Monthly Archives: September 2025

In my little town?

Posted on by
Reply

Yes, ICE seems to be everywhere nowadays, including in small Colorado towns

Federal agents outside a Frisco, Colorado, restaurant; source: CBS

A half-century ago, Paul Simon wrote a few lines that may forever bounce about in the heads of many of us. The opening: “In my little town/I grew up believing/God keeps his eye on us all/And he used to lean upon me/As I pledged allegiance to the wall.”

Up here in Summit County, Colorado, many of us feel as divinely blessed as Simon might once have. High in the Rockies, ours is a place of mountains, streams, a stunning lake, ski resorts and the prettiest valleys of anywhere. Frisco, a little town in the county, has an Old West feel about it, even as its restaurants, shops and ski-and-bike outlets serve thousands of modern visitors each year.

So, are Frisco (pop. 3,100) and Summit County (pop. 31,000) places where one might expect brown-shirted armed government agents to show up at a local favorite eatery for a midday raid? Might we expect them to shut the business down by grabbing up its computers and other vital gear, putting the place out of business for an undetermined time? Is another smaller town nearby, Dillon (pop. under 1000), a place where a raid at a home is worrisome enough for administrators in an elementary school to put students into lockdown?

And are the towns places where we would see an uproar by residents, an outpouring of condemnation? Where even the county sheriff disavows any role in the federal actions? Where the county education superintendent bemoans them?

Sadly, in Donald J. Trump’s America, it’s not God who is keeping an eye on us all these days, it seems. Instead, it’s the FBI and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies that are doing so, even in little Summit County and even smaller Frisco and Dillon. Those agencies slipped into the area yesterday to pursue a restaurant that has served locals for over two decades, Hacienda Real, after a tipster claimed the place was employing undocumented workers.

Source: Summit Daily

“For several months we have been collaborating with the authorities and delivered all the documentation requested by ICE, fulfilling every requirement,” the restaurant said in a post on its Facebook site. “Unfortunately, this process has led to a broader inspection of the entire restaurant. As part of this investigation, our work team was removed, including the computers we use day to day, so we find ourselves in the need to keep the restaurant temporarily closed while everything is being reviewed.”

The statement added: “Thankfully, we have peace of mind in knowing that for over 22 years we have worked honestly, serving this much-loved community … We’re confident that we’ll soon be able to get back to doing what we do best: working and sharing our food with all of you.”

The raid even took local law enforcement authorities by surprise. As our county newspaper, the Summit Daily News, reported, county Sheriff Jaime FitzSimons said he learned of the operations through a dispatch when the agents arrived. The agents were serving “targeted, federal, criminal” search warrants, FitzSimons told the paper. He added that he knew no details.

Precious little information came from a spokesman for Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE unit involved in the raids. Talking with a reporter at the scene of some of the action, the spokesman said only that the agents were serving a criminal search warrant as part of “authorized law enforcement activity,” adding that the agency would issue a press release with more information at a later time. He declined to answer questions.

But the splashy headline-grabbing raid by the agents, some hiding behind masks, did not surprise some folks. Rumors of impending ICE actions made the front page of the Summit Daily News last week, so when the agents swarmed into Hacienda Real, people showed up with their phones to video the operation. Some blocked the authorities from moving through the parking lot, to no avail.

“Video of the confrontation shared with 9NEWS shows members of the public shouting at agents, telling them to take off their masks and pick up the excess caution tape they had left on the ground,” a Denver TV station reported. “Footage also shows people standing in front of the agents’ cars, blocking their ability to leave, a woman snapping the license plate frame on one of the vehicles, and what appears to be a man spitting in the direction of an agent getting into a vehicle.”

Spitting at law enforcement agents or interfering with them is a sorry reflection on the state of things nowadays. But it’s also not surprising in our very blue Summit County. Democrats swept all federal, state and county races last year, with Kamala Harris besting Trump by 11,762 votes to 5,244. Our sheriff is elected, so it’s not surprising that, as his office reported, he “did not provide any support or assistance” to the federal authorities, nor did those authorities request it.

Local residents who gathered at the restaurant during the ICE action included the county education superintendent, Tony Byrd. “People are going to live in worry, they were living in worry last week, the week before, pretty much forever and now more,” he told a reporter for the Denver CBS News affiliate. Byrd told one of the officials that they were disrupting the community, adding, “We have a lot of crying kids and families right now.”

Raid at the Dillon home; source: Summit Daily

During the raid at the Dillon home — presumably that of restaurant owner Luis Flores — officials at nearby Dillon Valley Elementary School kept children inside and planned “a controlled release” of them at the end of the day. While the reported immigrant population of the county is small – only about 15 percent of the number overall – the Spanish-speaking student population in the schools is much larger, over 41 percent compared with less than 54 percent white non-Hispanic.

This is a county, moreover, where some local churches have pledged to protect immigrants under threat of arrest, even to the point of breaking the law by giving them sanctuary from agents. With an unemployment rate last reported at 2.8 percent, it’s also a place that economically would be devastated without immigrants to work in the restaurants, stores, building industry and various other services.

The initial news reports said no arrests had been made at either the restaurant or the owner’s home. But a Colorado immigrant advocacy group, Voces Unidas, has since reported that a cook and a waiter were arrested, among others, basing its report on information in the ICE system. The group asked people with more details to contact it.

So, this raid leaves us with a lot of questions. First, was the owner of Hacienda Real, Luis Flores, guilty of anything? Did he hire undocumented workers? Did he underpay them, as sometimes happens with under-the-table staff? Did he treat them well or poorly?

We have no answers to those questions now. Indeed, the restaurant has a sterling reputation, repeatedly winning top honors in the Summit Daily News “Best Of Summit” contests. Its burritos and margaritas are top-notch, according to the paper’s readers.

And, among some 50 recent commenters on its website, condemnation of the ICE actions was universal.

“The last time I was at the restaurant they were donating a ton of food for a fundraiser at Silverthorne elementary,” one said. Another said: “You are loved by the community! For the anonymous caller, may karma get them!” And a third said: “The entire team at Hacienda Real is amazing and you are fully supported!!!! I’m so sorry some bigot racist made a false claim against your business and the livelihood of not only your family but the families of all of your employees.” Yet another vowed: “The community will support you and your restaurant!”

But let’s assume that Hacienda Real did hire undocumented Latin American workers. First, the chances are the food will be authentic. Second, and more important, these workers would be supporting their families and contributing to the economy. Are these bad things? If they are arrested – and if Hacienda Real is driven out of business – is this good for our town and county?

And let’s turn to economics for some insight, too. If the restaurant hired under-the-table workers and underpaid or overworked them, just how long would such workers stay at the place? The average wage level in the county tops $56,000 a year and, with the low jobless rate, help-wanted signs are common. Poorly treated workers would have plenty of other options.

The bottom line, of course, is that ICE isn’t welcome in Summit, Frisco or Dillon. By contrast, hardworking migrants are.

But, given these troubled times, we can only hope that other lines from the Paul Simon song are not apt. “Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town,” he sang. “Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town.”

If ICE and its masters in the Trump Administration expand their immigrant roundups, as they plan to, and if they continue to do so in facilities that even ICE says violate dozens of federal standards, lyrics like those may only slightly overstate things all across America.

“The past always looks better than it was.”

Posted on by
Reply

Downton Abbey lets us escape for a while, but real history won’t.

Downton Abbey’s cast, source: tom’s guide

After feeling oppressed by all the ugly sturm und drang of our American life in the last week or so, it was a relief this weekend to enter a world where, as one character put it, the past is a far more comfortable place than the present.

I refer, of course, to a telling comment by character Harold Levinson, an American relative visiting Downton Abbey in that delightful bit of Anglophilic fluff that aired on our local movie screen.

What a glorious escape it was for a couple hours.

Oh, to live in a world of glittering silver place settings, gracious conversation with men in tuxes and women with gloved hands in stunning open-backed gowns, all in a stone behemoth of a home that one’s family has owned for centuries. Oh, to sport top hats and cravats at Ascot, where one could chat amiably – if deferentially – with royalty, with whom one might be related in some distant way. Oh, to be tended by manservants and ladies’ maids with meals served on strenuously polished platters in wondrous halls bedecked with old family portraits and marvelous tapestries.

Of course, it was only a privileged few – relatively speaking – who enjoyed such delights in real life. Their servants lived in far less cozy quarters and, simply by accidents of birth, were fated to call their “betters” m’lady or m’lord. And the vast majority of their countrymen lived in various states of unpleasantness or worse— sometimes grinding poverty—while they organized their oh-so-tiring visits to the great and glorious homes of London for the whirl of the social season.

To enjoy “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” and the earlier installments, one just has to put reality on a shelf. One must imagine that he or she was part of that upper crust, not the downstairs folks. Not that their lives in the fictional kitchens and stables were all that bad. The lord and lady, naturally, were kindly sorts who had at heart the best interests of all in the county, the domain they were born to oversee.

Downton, of course, is a lovely bit of cotton candy. It paints an England that is fading, being dragged into the middle of a 20th century that is a far less pleasant place. “They say America is the future and England is the past,” the Levinson character says. “Sometimes it’s more comfortable in the past.”

Judging by the ample amount of gray hair in our surprisingly crowded theater at our afternoon matinee, many of the movie’s fans might second that thought. “Downton” offers a cozy world beloved by those of a certain demographic, a group of which many of us, reluctantly perhaps, are part. The series aired for six seasons on TV in the U.S., beginning in early 2011, a time before the Trump era, a time when for many of us the past was indeed far more comfortable than the present. There were also movies in 2019 and 2022 that could remind us of the halcyon days before 2016.

As it happens, this installment of the Crawley family saga is set in 1930. The Depression hasn’t done its nastiest work yet (though the family’s American branch did lose a bundle to a con man after the crash) and the stunning Lady Mary (heartthrob Michelle Dockery) and her father, Lord Grantham, are a bit stressed at how to keep the estate together without selling off too much. And, of course, the next world war is a long way off. Still, change is afoot for the royals and that does give the Crawleys a lot of worry.

As The New York Times put it: “.., the movie delivers exactly what ‘Downton’ fans want: yummy photography … stunning set pieces and Lady Mary trying on as many fabulous frocks as possible. It will be another 15 years before the rise of socialism pierces the aspic of aristocracy; for now, the worst that can happen to the Crawleys is being ousted from a ball.”

Highclere Castle, setting for Downton Abbey, source: Golden Tours Travel Blog

For longtime fans, it’s a delight to immerse oneself in this world, a place facing plenty of threats but still a realm of comfort and warmth where social roles are rigid but, in this imagined reality at least, are not all that constricting. The upstairs and downstairs folks look after one another in a mutual way. And there’s much reassuring about that old stone pile of a family manse, which had stood through centuries of turmoil. Yes, divorce among the upper classes is intolerably scandalous, but even that proves surmountable for our redoubtable Lady Mary.

“With its mix of old characters and new, worldly upheaval and small-town drama, [writer Julian] Fellowes illustrates what ‘Downton’ has always done best, which is a social examination of how much things have changed and how they haven’t changed at all,” the Los Angeles Times says.

Fluffy, unrealistic and comically so, yes. But what a delightful ride it is, what a sweet fantasy.

“It’s no surprise that ‘The Grand Finale’ is thoroughly fun, stunning to look at … and aptly emotional as the iconic brand’s swan song,” Variety’s reviewer wrote. “There are expected doses of fan service throughout (including a playful wink to one of Dame Smith’s most unforgettable lines, ‘What’s a weekend?’) and a neatly achieved final sequence that says a lovely and memorable farewell to all those for whom the show has meant so much. But what lingers most after ‘The Grand Finale’ is its handle on the end of an era, which inherently comprehends that big ideas matter more than massive estates.”

Those big ideas, of course, touch on matters of equality, democracy, feminism, gay rights, the end of hereditary privilege. These things, in real life, are far more important than a wistful look at aristocracy. And, tragically, in our time these things are under merciless assault.

Today, we Yanks contend with leaders who appear to live in a world in which such modern values must be stamped out. Indeed, our president and his colleagues are determined to stamp out our history, to recast it in terms almost as glossy as those in Downton Abbey. Signs and exhibits related to slavery, for instance, are being pulled from our national parks, as The Washington Post reported.

The Smithsonian is under pressure to remove all unflattering elements, evoking only a gauzy celebratory past. Of course, that institution and so many others should be recording and educating about reality as it was, not as some corrupt political regime thinks it should be.

It’s fine, of course, to go to movies that paint happier pictures — so long as one knows they are false. What lingers most about the gently challenged world of Downton for me is that it’s so much warmer and more pleasant than the too-often ugly and unhappy world we now inhabit.

In Downton’s universe, no one is being assassinated by disturbed Internet- and video-game-obsessed young men. No one is fielding military forces in our cities or hauling people off to detention camps for deportation to frightening Third World countries. No one is courting the rebirth of polio and other dread diseases with a disdain for the science that all but eliminated those things years after the fictional Crawleys lived. And no one is erasing the past, even as they mourn its passing.

The more class-conscious (and, perhaps, more reality-focused) British paper, The Guardian, perhaps not surprisingly mostly mocked the new movie, though it couldn’t pan it altogether. Its reviewer referred to the film’s “gibbering, wittering, blithering and surreally enjoyable nonsense,” saying it was “very silly and always watchable in its weird way.” But he hoped the latest was not in fact the finale for the abbey.

Yes, the past can be far nicer than many parts of the present, at least in the confines of a theater. Our very real danger today is that we will forgo the real past for some self-deluding demagogue’s version. That would be an all-too-real tragedy.

Cleansing the past

Posted on by
Reply

Will Charlie Kirk’s death — and life — be remembered in full?

Horst Wessel

Young, good-looking and charismatic enough to impress his party’s elders while rallying lots of other young people to their cause, this passionate true believer was gunned down by people he had long attacked as enemies. As he lay dying, a backer released a statement saying he had been assaulted by “degenerate communist subhumans.”

In death, however, the assassinated man – the son of a Christian minister and a woman whose family included ministers — proved especially useful to his party. His funeral was filmed and turned into a major propaganda event as he was declared a martyr. The party’s top leader called his sacrifice to the “a monument more lasting than stone and bronze.”

The man was Horst Wessel, a Nazi party enthusiast who was killed in Berlin in 1930, as his party was beginning its ascent into infamy. Are we now seeing what happened to Wessel take place with a modern right-wing firebrand, Charlie Kirk?

Wessel was embraced by Nazi propagandist leader Joseph Goebbels and party organs. A wartime article in the Nazi-owned Völkischer Beobachter newspaper called Wessel “the hero of the Brown Revolution” and referred to his “sacrificial death” as one that “passionately inflamed millions who followed.”

Charlie Kirk, source: The Guardian

Today, in Kirk’s honor, flags are being lowered to half-staff around the country by order of President Trump. That’s a distinction usually reserved for deceased presidents and other leaders. Also, the president, without evidence of what drove Kirk’s assassin, was quick to decry the “radical left” for his killing.

So, are we seeing political martyrdom opportunistically bestowed on this polarizing young figure? Are we seeing a nobility bestowed on him in death that many say wasn’t deserved in his life?

Social media, cable TV and other outlets lately have been filled with praise for Kirk, leader of the campus-focused Turning Point USA organization. Vice president JD Vance called him “a true friend. The kind of guy you could say something to and know it would always stay with him.” A tearful CNN commentator, Scott Jennings, called him “one of the most unique and special people in the conservative movement today. What he was able to build, the people he was able to organize, was just so large and powerful.”

In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan called Kirk “a presence in the life of a whole generation of young conservatives” adding that “he set a kind of template for how to discuss politics—with good cheer and confidence, with sincerity and a marshaling of facts.” Over at The Washington Post, George Will compared Kirk with William F. Buckley, that eloquent lion of the right, saying: “Kirk was killed at the beginning of what was to have been a Buckley-like tour of political evangelism among the unconverted: college students. He also was probably killed because, unlike Buckley when he was 31 in 1956, Kirk was advocating a powerful and ascendant politics.”

Even at The New York Times, Ezra Klein celebrated Kirk. “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” Klein held. “He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”

When any young person – and Kirk, the father of a 1-year-old son and a 3-year-old girl, was just 31 – is killed, it is monstrous. And when the murdered person is an influential political figure, it is even worse. Such assassinations must be decried anywhere and at any time by everyone on any end of the political spectrum. Such a killing is anathema to the free discourse that is a pillar of American culture or should be.

“There is no place in our country for this kind of violence,” former President Joe Biden said. “It must end now. Jill and I are praying for Charlie Kirk’s family and loved ones.” And his predecessor, Barack Obama, similarly said: “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.”

Also, I concede that it seems churlish to speak ill of the dead person, especially so soon after his passing.

But I also fear that in the lionizing of Kirk, we are seeing a far-too-convenient beatification of sorts that serves Trump and Trumpism too well. Will Kirk’s death be used to further justify outrages that go even beyond anti-immigrant roundups, the placement of troops in cities? Will we now see further rollbacks of reproductive rights and the freedom to marry a person of one’s choosing?

Erin Reed, source: Sociologists 4 Trans Justice

We do ill to ourselves as a society to forget or downplay many of the things that Kirk stood for and built his organization around. As journalist and blogger Erin Reed has written, Kirk in 2023 called transgender people an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God.” Do such sentiments reflect a compassionate and goodhearted man?

In one interview, Reed wrote, he said the first thing he thinks when he sees a Black pilot is, “Boy, I hope he’s qualified.” In another, Kirk called for the man who assaulted Nancy Pelosi’s husband to be bailed out of jail. He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964— and infamously said a few gun deaths were worth his Second Amendment rights in the aftermath of a school shooting. He even derided empathy itself as worthless, a sentiment that Reed wrote has since metastasized into a broader far-right project to strip empathy education from schools.

In another interview, Reed noted, Kirk mocked fellow Christians who followed scripture about loving their neighbor. He scoffed that God also “calls for the stoning of gay people,” which he described as “God’s perfect law.”

As the Anti-Defamation League has written, Kirk promoted conspiracy theories about election fraud and Covid-19. He was an enthusiastic backer of Christian nationalism, “the idea that Christians should dominate government and other areas of life in America,” the ADL reported. His TPUSA organization, the league said, has been a magnet for racists and white supremacists.

“Kirk has created a vast platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists, who speak and attend his annual AmericaFest and other events sponsored by TPUSA,” the ADL reported. “AmericaFest has showcased extreme rhetoric from speakers and attendees and has attracted white supremacists.”

Will his death legitimize even the worst of his views? And was this really the sort of person young Americans should admire and emulate?

Certainly, Trump thinks so: he plans to bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously on him. “Charlie was a giant of his generation, a champion of liberty and an inspiration to millions and millions of people,” the president said. “The date of the ceremony will be announced,” he said, adding, “and I can only guarantee you one thing, that we will have a very big crowd.”

Crowds, of course, are important to Trump. And with Kirk’s death offering him a golden chance to draw an audience, this is an opportunity the president will not pass up. We don’t know how and when he’ll commemorate Kirk, but he’s almost certain to make a big show of it.

Melissa Hortman

Recall that Trump has said little about other killings of Democratic leaders. In a Sept. 10 video, USA Today noted, the president did not mention the June shooting of Minnesota House of Representatives speaker emerita Melissa Hortman, though he alluded to his own survived assassination attempts and the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana in 2017. He offered no presidential medal or flag lowering for Hortman.

The president also did not mention other attacks on Democrats, including an arson attack at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s house, a kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or an assault on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in their home.

Those events apparently don’t serve Trump’s agenda as well as Kirk’s death does.

As former President Obama said, we don’t know what motivated Kirk’s assassin, and it’s possible we never will learn that. Will it prove to be a “leftist” assault, as Trump suggested? In two attempts on Trump’s life, the would-be killers – Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh — seemed to have been driven more by mental illness, anti-government beliefs or antisemitism.

Back in pre-Nazi Germany, Wessel was killed by Communist assassins. His death helped galvanize and further drive the Nazi movement. Kirk’s life certainly helped do the same for Trumpism. Will his death now do even more to advance that cause? And will his life be remembered in its fullest and most honest way, or as something to be sanitized, a martyrdom Trump can market?

The last bulwark

Posted on by
Reply

Some courts stand tall against Trump’s depredations

Judge Allison D. Burroughs, source: The Boston Globe

Judge Allison D. Burroughs was unequivocal.

Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and should have done more to combat it, she wrote in her 84-page decision in the university suit against the Trump Administration. “Defendants and the President are right to combat antisemitism and to use all lawful means to do so,” she wrote. “Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did.”

But antisemitism on the campus – which she suggested the university has gone far to defeat since the upheavals of 2023-24 — was not what is really driving Donald J. Trump and his administration in their campaign against the university. It was not the reason for the government to cancel billions in research grants to the university last spring, a full year after pro-Palestinian actions at the school had all but faded away.

“… [T]here is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism,” the judge said. “In fact, a review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA [the federal Administrative Procedure Act], the First Amendment and Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act].”

Judge Burroughs’s blunt ruling came amid a flurry of other recent court setbacks for Trump. A federal appeals court shot down many of his tariffs, another court ruled his use of troops in Los Angeles was illegal, and still another harshly ruled that Trump had no standing to sue federal judges in Maryland over immigration rulings they made.

“Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate,” Judge Thomas Cullen, a Trump appointee, wrote in the Maryland case.

Such losses by Trump suggest that even as his overreaches grow, critics and clear-thinking judges are not sitting still for them. The court actions offer hope amid a seemingly nonstop parade of outrages.

Let’s consider Burroughs’s order closely. Along with being notable for even stronger language than Cullen’s, the clarity and airtight logic of her ruling is exceptional. It is an outstanding example of how the courts remain our last bastion of resistance to a would-be tyrant’s vindictive assaults.

To many critics, it has long been obvious that Trump has used antisemitism as a club with which to batter Harvard and other schools. But the judge’s decision ripped any shred of a veneer off that claim.

“There is no obvious link between the affected projects and antisemitism,” wrote Burroughs, an Obama appointee. “By way of example (although by no means an exhaustive list), Defendants have ordered immunologists overseeing a multi-school tuberculosis consortium to immediately stop research, … a researcher at the Wyss Institute to halt his development of an advanced chip designed to measure NASA astronauts’ radiation exposure during the upcoming Artemis II mission to the moon … and another Wyss Institute scientist, a recipient of the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement, to cease his research into Lou Gehrig’s disease ….”

She continued: “Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs have begun the process of cutting funding for research into, among other life-saving measures, ‘a predictive model to help V.A. emergency room physicians decide whether suicidal veterans should be hospitalized.’” Yet another project involved a defense program aimed “at increasing awareness of emerging biological threats.”

Going beyond the irrelevance of the defunded research to the antisemitism claim, the judge also laid bare Trump’s true motivations. Using his own language on social media, she left no question that the assault on Harvard was driven by his longstanding and broad attack on “wokeism.”

Source: Politico

Among Trump’s posts: “[p]erhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” Then there was his slam at Harvard for “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots,” followed by his denunciation of the university as “a Liberal mess.”

Her order also shone a light on Trump’s vindictiveness, his rage at the university for having the temerity to oppose him, unlike schools such as Columbia and Brown, which rolled over under his attacks. To placate Trump Columbia agreed to pay $221 million, while Brown agreed to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. Trump has sought $500 million from Harvard.

At one point, Trump said he was considering taking away $3 billion from “a very antisemitic Harvard,” which he would then give to “TRADE SCHOOLS,” the judge noted. Then, during an interview in the Oval Office, Trump said that Harvard is “hurting [itself]” by “fighting,” adding that “Columbia has been, really, and they were very, very bad . . . . But they’re working with us on finding a solution.” He further stated that Harvard “wants to fight. They want to show how smart they are, and they’re getting their ass kicked”; “every time [Harvard] fight[s], they lose another $250 million”; and “[a]ll they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.”

Recall that Trump, far from “smart,” was a middling transfer student at Penn’s Wharton School, where one of Trump’s former professors called him “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Perhaps he still suffers still from an insecure man’s resentment at all those folks who were far brighter than he?

Certainly, there’s little doubt that these were the infuriated reactions of a martinet offended at a school that refused to genuflect to him, as so many other institutions have. Sadly, yet another university president — Northwestern’s Michael Schill — just quit, a few months after Trump’s minions froze $790 million in funding for the school — providing another scalp among many that Trumpists have claimed in recent years.

As for Harvard, Burroughs invalidated the administration’s freeze on billions of dollars in federal research funding for a broad array of projects. But it’s not clear when or whether the school will get any of the money back.

The administration will drag out the matter with appeals as a White House spokeswoman argued that the university “does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars.” As The Wall Street Journal reported, by using agencies across the federal government, Trump has threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, tried to block its ability to enroll international students and probed money it receives from foreign sources. Harvard will also owe higher taxes on its $53 billion endowment under the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Source: Supreme Court Historical Society

Trump’s assault on academia continues, of course. And, in the end, many of his attacks will be adjudicated in the Supreme Court. Good outcomes are far from a sure thing there, given the deference the body has shown to Trump.

But, at least in some quarters, smart people such as Burroughs are seeing the assault for the petty and destructive effort it is. The fight is far from over, but this round has gone to the better side.