaos, and professors and administrators are sounding the alarm. The targeting of Columbia University, where $400 million in federal grants and contracts have been canceled in retribution for its failure to address campus anti-Semitism and unruly protests against the war in Gaza, has inspired particular distress. Such blunt coercion, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic earlier this month, amounts to ‘the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare.’ In The New York Times, the Yale English professor Meghan O’Rourke called it and related policies ‘an attack on the conditions that allow free thought to exist.’”

The administration’s twin rallying cries are fighting anti-Semitism and killing DEI. The former, of course, is just a fig leaf, a handy excuse for bludgeoning administrators because some students angry about the Gaza War misbehaved in the school year before last. Those protests were usually handled, if not always well, and mostly didn’t recur in the year just ended. Still, they are bogeymen the rightists can invoke as example of dissent they just can’t tolerate.

The DEI assault is more substantial. White Trumpians angry about minorities becoming more prominent feel disadvantaged, as they have ever since affirmative action began in 1965. Back then, President Johnson issued an executive order requiring federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure equality of employment opportunity without regard to race, religion and national origin. Ever since then, any steps to give disadvantaged groups a leg up – and to adapt to our increasing national diversity – have been castigated by angry whites as unfair.

So, it’s no surprise that at UVA some white alums have resented the modest advances Blacks and other minorities have made and DEI efforts to help them. To them, 57 percent is apparently not a high enough share of whites among students; nor is 82 percent of faculty.

A third rallying cry among the Trumpians is intellectual diversity in the college communities. What that means is that professors are just too damn liberal — another longstanding canard — and they should be driven out in favor of rightists. That is taking root in some places. Just look at what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has done with the New College of Florida in Sarasota, where ideologues have marched in, particularly as scholars in residence. The right sees this is as a model for remaking universities nationwide.

Judging from my days as a student and more recently as a professor, there are indeed plenty of liberals on faculties. That’s likely because liberals generally tend to be more adaptive to social change than conservatives, almost by definition, and being attuned to such change is natural in the academy. Still, there also are plenty of conservatives, and not only in economics departments and business schools. And is the liberal-conservative split even an issue in the sciences, tech and ag areas, for instance?

There are lots of scary elements about the changes Trump and his minions are enacting. One is a very conservative idea — that the drive amounts to social engineering by an elite in Washington — a Trumpian elite — not change coming from the grassroots. It is one thing if spontaneous change is demanded by the public around the country, in various states where legislatures fund education; another if it is directed by federal authorities.

Another troublesome factor is that many of the changes now being forced on private institutions are moving into the public ones. UVA is an example, but not the only one. We’ll likely see more such state universities in the dock going forward. More university presidents are likely to be driven out or quit under the pressure.

And where will this all leave students? Well, federal funding cuts will leave them with fewer intellectual opportunities as programs disappear. What’s more, in some states dominated by Trumpian rightists such cuts are being amplified by stinginess in state funding. As a result, many students are paying more for less.

In Nebraska, where I taught for 14 years, the state government’s contribution to the university system will rise roughly 0.6 percent in the coming year, far below the 3.5 percent increase that the Board of Regents had sought to account for inflation. The Trumpian Gov. Jim Pillen, who wanted the state to have “the courage to say no, and to focus on needs, not wants,” had originally pushed for a 2 percent cut, The New York Times reported.

“We will need to continue to reduce spending and make increasingly difficult choices to ensure fiscal discipline,” Jeffrey P. Gold, the University of Nebraska’s president, said before the regents voted to impose cuts and increase tuition. Students at the flagship campus in Lincoln will pay about 5 percent more.

It took many decades for higher education at both private schools and top-tier public ones, such as UVA, to develop into an international bragging point for the United States, a magnet for the world. That system, moreover, has long been the engine of American economic growth. Tragically, all that is under siege and it’s not clear how or when the damage we’ll see in the coming three and a half years can be undone.

The “end of the beginning?”

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s attack leaves us with uncertainties aplenty

Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925 developed what came to be known as the Pauli exclusion principle. It holds that identical particles cannot occupy the same quantum state at the same time. Non-scientists have since broadened the idea to say that no two objects can fill the same spot at the same time.

But what of ideas? And what of competing and equally bad realities? Can two disparate and conflicting things coexist, especially when matters of politics, war and religion are involved?

Tragically, perhaps, we have an example now with Donald J. Trump’s attack on Iran. On the one hand, the world is surely safer if that country can’t now develop a nuclear bomb.

Certainly, Israel is more secure without that. And so are any of the many other enemies of the ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, the “cleric” whose bloodthirstiness belies any claim to holiness. We can include on his enemies list most of the western world, along with neighbors such as Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, as well as Jews everywhere.

U.S. and Qatari troops and staff await U.S. President Donald Trump at the Al-Udeid Air Base southwest of Doha on May 15, 2025. Source: CNBC

On the other hand, all those enemies are now just as surely more at risk of lesser attacks. Terrorist assaults, missiles — perhaps even dirty bombs that could spread radioactive material over large areas — are all at the Shi’ite ayatollah’s disposal. Indeed, he already has sent missiles into Qatar in a failed retaliation at the U.S. military location, Al Udeid Air Base. What more awaits his enemies in coming weeks, months, even years?

In other words, the Trump attack is difficult to assess because this unquestionable act of war could bring safety to many for a long time, even as it poses great dangers to many, perhaps for a longer time.

So, was it a good move or not? Will history look back on Trump’s swaggering Marshal Dillon move as the bold and visionary effort of a courageous leader, a Churchill in a world of Chamberlains, as one right-wing rabbi suggested? Or was this a short-sighted, impulsive and power-mad bit of machismo that ultimately will deepen the U.S.’s plunge into an unresolvable Middle Eastern quagmire, possibly this generation’s Vietnam or Afghanistan?

Of course, with the ruins at the Isfahan, Natanz and Fordo nuclear-development sites still smoldering, a huge amount remains unknown. Vice-President JD Vance hinted that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium remains intact, for instance, saying “we are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel and that’s one of the things that we’re going to have conversations with the Iranians about.”

That appears to contradict his boss’s claim that Iran’s nuclear program was “totally destroyed” or “obliterated.” Trump’s claim was undercut, too, by the leaders of the U.S. military, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine saying that an assessment of damage to Iran’s nuclear sites was “still pending,” and Caine hedging that it was “way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.”

Similarly, the judgments of a couple independent experts fly in the face of Trump’s bravado. Consider the remarks of Jeffrey Lewis, a professor of nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, which tracks Iran’s nuclear program.

“At the end of the day there are some really important things that haven’t been hit,” Lewis told NPR. “If this ends here, it’s a really incomplete strike.” And Albright said: “I think you have to assume that significant amounts of this enriched uranium still exist, so this is not over by any means.”

Put another way, we either are now just entering the cliched but on-target “fog of war” or we are seeing the beginning of the removal of an horrific threat to Israel and the West. Judgments by very smart observers are conflicting:

“Those who claimed that Trump would flinch and back down at the last moment, that he is always afraid to take the next decisive step, were proven wrong,” the hawkish Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal wrote on YNet. “The Chinese watched and saw a great power willing to defend its interests and its allies in the region. The Russians saw Iran’s capabilities—some equipped with Russian weapons systems—easily crushed by the Israeli Air Force. By deciding to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump has begun to rebuild the image of a superpower that stands by its principles and is ready to deter its rivals. This is not only important for Israelis, but for the entire world. This is not the end, but it is certainly the end of the beginning.”

And then there is the opposite view of Zev Shalev, an Israeli-South African television producer and author of the “Narativ” Substack.

“Pentagon planners aren’t talking about surgical strikes,” Shalev argued. “They’re discussing deployments, supply lines, and regional bases. They know what civilian leaders refuse to admit: there’s no such thing as a quick war with Iran. Once American forces engage, we’re committed to decades of conflict in the world’s most volatile region. Iran has prepared for this moment since 1979. They’ve built a war machine specifically designed to survive initial strikes and then bleed America through sustained asymmetric warfare. They’ve studied our weaknesses, positioned their assets, and created the perfect strategic nightmare for American forces. Russia and China are waiting. They’ve engineered the ultimate trap for American power: a war we can’t win, can’t afford, and can’t escape. And they’ve found the perfect mark to spring it—a cognitively compromised president who mistakes manipulation for respect.”

Can both views be true at the same time?

Certainly, one hopes that Pentagon planners have contingency plans for all eventualities, though Shalev doesn’t cite any sources for reporting what such planners are up to or know. Nonetheless, even if his comments are just conjecture, they are not unreasonable.

For sure, what is unreasonable is Trump seeming to think – or at least suggest – that his effort was a one and done, something that would force the Iranians to the bargaining table to sue for peace. “We did not assault anyone, and we will never accept being assaulted by anyone,” Khamenei said, as reported by Reuters. “We will not submit to anyone’s aggression – this is the logic of the Iranian nation.”

And just before the explosions in Qatar, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote on X: “We neither initiated the war nor seeking it. But we will not leave invasion to the great Iran without answer.” The missiles Iran sent into Qatar killed no one – probably because Iran back-channeled a warning about its plans in advance – but they underscored Iran’s intent to respond.

What is also unreasonable is Trump ignoring the views of his own intelligence agencies by arguing that Iran was on the brink of getting a bomb. His own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, in March testified on Capitol Hill that the U.S. “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” Only later did she backtrack, as Vance more recently claimed that “a lot has changed” since Gabbard’s March testimony.

Is this all shades of the fictional weapons of mass destruction that were invoked to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq? Given Iran’s very real nuclear-development effort, the argument for decisive military action – the Trump bombing – seems far more reasonable than the Iraqi action was. Almost certainly, the Iranians would love to have a nuclear bomb — sooner or later.

However, what happens now is problematic. As even critics of prior efforts at diplomacy with Iran admit, the country plays the long game (see Stanford’s Josef Joffe). Will it now bide its time, making small gestures as it tries to regroup after the blows to its military leadership and ordinance? Or might it escalate to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, restricting the world’s oil supplies? Then again, will it lay low but hit again when it judges the time right, in a year or two or three?

And will Trump soon be forced to realize this isn’t a reality-TV show where the plot unfolds in days and he comes out on top in the end? Will he be forced to kill the Iranian leader, as he threatened to do? Will he be forced to push for regime change, the mantra of other failed U.S. military efforts?

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” Trump cartoonishly posted on Truth Social.

And where would that put us but even deeper into the mud, as happened in so many wars before?

Questions abound. But, eventually, we’ll find out whether Trump’s cowboy actions — all done without the legally required assent of Congress — will amount to the end of the beginning, maybe a prelude to far worse. If physics offers any guidance, two opposing ideas can’t really be right at the same time.

Long live democracy or long live the king?

Posted on June 16, 2025 by Joe Weber

The would-be monarch is fighting hard but just may lose

Philadelphia’s “No Kings” Protest, June 14; source: AP

Crowd estimates are notoriously unreliable. But it appears that between four million and six million Americans angry enough to march on “No Kings Day” last Saturday don’t like the idea of a monarch in the White House. And, given the latest approval ratings for Donald J. Trump – 39 percent or lower, the lowest since January – it is likely that many more who stayed home don’t either.

Of course, some like the idea of an absolute ruler – or something close to it. The Project 2025 folks, for instance, love the so-called “unitary executive theory,” which holds that the Constitution vests power in the executive branch in the president, giving him the power to command at will, hiring and firing and issuing edicts as he sees fit.

“A president is elected by the whole American people,” is how Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller put it in a February press briefing. “He’s the only official in the entire government that is elected by the entire nation. Right? Judges are appointed. Members of Congress are elected at the district or state level.”

“Just one man,” Miller continued. “And the Constitution, Article 2, has a clause, known as the vesting clause, and it says, ‘The executive power shall be vested in a president,’ singular. The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president. That president then appoints staff to then impose that democratic will onto the government.”

Certainly, Trump agrees. That’s why he has fired top officers at such independent agencies as the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and more recently, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And he also issued an executive order taking direct control of independent regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.

By appointing loyalist Kash Patel, moreover, he seized control of the FBI, where Patel has been polygraphing agents to find news leaks. And he upended the Justice Department, where appointee Pam Bondi has turned its guns on anyone who investigated Trump in past times. He also fired 18 inspectors general from federal agencies.

“It’s good to have a strongman at the head of a country,” then-candidate Donald Trump declared at a New Hampshire campaign rally back in January 2024, as NPR reported.

Thus, no one could be surprised that he could unilaterally order National Guard troops and Marines into a state where officials didn’t invite them and don’t want them. After California officials sued Trump over the move, he lost an initial judgment and is now fighting in a federal appeals court to keep the troops on the ground.

Poster at anti-Trump demonstration in Frisco, Colorado

Trump, of course, seems to feel he can defy court orders he doesn’t like. Thus, D.C. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg, found reason to believe that administration officials defied his order requiring a halt to deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. And in several cases involving the withholding of federal funding, judges found the administration to be violating injunctions to restore funding.

So much for checks and balances, one might say. And more power to the advocates of the unitary theory or, perhaps more apt, the monarchists.

In some ways, this is cyclical. Those of a certain age will recall that John F. Kennedy felt no reluctance to appoint his brother, Robert, as Attorney General, leading the Justice Department. Only norms and self-restraint regulated much presidential power for much of our history. But, as NPR reported, after Richard Nixon resigned in a scandal over abusing such power, Congress spent years passing laws to limit that power. Inspectors general emerged to attack waste, wrongdoing and inefficiencies.

“We’re still living with those laws today,” conservative legal scholar John Yoo told NPR. “And one way to understand what Trump is trying to do, and I’m not saying even that Trump understands this is what he’s doing, but the presidency, the way it’s designed, urges him to do it, [is] he’s trying to snap those bounds that were imposed on the presidency in the post-Watergate era.”

So, Fox News contributors such as Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, are keen to attack Democrats for trying to preserve those bounds with efforts such as the “No Kings” demonstrations. “Monarchy Malarkey” Turley called it on his website and in a column for The Hill.

“It is a curious campaign, since every indication is that our constitutional system is operating precisely as designed,” Turley argued. Courts have ruled for and against the president, he added, suggesting everything is just fine, except that Democrats are trying to breathe life into their failed “Democracy is Dying” theme.

“The danger is that these Democratic politicians are fueling the most radical and violent elements in our country with their ‘rage rhetoric,’” he contended.

Assassinated Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, Sen. John Hoffman; source: NPR

Turley’s timing in making that absurd contention couldn’t have been worse. Recall that a Trump supporter, Vance Luther Boelter, in the predawn hours of “No Kings Day” assassinated former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their home outside Minneapolis. He also shot state Sen. John Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, though they survived. And Boelter had a hit list of 45 Democrats.

Recall, too, Trump’s egging on of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And his claim afterward that the Capitol terrorizers were “patriots,” followed by his pardon of those who attacked police and others. Can we expect anything better of a man whose disdain for law and order is demonstrated most clearly by his own 34 felony convictions, findings for which he has avoided justice?

For Trump apologists, important questions loom. Is the system really operating as designed when Congress and most of the Senate are supine in the face of Trump efforts against universities, including Turley’s GW? Is it really operating when the president thumbs his nose at courts? Is it really operating when a president can countermand the wishes of a state’s governor and a big-city mayor? Or when, out of sheer vindictiveness, he can ramp up his deportation plans by targeting Democrat-led cities where the protests were largest, such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York?

“We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest cities,” Trump ranted on his Truth Social platform. “These, and other such cities, are the core of the Democratic Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.”

In the face of such George III-like furor (see the brilliant royal take in “Hamilton”), is the system really performing as it should? Or are critics such as Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman onto something in supporting the “No Kings” efforts.

“America is no longer a full-fledged democracy,” Krugman argued in his Substack. “We are currently living under a version of competitive authoritarianism — a system that (like Orban’s Hungary or Erdogan’s Turkey) is still democratic on paper but in which a ruling party no longer takes democracy’s rules seriously.”

But Krugman doesn’t believe Trump has won — yet.

“Trumpists, however, haven’t yet fully consolidated their hold,” Krugman wrote. “America still has a chance of reclaiming itself from the grip of brazen corruption, mindless destruction, and contempt both for the rule of law and for our erstwhile allies. We don’t have to become a country bullied into submission.”

For that view to prevail – for American liberties and reasonable government policies to succeed – it likely will take more and bigger “No Kings” days. It will likely take a huge voter turnout in one and a half years to send a message in the Congressional elections that, indeed, most Americans have no use for the would-be monarch. And it will take a resounding rejection of Trump’s GOP two years after that to begin restoring health to the Republic.

Encouraging as they are, four, five or six million anti-monarchists are just a start.

Is the”police state” dawning?

Posted on June 9, 2025 by Joe Weber

Some of Trump’s critics are warning of just that

“Flatbed train cars carrying thousands of tanks rolled into Washington, D.C., yesterday in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters. The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state.”

From the opening above, historian Heather Cox Richardson, a professor at Boston College, went on in her popular Substack to paint a bleak picture of the use of military and law-enforcement forces under the orders of the president.

She noted that the administration has insisted that many immigrants – even some in the U.S. legally – are criminals with no right to due process. Thus, masked officers dressed in black could grab people up off the street or pick them up when they appeared for legal appointments in courthouses. And thus officials could rush immigrants off illegally to the equivalent of a U.S.-funded penal colony in El Salvador.

Richardson also quoted the president’s point man on immigration – deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller – as saying that recent protests at a federal detention center in Los Angeles constituted an “insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.” Thus, the administration could order some 700 Marines to join some 2,100 National Guard troops Trump dispatched to quell protests, even though California Gov. Gavin Newsom did not request the military help and is suing to oust these uninvited soldiers.

Unsettling as all that may be, does it constitute the actions of a “police state?” A usually thoughtful nephew who works in law enforcement panned Richardson’s comments. Everything she writes, he argued in a post to me, is “skewed” and those who don’t see that are “willfully blind.”

While my nephew offered no details on what, if anything, is amiss in her comments on the police and military actions in California, there is no question that the term “police state” is strong stuff. So, too, is the argument that Trump is steering us into one. And so, too, is some of the rhetoric by Democratic officials.

For instance, consider a comment in The Wall Street Journal from Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who as a Marine officer served multiple tours during the war in Iraq. “This is Trump’s dream,” Moulton said. “This is exactly what he has wanted to do: turn the military against the American people. Donald Trump has never respected what Marines do overseas but has always wanted to use them to force his political agenda at home.”

So, the questions arise: Is Richardson’s argument that Trump is out to “establish a police state” unhelpful and “skewed” hyperbole? And is Moulton’s contention correct that Trump – who himself dodged the draft in the Vietnam era – is using the military to force his agenda regarding immigrants and perhaps other elements on us all?

On the first point, let’s turn to Merriam Webster. A police state, the dictionary tells us, is “characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures.”

So, one must ask, is it repressive federal control when a president overrides the wishes of an elected governor to deploy force? Moreover, do masked ICE officers constitute “secret police?” And does disregarding the “judicial organs” of the government – the courts – reflect the actions of a would-be tyrant out to enforce his will through the military and police?

If the answer to any of those questions is “yes,” then the term “police state” doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. Moreover, when combined with the imagery of a military parade in the nation’s capital slated for that would-be dictator’s 79th birthday, is it overwrought to think that suppression of dissent by force is out of bounds? Is not such imagery designed to intimidate both those from abroad who might threaten the U.S. and those at home whom Trump wants to crush?

Parade in D.C. following 1991 Gulf War, source: The New York Times

Is a parade of weaponry and soldiers in the nation’s capital — à la North Korea or Russia — not the action of a would-be fascist (a loaded term, too, but perhaps an apt one)?

One must note that most of the normal checks and balances in our government have evaporated under the one-party control of the Senate and the House, since that controlling party operates under Trump’s thumb. The president has cowed nearly all the potential critics in his party. Stepping up his control of the military seems likely to eliminate one other potential stumbling block.

To their credit, however, one force for checking tyranny – the judiciary – still seems to be operating properly. The courts, right up to the Supreme Court, have been a last bastion of resistance, often on immigration questions.

Indeed, it is heartening that the administration after insisting that one illegally removed immigrant – Kilmar Abrego Garcia – would never return to the U.S., has brought him back in the wake of a Supreme Court order demanding that. Abrego Garcia will soon face charges in a court of law, as he perhaps should have earlier, and we’ll see whether the administration’s accusations against him have any merit.

And yet the courts can act far less quickly than Trump can. At this point, the administration is battling an extraordinary 269 lawsuits (and many more if one regards scores of suits involving foreign student visa cancellations as more than just one giant action). Many of those suits could take years to wind their way through the system, perhaps even long after Trump is out of office. Certainly, they will gum up the courts.

Will judges decide that Trump’s actions in California are improper? That they amount to the uninvited actions of someone seeking to create nothing less than a police state? We’ll find out in time. For now, we do have the comments of academics such as Richardson, partisan critics such as Rep. Moulton, and writers such as those at The Atlantic.

Consider the insights of Tom Nichols, a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College who writes for the magazine. He called Trump’s military callup “yet another assault on democracy, the Constitution, and American traditions of civil-military relations.” He argued that Trump’s advisers “seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.” And he held that the president “sees the U.S. military as his personal honor guard and his private muscle.”

Alarmingly, Nichols theorized that Trump may be looking long term here, “trying to create a national emergency that will enable him to exercise authoritarian control.” And he pleaded for Angelenos to not rise to the bait, to remain peaceful, saying “the last thing anyone should do is take to the streets … and try to confront the military or any of California’s law-enforcement authorities. ICE is on a rampage, but physically assaulting or obstructing its agents … will provide precisely the pretext that some of the people in Trump’s White House are trying to create.”

As Nichols perceptively put it, “The president and his coterie want people walking around taking selfies in gas clouds, waving Mexican flags, holding up traffic and burning cars.” Of course, most of the demonstrators in Los Angeles have been peaceful, as here:

From his “invasion” rhetoric on, however, Trump has tried to cast himself as the leader of a war. It’s the responsibility of intelligent observers – such as Richardson and Nichols — and of officials such as Moulton to point up the hollowness and buffoonery he instead exhibits.

One could argue that their strong language is over the top. But do we want to wait until there are armed soldiers occupying the other arms of government or patrolling the streets all across the country to find out? Their warnings bear attention.

Go West, young man (and woman)

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Joe Weber

But will the gutting of exchange programs let them come to the U.S.?

A couple decades ago, our family welcomed a high school foreign-exchange student from Sweden into our home. Frida was excited about coming to the United States. And, taking a liking the country, she has returned several times since, particularly at the urging of her National Hockey League-loving husband. Now, Frida’s 14-year-old son wants to do the same by attending a religious summer camp next year in the U.S.

In a delightful couple weeks in Europe and Scandinavia, we just visited these friends in their charming Swedish village. We also spent time with a former exchange student of ours from Stockholm, Johann, whom we also hosted years ago. Johann would like to join us in the Colorado mountains next winter to show us his Alps-trained skiing skills.

Frida, her son, and Johann are much like so many other foreigners for whom the U.S. has been a magnet. For millions, our country has represented freedom, adventure and opportunity. For those who come for education – especially at the undergraduate and graduate levels, along with high school – the country has opened pathways that have enriched them and our country alike.

Tens of thousands of high school students have come to the U.S. under such programs over the decades. Just one of many such efforts, the Future Leaders Exchange Program (or FLEX), boasts some 30,000 alumni, for instance. And it dates back only to the 1990s.

“While in the U.S., FLEX students gain leadership skills, learn about American society and values, and teach Americans about their home countries and cultures. FLEX students perform community service in their U.S. communities and act as ambassadors of their home countries,” the outfit’s website notes. “Many are inspired by this spirit of volunteerism to develop and implement innovative projects in their home countries, using the skills and ideas they gained while on program. FLEX students are naturally curious and enthusiastic citizens of the world.”

Former Moldova PM Natalia Gavrilita, source: NY Times

Some become leaders in their home countries. Natalia Gavrilita, one FLEX alum, for instance, wound up serving as her nation’s prime minister.

But in its xenophobic fervor, the Trump Administration seems to be doing its best to pare back or eliminate such exchanges. First, it suspended State Department grant programs under the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs that supported a slew of exchange programs.

And now, the administration intends to defund that State Department unit. The president’s fiscal 2026 budget – largely mirrored by the recently passed House budget bill – called for cutting the funds in the State Department international exchange programs by 93 percent, some $691 million. This could jeopardize such programs as AFS Intercultural Programs, along with the Germany-oriented Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX), the Future Leaders Exchange Program (FLEX), the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program (YES) and the American Cultural Exchange Services (ACES) program.

Trump’s budget cuts, if enacted by the Senate in coming days, could toss the rich legacy of such exchanges on the dustheap. They will undercut the so-called soft power by which America shows a welcoming face to the world.

“The proposal demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of exchange programs and would do the exact opposite of making America safer, stronger, and more prosperous,” wrote Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance for International Exchange. “International exchange programs are a proven investment in America – an investment in our economy, in our people, and in our foreign policy influence and interests. In order to expand America’s global influence, it’s important to invest more in international exchanges, not less.”

In addition, the State Department has just imposed a freeze on consular interviews for visas for foreign students and visitors while it fashions rules for officials to review their social media accounts. “The Department is conducting a review of existing operations and processes for screening and vetting of student and exchange visitor (F, M, J) visa applicants, and based on that review, plans to issue guidance on expanded social media vetting for all such applicants,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio cabled officials.

For now, these swords hovering over exchange programs haven’t been driven home yet. The Senate could restore funding as it reviews Trump’s budget. Indeed, after a recent funding freeze was declared illegal by a court, money needed for AFS and ACES activities was restored – at least temporarily – as reported by the Toledo Free Press.

Moreover, some Republican senators are chafing at some of the bill’s effects – though mainly because of the plan’s trims on Medicaid, as well as its explosive effect on the national debt. In a New York Times opinion piece, Missouri Republican Josh Hawley called “slashing health insurance for the working poor” both “morally wrong and politically suicidal,” for instance. And fiscal hawks, for their part, want even deeper cuts in spending.

Still, Trump is pushing the Senate to pass his bill by July 4.

Will the student exchange programs – with their comparatively small constituencies – survive? Certainly, they are not getting the headline attention of, say, Medicaid and programs to feed hungry American children.

Still, advocates for such programs such as NAFSA: Association of International Educators are doing their best to rally exchange-program enthusiasts to make their voices known. Whether the group can marshal enough power to stand up to Donald J. Trump remains to be seen.

In the face of Trump’s many assaults on international students at the university levels — what remains surprising is that so many foreign students – at all levels — still want to come to the U.S. Even as he erodes the nation’s standing globally, Trump hasn’t destroyed that desire.

Harvard international students, source; NY Times

His attacks on U.S. universities and the limits he has tried to put on international students at Harvard – though temporarily blocked by a court — surely will make a dent. Certainly, schools in Europe will capitalize on fears among foreign university students that they could face harassment and deportation.

But, for now, America still shimmers as a promised land for many. That status took a couple centuries to develop and is well-rooted. Can one benighted presidential administration destroy that? The damage will be real, but it may vanish in time — just as this administration surely will.

The Big Picture

Monthly Archives: June 2025