When down is up

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Joe Weber

As Trump terrorizes international students, he endangers us all

Comic book fans of a certain age will remember The Bizarro World. Courtesy of DC Comics, this planet featured just about everything that was its opposite on Earth. Superman was a villain. Batman was an inept detective. Aquaman couldn’t swim, etc.

Lately, it feels as if Washington has fallen into that world and is dragging the rest of the country with it.

Consider the approach of Donald J. Trump to foreign students in our colleges and universities. Almost as long as there has been a United States, our schools have drawn foreigners here. International students attended Yale, for instance, starting in the 1800s, if not even earlier. And World War II marked a huge uptick, with the numbers of non-Americans coming to study rising to top 25,000 in 1948-49 and climbing to over 1.1 million in 2023-24, an all-time high.

Education has long been one of our biggest services “exports” — one helpfully “consumed” at home — that pours more than $50 billion annually into our economy. It’s also a big draw for the best and brightest to stay and enrich America economically and culturally. Some 41 percent of graduates at all levels – especially at the master’s and doctoral level – stay to settle in the U.S., according to the Economic Innovation Group.

Source: Institute of International Education

So why is the Trump Administration – which claims to want well-schooled and talented immigrants and aims to boost exports – making life miserable to international students? Only on the Bizarro World would this make sense.

How else can we understand why the administration has revoked the visas of more than 1,000 international students, and counting, so far? With only days to go for graduations for some of these students, it has cancelled their abilities to stay and study in more than 240 colleges and universities nationwide, according to Inside Higher Ed.

This count of students tops the 300 that Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially estimated. He claimed that such students came to the U.S. “not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.”

Rubio made the comment after masked plainclothes officers on March 25 snatched a Fulbright Scholar in a doctoral program in child development off the street in Massachusetts. The student, 30-year-old Rumeysa Ozturk, coauthored an opinion piece in the Tufts University student paper criticizing Israel over the Gaza War.

Ozturk’s apprehension in Somerville, Mass., source: AP

Even though the Turkish woman has not been charged in any crime, she is being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana pending a decision in her revocation case. An immigration judge recently denied Ozturk bail.

In some cases, the students are being driven out of the country for taking part in demonstrations against the bloodshed in Gaza. In others – perhaps most – however, their revocations appear to have been triggered by traffic tickets or old minor violations that linger in their student records.

Based on such problems, the numbers of revocations are likely to grow. More than 4,700 students may have already had their records terminated in ICE’s Student and Exchange Visitors Information Systems database (SEVIS), according to Bloomberg Law. This move, which targets them for visa revocation and removal from the United States, is the opposite of the usual process in which a visa revocation triggers termination in the SEVIS system.

Another case of a Bizarro World approach, it seems.

The backwards, database-based approach also smacks of involvement by Elon Musk’s numbers crunchers at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. A claim on that point has been made in at least one lawsuit, that of 10 students who have sued over their SEVIS record terminations in Michigan.

At least 16 lawsuits have been filed over the government actions, IHE reported. Among the students who have sued is a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who is supposed to graduate on May 5, with a job offer to join the faculty. His attorney told the Associated Press that the student was likely targeted because of an unpaid traffic fine from when the student lent his car to a friend. Ultimately, the violation was dismissed.

As with the Georgia doctoral student, the U.S. stands to lose some of the best and brightest in this Trumpian effort. Science, for instance, reported the case of a biochemist caught up in the SEVIS terminations who had just been selected for a H-1B visa, but who had a misdemeanor charge dismissed more than 10 years ago. “A mistake made in high school came haunting me all over again,” the researcher told the outlet.

Trump and his toadies are going even broader. In the administration’s battle against Harvard University, it now is threatening to block the enrollment of foreign students. “It is a privilege to have foreign students attend Harvard University, not a guarantee,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in a letter to the school obtained by The New York Times. “The United States government understands that Harvard University relies heavily on foreign student funding from over 10,000 foreign students to build and maintain their substantial endowment.”

Harvard relies on such students, who often pay full tuition, to support it financially. Noem demanded detailed records on such students and she said that failure to comply would be treated as a “voluntary withdrawal” of the certification system that allows international students to enroll. “The withdrawal will not be subject to appeal,” Noem wrote.

Wrongheaded as this assault on international students is, it also contradicts what Trump, the candidate, said last June when he promised a green card to any international student bright enough to graduate from a U.S. school, as Washington Post opinion writer Catherine Rampell recently wrote. “He also promised to help his country better compete on the global stage,” Rampell added. “Today, he’s destroying one of our most powerful economic engines — and ensuring international students don’t come here (let alone graduate) at all.”

That 1.1 million tally for foreign students here in the last academic year may well turn out to be a high-water mark, a count that could easily decline in coming years. In China — one of the biggest sources of foreign students in the U.S. — New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman heard repeatedly a few weeks ago that maybe studying in the U.S. isn’t such a great idea. “The reason: They don’t know when their kids might be arbitrarily arrested, when their family members might get deported to Salvadoran prisons,” Friedman wrote.

Somdeep Sen, an associate professor at Denmark’s Roskilde University, echoed that theme in a piece in Aljazeera headlined “United States is no longer a safe destination for international students.” In it, Sen contended: “One cannot underestimate the precarity that orders the lives of international students in the United States.”

Reagan’s Farewell Address, source: Politico

Former President Ronald Reagan, in his farewell address to the nation in 1989, referred to the famous vision of Pilgrim John Winthrop of America as a “shining city upon a hill,” a theme Reagan had often invoked. The former president said the country was “still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

As Trump appears today to be doing his best to douse that light, one can only wonder how inverted his world is. For many international students, and for the U.S. generally, his comic-book version of reality is tragic. The harm it will do could prove irreparable and likely to long outlast him.

Friedman invoked Steve Jobs’s Syrian birth father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, who came to the U.S. in the 1950s to get a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. The legacy he left us, through Jobs, has proved immeasurable. How many Jandalis will now opt for graduate study in Canada, Europe or the U.K., or anywhere but Trump’s Bizarro America?

When taking aim at the king …

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump has a fight on his hands, at lasT

Omar Little, portrayed by the late Michael K. Williams, source: Fandom

The wonderful character Omar Little, appearing in the eighth episode of “The Wire,” offers a memorable line: “Ayo, lesson here, Bey. You come at the king, you best not miss.”

That line, now 23 years old, resonates anew as Harvard has decided to fight back against the would-be monarch now soiling the White House. It applies, too, to a group of other schools – including Brown University, Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois — that have brought suit against Trump’s Department of Energy.

All are attacking the vindictive federal overreach Trump is using to withhold funds in his effort to reshape higher education policies. Together, the moves could embolden more institutions, such as law firms and Columbia University, perhaps including some that the president has already bullied into acquiescence of various sorts.

“This is of momentous, momentous significance,” J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals court judge revered by many conservatives, told The New York Times. “This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”

But they also had better win. Their opponent is a wily master of the judicial system who has shown that 34 felony convictions, among other legal humiliations, are not enough to defeat him. Just look at how – so far, at least – Trump has spit on an order by nothing less than a unanimous Supreme Court to return wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador prison.

Along with showing an astonishingly callous indifference to a jailed man’s plight, Trump seems to believe that all and sundry should bow to his will, no matter how wrongheaded it is. The president is similarly indifferent to the damaging effects his battle with universities are having on medical and scientific research.

Already, Trump is upping the ante in his battle with Harvard. In the wake of Harvard President Alan Garber’s defiance, federal officials froze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and canceled a $60 million contract, along with the president threatening to remove the university’s tax-exempt status. The administration had put nearly $9 billion in funding at risk when Garber refused to bow to its demands for extensive policy changes and oversight.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber wrote in a message to the Harvard community. He added: “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.”

As The Harvard Gazette reported, Garber’s message was a response to a letter sent late Friday by the Trump administration outlining demands that Harvard would have to satisfy to maintain its funding relationship with the federal government. These demands included “audits” of academic programs and departments, along with the viewpoints of students, faculty, and staff, and changes to the University’s governance structure and hiring practices.

Garber’s defiance stood in stark contrast to Columbia’s genuflection to Trump. So far, Columbia’s obeisance has not led to a restoration of the $400 million Trump cut. That, together with Harvard’s stance, may have prompted Columbia’s new acting president, Claire Shipman, to push back in a new message to the university community after her predecessor, Dr. Katrina Armstrong, had bowed to Trump’s demand and then quit.

Claire Shipman, source: Columbia Spectator

“To be clear, our institution may decide at any point, on its own, to make difficult decisions that are in Columbia’s best interests,” journalist and writer Shipman wrote. “Where the government – or any stakeholder – has legitimate interest in critical issues for our healthy functioning, we will listen and respond. But we would reject heavy-handed orchestration from the government that could potentially damage our institution and undermine useful reforms that serve the best interests of our students and community. We would reject any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire. And yes, to put minds at ease, though we seek to continue constructive dialogue with the government, we would reject any agreement that would require us to relinquish our independence and autonomy as an educational institution.”

Separately, the handful of top schools that brought suit against Trump’s Department of Energy are fighting a policy change that would reduce the amount of indirect support that federal grants provide. As Reuters reported, the DOE announced that it would cut more than $400 million in annual spending by setting an across-the-board 15 percent reimbursement rate for indirect costs of research.

Many of the universities involved in the lawsuit have negotiated far higher “indirect” rates than the 15 percent proposed by DOE policy. The National Institutes of Health announced a similar cut and was also sued. A federal judge has issued an order blocking the Trump administration from proceeding with those cuts, while the lawsuit against NIH proceeds.

In the case of the indirect research support, the administration offers the specious argument that the cut would bring “greater transparency and efficiency” to federal government spending. In the case of the broader university reforms Trump is seeking, he and his minions have veiled their moves behind the claim of fighting antisemitism on the campuses.

The president’s broad list of demands to Harvard, however, gives the lie to the latter claim. He has demanded an end to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, for instance, along with eliminating any hiring preferences based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, along with gutting any such preferences in student admissions. He has demanded audits to assure “viewpoint diversity” at the school without defining that.

Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist who is also a president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, told The New York Times that it was “truly Orwellian” and self-contradictory for the government to force viewpoint diversity on the university. He said it would also lead to absurdities.

“Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?” he said.

In going up against Trump, the universities, no doubt, will be equipped with the best and brightest. Happily, they will fight a Trump Justice Department and other agencies that have lost their top talents in the president’s government-wide gutting efforts. Just consider that Harvard’s legal team includes William A. Burck and Robert K. Hur.

As the Times reported, Burck is also an outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization and represented the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in the deal it recently reached with Trump. And Hur, who worked in the Justice Department in Trump’s first term, was the special counsel who memorably called President Biden “an elderly man with a poor memory.”

They are insiders who understand the man and the system they now are battling.

For his part, Trump is someone whose two years at The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School were undistinguished at best. “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!,” one former prof of his said.

Still, he can work a lot of governmental levers, has a bottomless well of vindictiveness and can’t stand losing. The universities are in a fight for their lives and all of us have much riding on the outcome. They’d best not miss.

Social engineering

Posted on April 11, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s efforts to remake higher education bring us all to grief

During the Easter Parade in New York in 1929, PR wizard Edward Bernays pulled off quite the stunt, one that influenced generations. He hired appealing women to light cigarettes and march, scandalously smoking in public. Their “torches of freedom,” as Bernays called them, garnered headlines nationwide as symbols of equality and emancipation.

Women, who earlier accounted for only about 5 percent of cigarette sales, soon bought about 12 percent of smokes and, in time, grew to consume about a third of cigarettes sold. It was a PR coup and a health disaster.

For Bernays, a Viennese-born nephew of Sigmund Freud who was then working for the American Tobacco Co., this was proof that “social engineering” could work. It showed how “people in power . . . shape the attitudes of the general population,” and that those who mastered communication could become an “invisible government . . . the true ruling power of our country.”

Such social engineering – once anathema to people on the right who long bristled at government efforts to shape public and institutional behavior – comes naturally to another huckster, Donald J. Trump. But, tragically, his efforts are more than just headline-grabbing stunts. His extortions of federal funds are biting deeply at universities including Princeton ($210 million), Columbia ($400 million), Northwestern ($790 million), Johns Hopkins ($800 million) and Cornell ($1 billion).

And health, along with public welfare, is at stake in his cuts. The grants he and his anonymous minions are withholding go for things such as medical research (in topics including pediatric long-COVID, environmental science, cancer) at Columbia, global health initiatives at Hopkins, pacemaker and Alzheimer’s investigations at Northwestern, defense and health at Cornell, and defense and energy at Princeton, and much more.

Now, with his reported plans to put Columbia under the control of a federal judge, Trump is poised to cement his engineering. Independent governance at the private university would, for all practical purposes, be eliminated. Such a judge would oversee the university’s compliance with any formal agreement to change a host of policies in Trump’s efforts to suppress dissent and academic freedom, setting up years of oversight and putting the school at risk for contempt proceedings if it fell short.

If Trump succeeds, a consent order providing for such oversight at the New York school would be a model for other schools he is attacking.

It is social engineering at its worst. Trump seems determined to humble such schools, to prove he can bring them to heel and gratify is base’s hostility to elite education. It seems to be all about control, reining in institutions that could defy him – whether they are law firms, Congress or educational outfits.

And, pathetically, Trump’s effort has little to do with his claimed battle against antisemitism at Columbia and the other schools. As Ben Olinsky of the Center for American Progress put it, is Trump’s effort is just weaponizing antisemitism for political gain.

“It does nothing to keep Jewish students or any other Americans safe from hate or prevent terrorism, which pose legitimate threats to America’s Jewish communities,” Olinsky said. “Instead, it forsakes education and dialogue while attacking protected political speech. It’s clear that Trump’s real goal is to silence opposing voices, whether they be from pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses, Black Lives Matter marchers, clergy who pray for mercy, or journalists who report news that is critical of him. The right to free speech, protest, and exercise of any religion or none are bedrocks of America and must be protected in our schools and universities.”

To be sure, real dangers arose last year for Jewish students at many of the schools. They do need to do more to root out antisemitism among students and faculty alike. And there’s no doubt much ugliness persists, as became clear in protests at an April 7 visit to Princeton by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Jewish students at the event were taunted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators. “You’re committing a holocaust!” and “You’re killing babies!” some said. Some were told to “go back to Europe.” As student Danielle Shapiro reported in The Free Press, “We also heard many shouts of ‘They’re all fucking inbred!’ and ‘inbred swine!’ At least two or three protesters used their hands to create the shape of the Hamas triangle.”

Ugly and ignorant as such language is, it is not against the law. Vile, uncivil and disrespectful as it is, it is legal.

Where such protests cross the line is in preventing others from speaking.

Saying he was “appalled at reports of antisemitic language directed by demonstrators at members of our community” after the event, Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber promised an investigation and disciplinary moves, if appropriate. Since some students disrupted the talk and others set off a fire alarm, the university may have reason to take action.

But, to Trump’s critics, the president’s use of such protests to move against universities is just a fig leaf covering up his assault on any dissent he dislikes. It also gives him an excuse to attack such rightist hobbyhorses as efforts to build diversity and erode inequality, so-called “woke” culture, and moves to preserve academic freedom.

“Trump obviously doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism, this is just an expression of his authoritarianism,” Jerry Nadler, the most senior Jewish member of the House of Representatives, told The Guardian.

“Once again, the President is weaponizing the real pain American Jews face to advance his desire to wield control over the truth-seeking academic institutions that stand as a bulwark against authoritarianism,” Nadler added in a statement. “Withholding funding … will not make Jewish students safer. Cutting funding to programs that work to cure cancer and make other groundbreaking discoveries will not make Jewish students safer. Impounding congressionally appropriated funding will not make Jewish students safer. Trump’s ‘review’ is part of a larger effort to silence universities and intimidate those who challenge the MAGA agenda. It is a dangerous and politically motivated move that risks stifling free thought and academic inquiry.”

So far, Columbia has rolled over in the face of Trump’s bullying, much as several law firms, some media magnates and some corporations have. Princeton’s Eisgruber has called on fellow academics to fight, writing in The Atlantic: “The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research. Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”

Schools are not without weapons of their own. Columbia, for instance, has a nearly $15 billion endowment and a wealthy alumni base. Princeton could tap a $34 billion endowment.

As lawyers for many of the universities argue, moreover, there are grounds for legal action. The government cannot cut off funds until and unless it has done program-by-program evaluations of alleged Title VI violations, given schools notice and “an opportunity for hearing,” limited any funding cutoff” to a particular program, or part thereof, in which… noncompliance has been…found,” and submitted a report explaining its actions to relevant committees in Congress at least thirty days before any funds can be stopped.

The problem, of course, is that for all his stupidity and power-hunger, Trump is a master of using the courts to delay and obfuscate. While prospective lawsuits would wend their way through the judiciary, researchers would be sidelined and their work and, often, their livelihoods put on hold. And there can be no assurance that a sometimes servile Supreme Court, where the fights could wind up, would rein in the president.

Still, as the discrediting of the “torches of freedom” demonstrates, good sense can in time prevail. As with tobacco, though, one must wonder how long it will take to do so? Will it take a regime change? And, in the meantime, how much will universities, students, faculty and the public suffer?

The “deep state” has a long history

Posted on April 4, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump is little more than the John Birch Society in action

In 1962, Bob Dylan gave us “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a wonderful ditty that tragically reverberates today. Among the lyrics: “Look behind the cloths, behind the chair/Lookin’ for them Reds everywhere/I looked way up my chimney hole/Even looked deep inside my toilet bowl.”

The song echoes for me now because of the revival we are seeing in the John Birch Society approach to Washington, the national economy and the rest of the world. Consider those attacks on “the deep state,” the tens of thousands of government workers being fired, the influence of conspiracy theorists such as the loony Laura Loomer, and, perhaps surprisingly, the tariffs that make the notorious Smoot-Hawley levies look like small change.

Allow me to get personal on this. In high school, I was privileged to have an American History teacher who was a chapter leader in New Jersey of the John Birch Society. That group, popular in the 1960s, maintained that communists had infiltrated the government up to and including President Dwight Eisenhower, that they were eroding U.S. culture with pollutants such as rock and roll and drugs, that higher education was filled with dangerous lefties, and that the only solution was for internal purges and for the U.S. to wall itself off economically, becoming self-sufficient. Tariffs were a good thing to them.

For Birchers such as my teacher, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 were not to blame for deepening the Great Depression, as just about all economists now maintain. Indeed, he would argue, the U.S. was better off ignoring the freezing of world trade and cheering on the isolationism that tariffs led to, especially since this would force us to develop our own independent economy better. And, by the way, the only legitimate level of government was at the county level since Washington was corrupt and in the thrall of the Reds.

Does any of this sound familiar?

My classmates and I were privileged to have had that teacher – whose name, I kid you not, was Schreck (German for fear) – because that insufferable year with him at the dawn of the 1970s gave us insights into Donald J. Trump and his acolytes that we would otherwise not have. Consider Trump’s bizarre conspiracy theories such as Barack Obama’s noncitizenship, the overrunning of the U.S. by Mexican drug dealers and rapists, the involvement of Ted Cruz’s father in the Kennedy assassination, the evils of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the fraudulent and fixed 2020 election, and on and on.

Such ideas don’t arise in a vacuum.

My classmates and I got insights into what a well-regarded Columbia professor, Richard Hofstadter, called “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.” In fact, because so much of Schreck’s blather seemed so off-the-wall, one chum and I sought out an academic for explanations and he turned us on to Hofstadter’s work.

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” the professor wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.”

Referring to Birch society founder Robert H. W. Welch Jr., Hofstadter wrote: “Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”

Messianic? Sure. False. Absolutely.

Recall that in Trump’s mind – or, at least, his rhetoric – God spared him for a mission to transform America. “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Trump proclaimed during his victory speech early on the Wednesday following Election Day. “And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness, and now we are going to fulfill that mission together. We’re going to fulfill that.”

And remember Trump’s frequent references to Marxists and communists. He vowed to bar them from entering the U.S. And recall him labeling Vice President Harris a communist and Marxist.

No matter that economists of all stripes fear that Trump’s policies — especially his economic ones — will plunge us into hard times. No matter that the world is now engaged in a trade war that could easily spiral out of control. Trump, much like Welch, is convinced that he knows best.

Some have written eloquently about the Bircher viewpoints that have coursed through our society like a poison that just won’t quit, a pathology we can’t cure. At times, those attitudes have risen and fallen particularly in the Republican Party, now fully captured by such attitudes as embodied by Trump. Northeastern University historian Edward H. Miller, in “A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, The John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism” in 2021, for instance, had Trump’s number on this.

“Today, all of us are strapped into the roller coaster in the fantastical theme park of Welch’s political imagination,” Miller wrote. “And we can’t get off.”

Welch’s echoes are indeed pervasive in today’s political culture.

“Many of the issues, themes, and causes the Birchers seized upon six decades ago can still be found on the political right today,” book reviewer James Mann wrote in The New York Review. “In an essay titled ‘There Goes Christmas,’ Welch complained that department stores were, in Miller’s words, ‘stocking subversively secular UN holiday propaganda’; because the stores did not have enough ‘Merry Christmas’ decorations, Welch complained, they were trying to take Christ out of the holiday.”

Mann continued: “The Birch Society called for defending the police against charges of brutality, opposed putting fluoride in the water supply with the fervor of today’s anti-vaxxers, and fought efforts at gun control, which they depicted as the preliminary step for confiscation and a Communist takeover of the United States. Much like Donald Trump and his base today, the Birchers refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of political opposition, suggesting that those who disagreed with them were acting in bad faith, if not as part of a sinister conspiracy.”

Can we miss those reverberations today?

It’s far from clear whether the Smoot-Hawley revival now under way in the White House and in Washington will plunge us into recession or worse. Economists at J.P. Morgan and Moody’s Analytics now say there’s a 40 percent chance of such a decline. Those at Goldman Sachs peg the chance at 35 percent. Whether they are on target or not, many economists expect to see lower growth, at least. Yale’s Budget Lab, for instance, expects higher prices and a substantial decline in growth both for the U.S. and the world.

Trump’s attitude seems to be that all the pain his efforts are causing are short-term problems. As The New York Times reported, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said Trump’s policies are “worth it” even if they cause a recession. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has said the economy may need a “detox period” after becoming dependent on government spending. And Trump has said there will be a “period of transition” as his policies take hold.

But others, including some traditional conservatives, think this is pablum.

“The idea of short-term pain for long-term gain is not a crazy idea in and of itself,” said Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, told the Times. But Trump’s trade policies, he said, are “short-term pain to get more long-term pain.”

Welch died in 1985. His ideas, however, are living on. With the market collapses and the expectation of economic strain, we already are seeing just how crazy they were. Buckle up, friends, it’s likely to get worse.

There are no sidelines here

Posted on April 1, 2025 by Joe Weber

The academic battle against Trump calls for unity

In 1931, the wife of a United Mine Workers organizer was terrorized in Harlan County, Kentucky, by Sheriff John H. Blair and his henchmen, who worked for the local mining company. The woman, Florence Reece, in response wrote the memorable song “Which Side Are You On?”

Reece included the lyric: “They say in Harlan County/There are no neutrals there/You’ll either be a union man/Or a thug for J. H. Blair.”

Academics today face a similar fight. There can be no neutrals among them in the battle against today’s thug, Donald J. Trump. And yet, we are seeing splits, with some laboring to stay away from the fray, unable to overcome differences they have with other academics to unite against a common enemy.

Today’s major cleaving isn’t a matter of labor vs. management, of miners versus the company. Instead, the battle is joined over Zionism and antisemitism, and it pits supporters of the First Amendment and academic freedom against Trump Administration overreach and the pretext of antisemitism the anti-“woke” president is using.

Troublingly, some of the least popular people on American campuses — especially at elite schools — are carrying the water for the rest at the moment. And that could cede the fight to Trump.

Consider a new lawsuit brought by the American Association of University Professors and local AAUP chapters at Harvard, Rutgers and NYU, as well as the Middle East Studies Association. The case, in which Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute is providing legal counsel, is aimed at stopping Trump’s “large-scale arrests, detentions, and deportations of noncitizen students and faculty who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and other related expression and association (the ‘ideological-deportation policy’).”

The complaint points to administration actions such as the arrests of Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, the revocation of permanent legal status for Columbia student Yunseo Chung, the arrest of Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri, the persecution of Cornell University doctoral candidate Momodou Taal, which led to his self-deportation, and other student visa revocations. The common denominator: the targeted students all protested the Gaza War, backing Palestinians.

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned in early March on X: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” But is Rubio, a lapdog for Trump, really attacking Hamas supporters?

The AAUP-MESA lawsuit assails that Hamas contention. It argues that administration officials “have stretched that label beyond the breaking point to encompass any speech supportive of Palestinian human rights or critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.”

By contrast, the suit notes that demonstrators, including some Jews, had varying motivations. While some backed Hamas or damned Zionism, others just called for peace.

“Many of the pro-Palestinian protests included calls for a ceasefire and for humanitarian aid to displaced or wounded Palestinians,” the complaint says. “Others centered on calls for institutional divestment from Israel. Many included criticism or condemnation of Israel’s campaign in Gaza; and some included denunciations of Zionism.”

To be sure, many thoughtful people hold that the protestors were way off base. Certainly, they would have been better served to call on Hamas to lay down its arms and seek peaceful coexistence; clearly the simplest, fairest and least bloody solution. For various reasons — mostly bad ones discussed in other Substack pieces — the demonstrators didn’t see it that way, though.

Whether they were wrongheaded or misguided, however, those protestors were within their rights to speak their minds lawfully on campuses. And whether they were citizens or not, they remain protected by our First Amendment while they are here.

And, surely, there should be agreement among academic organizations in supporting academic freedom and those First Amendment rights.

Much as Jewish members of the American Civil Liberties Union such as David Goldberger decades ago supported the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, so should campus groups such as Hillel and Columbia’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies join in lawsuits such as the AAUP-MESA case. If they don’t sign on as plaintiffs or file amicus briefs, the could at least offer intellectual support for the principles involved.

Instead, the Middle East Studies Association — an organization many rightly find repugnant because of its calls for boycotting Israeli academics — is standing alone among non-AAUP professional associations in this lawsuit. Where is the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, a group founded by a Princeton scholar in 2007 as a reaction to the anti-Israel bent of MESA? Yes, these rival groups are riven by deep differences, but do they not share a commitment to academic freedom and open discussion?

And none should miss the bigger picture here. The lack of a united front can only weaken all academic institutions in this fight.

Surely, all academics should decry the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that the Trump Administration is spawning in its intellectually bankrupt attack on “wokeness” at universities. Even as schools such as Columbia must root out antisemitism that darkens too many departments there, they should not bow to Trumpian financial extortion.

Columbia may or may not get back the $400 million in cut federal funds because of its genuflection to Trump, but the bully surely won’t relent, finding other ways to hound the school (note that he drove out the latest interim president, Dr. Katrina Armstrong). Emboldened by Columbia’s submission, he’s now threatening to withdraw billions in funding at Harvard and Princeton. In reaction, all such institutions should unite to fight him in the courts, not succumb to being picked off one by one.

As the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber, wrote in The Atlantic, the government’s assault on Columbia presents “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.” He urged universities to speak up in defense of their rights.

“Every citizen and officeholder who cares about the strength of our country must also care about free speech, self-governing thought, and the untrammeled quest for knowledge,” Eisgruber wrote.

Just how bad are things on some campuses now? Take note of the claims in the AAUP-MESA suit. Academics avoid open discussion of Middle East matters for fear of retaliation, the suit maintains. The Trump policy, it says, “is accomplishing its purpose: it is terrorizing students and faculty for their exercise of First Amendment rights in the past, intimidating them from exercising those rights now, and silencing political viewpoints that the government disfavors.”

The suit provides several examples, including:

Noncitizen students of City University of New York history professor Beth Baron fear leaving the U.S. for research because they may be unable to return. Some who teach avoid discussion of Israel, Palestine and U.S. foreign policy for fear of deportation. At Columbia, a noncitizen organizer of a longstanding online community shut down the channel for fear of jeopardizing the status of noncitizen members. English and comparative literature associate professor Patricia Dailey says this denies her of access to information about the region and the university.

Another associate professor at Columbia, classics scholar Joseph Howley, last spring criticized the university for arresting student demonstrators and he now finds noncitizen graduate student instructors shunning his regular teaching sessions in fear. And a Rutgers English professor, David Kurnick, avoids publicly discussing the Middle East with noncitizen students and he limits his communications with noncitizens to in-person chats, all because he doesn’t want to endanger them.

With these and other detailed cases, the suit paints a picture akin to the darkest days of McCarthyism, an atmosphere that differs little from the repression once common in the old Eastern bloc. Back then, academics and others were forced into samizdat, secretly recording and distributing government-forbidden literature. Will that sort of system arise anew in the United States as Trump assaults more and more freedoms?

There’s no question that many Jewish students at Columbia and other universities lived in unacceptable fear of anti-semitism. And there’s no question that the pathology must be rooted out in every academic department polluted by it. Moreover, the best tack for the schools to take is to require protesting students to take coursework that would inform them fully about Middle East history, so they can understand how Israel has long been victimized.

But trading one fear for another is not the answer. And neither is allowing Trump to win by dividing those who should unite behind larger common aims.

By picking off his targets one by one, Trump prevails against some and weakens all — just look at how he has divided big law firms. Even as they differ on other important things, academic groups should stand shoulder to shoulder in supporting principles they can agree on.

Indeed, there can be no neutrals in this fight. That’s the way the bully in the White House wins.

An academic leader now wears a Scarlet Letter

Posted on March 22, 2025 by Joe Weber

Columbia’s genuflection to Trump may haunt it, even as some good will come

In “The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne’s masterpiece, Hester Prynne publicly acknowledges her sin and wears the red “A” as a gesture of defiance and pride. It soon becomes a symbol of strength and compassion. Compelled by outsiders to accept the humiliating label, she does the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Dr. Katrina Armstrong, interim president of Columbia University, seems to be in Hester’s shoes at the moment. Her sin is not adultery, of course, but rather it is capitulating to a vindictive, petty tyrant who is just at the beginning of a war on higher education. Armstrong has become both a casualty of that struggle and a contributor to it.

Certainly, there can be little argument that some of the gestures Armstrong is making are long overdue – and, indeed, had been under way before Trump’s meddling. In essence, the good doctor is doing some right things for the wrong reasons.

Recall that Armstrong has succumbed to Trump’s $400 million extortion effort. Trump cut that amount of money from a reported $5 billion in federal funds that goes to the private Ivy League school, but then said he might restore the money if the school knuckled under to a string of demands.

Significantly, these demands included putting a particular Middle Eastern studies department into “receivership,” i.e., taking control of it away from departmental faculty and putting it under another university administrator. Typically, this is done when the department is judged to be dysfunctional, usually paralyzed by in-fighting or other problems that render it unable to function.

It’s not done, generally, for political or intellectual reasons.

But the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department (MESAAS), the one Trump targeted, is an interdisciplinary unit that has long been a hotbed of anti-Zionism. One professor there, Joseph Massad, referred to Hamas’s barbarities on Oct. 7, 2023, as “awesome” and “stunning,” for instance, and he waxed poetic that they could lead to the destruction of Israel, as former Columbia graduate student Liel Liebovitz, an editor at Tablet, put it.

In turning the Middle Eastern studies program into a “bastion of anti-Semitic propaganda,” Massad is hardly alone, Liebovitz reported. There are many profs like him. Consider just one other, Hamid Dabashi, who over the last 20 years has attacked “rich and powerful” Zionists who he said controlled the American government. In a 2014 article for Al Jazeera, Dabashi compared Gaza with Auschwitz and Israelis with Nazis, according to Leibovitz. The two academics have been active in anti-Israel campus activities, including moderating events by Students for Justice in Palestine, a group the university suspended for inciting violence against Jewish students.

For more about Hamas enthusiasts at Columbia, see here.

Disgusted by the likes of Massad, a longtime adjunct professor at Columbia’s School International and Public Affairs, Lawrence “Muzzy” Rosenblatt, went so far as to quit the university last December. He was revolted that Massad was slated to teach a class on Zionism and Israel.

“This would be akin to having a White Nationalist teach about the U.S. Civil Rights movement and the struggle for Black equality, or having a climate denier teach about the impact of global warming, or a misogynist teach about Feminism,” Rosenblatt wrote in his resignation letter. “While Massad has a right to think what he thinks, and speak what he believes, Columbia has a responsibility to teach objectively and fairly. At best perhaps one could tolerate a class on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict co-taught from the many diverse Israeli and Palestinian perspectives, though not by someone who advocates for the eradication of a group of people.”

“Columbia has lost not only its moral compass, but its intellectual one,” Rosenblatt wrote.

So, now Armstrong has agreed to put an array of departments that deal with Middle Eastern studies, including MESAAS, under control of a new Senior Vice Provost. That is a “receivership” in all but name.

The SVP will review course offerings at MESAAS, the Center for Palestine Studies, the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies (IIJS), the Middle East Institute. the Tel Aviv and Amman global hubs, the School of International and Public Affairs Middle East Policy major and other University programs focused on the Middle East “to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced.” The SVP will recommend changes, as needed, to top administrators.

As detailed in a university statement, Columbia will also review coursework in other departments to assure “excellence and fairness in Middle East studies.” Even before Trump’s extortion effort, the university had reviews under way in the Arts & Sciences curriculum for classes dealing with the history of Israel and Zionism. Columbia also has invited visiting faculty and postdoctoral fellows at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies to extend their teaching until new tenure-line faculty are hired, part of an effort to expand intellectual diversity among the faculty.

Armstrong also agreed to accept a definition of antisemitism recommended last August by a university task force. This refers to “prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis. Antisemitism can manifest in a range of ways, including as ethnic slurs, epithets, and caricatures; stereotypes; antisemitic tropes and symbols; Holocaust denial; targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel; and certain double standards applied to Israel.”

Presumably, students and faculty can be disciplined for antisemitism, as defined above. Indeed, the university did expel and in other ways take action against an undetermined number of students for some actions in last spring’s demonstrations.

Some critics take issue with the Columbia definition. An official of the free-speech organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, for instance, derided it as “vague and sweeping enough that it will imperil speech otherwise protected by the First Amendment.” He added that the federal government “shouldn’t pressure any college, private or public, to censor speech critical of any country.”

Whether one accepts the definition or not, these are appropriate efforts on Columbia’s part and some of them preceded Trump’s demands and exceed them. Even as she is doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, some good will come out of Armstrong’s surrender.

Other points on which she has yielded, however, are more problematic. Is the requirement that student demonstrators be required to shun masks an intolerable interference with free speech? Is a review of admission policies, ostensibly with an eye toward not favoring some groups over others, really just a fig leaf for reducing diversity efforts? Is the adoption of “institutional neutrality” really just a refusal to publicly take stances on controversial matters for fear of offending Trump or others?

Beyond those details, there is a larger question: should a private university be brought to heel by a thin-skinned, grudge-bearing authoritarian who seems to be acting more out of personal animus than any commitment to intellectual fairness or real hostility to antisemitism? How petty is he, you might ask?

Consider the magic figure has been $400 million that Trump ordered cut. That figure seems like a number plucked from the air.

Certainly, it doesn’t reflect the value of grants and other federal funds the university gets. That tally, if the White House can be believed, is closer to $5 billion. So why didn’t Trump cancel $1 billion or more, something closer to the full amount? He named no specific programs for slashing and didn’t identify any particular cuts he wanted that would have added up to $400 million.

And why would the former middling New York real estate developer and failed casino magnate single out the New York school for such special treatment? Beyond the pro-Palestinian demonstrations of last year – an upheaval that has been largely resolved — what about Columbia put it in his gunsights in his national assault on higher education – a war in which he can now claim quite the high-profile scalp?

The New York Times, in a bit of smart reporting, has provided some answers.

Back around 2000, Trump tried to sell Columbia a parcel of land a couple miles away from the main campus, a parcel between Lincoln Center and the Hudson River, the newspaper reported. His asking price for what he called “Columbia Prime” was $400 million. The university had Goldman Sachs look over the deal. The firm’s valuation: $65 million to $90 million.

Outraged, Trump stormed out of a meeting with trustees. When Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger opted to expand elsewhere, Trump publicly labeled Bollinger – a lawyer who had clerked for a Supreme Court Justice and who went on to run Columbia for two decades — “a dummy” and “a total moron.” Ever the self-aggrandizer, Trump – who had been a disappointing student at the University of Pennsylvania for a couple years — wrote in a letter to a pair of Columbia student journalists: “Columbia Prime was a great idea thought of by a great man, which ultimately fizzled due to poor leadership at Columbia,” scribbling on it “Bollinger is terrible!”

Now, one key question is whether Trump has wrung all his vengeance out of Columbia. Recall that his administration called agreement to his demands just a “precondition” for negotiations about the $400 million. Will there be more demands, especially now that he has forced Columbia to roll over?

An Atlantic piece suggests Trump will just be emboldened. “Surrendering to Donald Trump, however, would be a serious error,” writer David A. Graham argued. “The first impact would be on Columbia itself, which would be granting control to an administration that has been frank about its desire to knock universities down a few notches.” He noted that Armstrong’s predecessor, Minouche Shafik, sought to placate GOP critics last spring, satisfying no one and losing her job in the process. In addition, he wrote, Trump’s pattern is to turn on both those who criticize as well as appease him.

“We are appeasing an angry king,” journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote about Trump in 2019. “And the usual result of appeasement is that the angry king banks every concession and, empowered and emboldened by his success, gets more aggressive and more power hungry.”

Moreover, while combatting entrenched antisemitism among some Columbia faculty members is overdue and appropriate, the precedent created by bowing to Trump’s meddling is alarming. As the president of Princeton, Christopher Eisgruber wrote in The Atlantic, the government’s “recent attack” on Columbia presents “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s” and urged universities to speak up in defense of their rights.

“Every citizen and officeholder who cares about the strength of our country must also care about free speech, self-governing thought, and the untrammeled quest for knowledge,” Eisgruber wrote. “They, too, should demand a stop to the government’s unwarranted intrusion on academic freedom at Columbia.”

And, as FIRE attorney Tyler Coward contended: “The federal government abandoned its existing process to brow-beat Columbia — and Columbia folded. Higher education reform shouldn’t resemble a shakedown. Colleges and universities shouldn’t be bullied into accepting speech-restrictive demands because the government dangles a $400 million check over an institution’s head …. Shaking under government pressure, Columbia crumbled. If Columbia — with its immense resources and influence — can’t stand up to government demands that threaten free speech, what are other colleges to do?”

For better or worse, Armstrong will now forever wear an academic scarlet “A.” It will not represent defiance, but genuflection, not standing up for academic independence, but kowtowing to a bully. And, for all the needed good that her mandated changes will do, the letter will not be something she can wear with pride.

Getting the bum’s rush

Posted on March 18, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump seeks to deport those who offend him

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, left, and Nicola Sacco, source: Boston Public Library

In the 1920s, many Americans had little use for Italian immigrants and less use for anarchists. When two men who checked off both boxes — Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – were charged with murder and robbery at a shoe company in Braintree, Massachusetts, they were swiftly convicted.

Seven years and many appeals later, they were executed.

Before their deaths, however, the men became global causes célebres. Writers, artists and academics claimed they were found guilty on thin evidence and were really victims of political sentiment and anti-immigrant feelings. Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter, later a Supreme Court Justice, argued for their innocence in a book, “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen.”

Are we seeing a similar railroading now in the deportation cases of Mahmoud Khalil and Dr. Rasha Alawieh? Are they being given the bum’s rush because of political sentiments and anti-immigrant feelings?

Certainly, the stakes are not as high in the case of the former Columbia University pro-Palestinian demonstrator, Khalil, and the Lebanese physician, Alawieh, a devotee of a dead Hezbollah leader. Deportation is a far cry from execution and murder isn’t on the table here.

But are there troubling parallels? Are we seeing a miscarriage of justice that threatens such cherished principles as free speech and free thought? Unlike Sacco and Vanzetti, there has been no trial for either Khalil or Alawieh, but nonetheless they are high-profile targets of enforcement arms that seem to run on presumptions of guilt and little or no need for proof of wrongdoing.

So far, the two are not accused of much more than speaking their minds or just having noxious views. Neither has been charged with any crime. Neither has been alleged to have given “material support” to terrorists, one standard for a criminal charge (this was a key finding in cases I wrote about in a book about Somali-American terrorists, “Divided Loyalties.”)

But both have views offensive to President Trump and his administration and, inarguably, to many other Americans. For what it’s worth, count me among those who find Khalil’s stance on Israel repugnant, and I hold no brief for Hezbollah leaders or any who support them. But, as Americans, we all have the right to take umbrage at differing views, even as we defend the rights of others to hold them.

Consider the attitude of an ardent Zionist, Wesleyan University President Michael S. Roth, as he told Politico:

“I was really shocked that someone in the United States would be arrested for having participated in a lawful demonstration,” Roth said. “I assumed there were some other justifications, I thought there would be some crime that had been committed for which the individual was being held accountable. But as I learned more about it, I saw that this was part of this broader attempt to intimidate people from protesting in ways that the White House doesn’t like.”

The Wesleyan president went still further, lambasting the McCarthyesque atmosphere the Trump Administration is creating.

“People are really afraid to be targeted by the government, whose powers are extraordinary, and when they’re willing to arrest or detain someone without charge and threaten to deport him without charges, that’s very frightening,” he said.

To get specific, Khalil was a graduate student a Columbia last spring and rose to prominence as a spokesman and negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a student coalition protesting the Gaza War. As The New York Times reported, he was videotaped shouting “Free Palestine” in a campus demonstration.

While Khalil became the face and voice of the protestors, and he often criticized Israel, it’s not clear that he ever said anything supporting Hamas. He was involved with a protest in the Barnard library at which fliers promoted the terrorist group, but so far there is no proof he had anything to do with the leaflets.

“It remains unclear what exactly Mr. Khalil is believed to have done,” the Times reported. “He is accused by the White House and others of organizing protests, such as the one in the Barnard library, where participants distributed fliers promoting Hamas. A flier that was shown in online postings from the library said it had been produced by the ‘Hamas Media Office.’ It was titled ‘Our Narrative’ and listed Hamas’s code name for the Oct. 7 attacks, with an image of fighters standing on a tank.”

But a friend of Khalil told the paper “he did not touch those fliers.”

Khalil is legally a permanent resident but not a citizen of the United States. Based on that status, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has cited a law that lets the government deport a noncitizen if his presence is deemed adversarial to American foreign policy interests. That is an “extraordinary attestation” consistent with an “emergency-happy administration” whose “broad aim is clearly to curtail or nullify constitutional protections under cover of unreviewable authority,” writes former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman.

And it’s very likely that Khalil’s case will test whether Trump and Rubio will have the right to toss out anyone whose views on just about anything offend them, according to Georgetown University law professor Stephen I. Vladeck.

Vladeck, editor and author of the Supreme Court newsletter “One First,” points to a Trump social media post in which the president says “This is the first arrest of many to come.” To Trump, Vladeck said, “Khalil’s is not a special case.”

Trump in his post also said: “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”

To the law professor, that suggests a big muzzle that Trump plans to affix on noncitizens and license for him to deport at will.

“And that, to me, is the scariest part—for it suggests that the government intends to use these rarely invoked removal authorities in enough cases to seek to deter non-citizens of any immigration status from speaking out about sensitive political issues, even in contexts in which the First Amendment does, or at least should, clearly protect their right to do so,” Vladeck writes.

He concludes: “If anything is anti-American, it’s threatening non-citizens who are in this country legally and have committed no crimes with the specter of being arrested, detained, and removed for doing nothing more than speaking up on behalf of unpopular causes—even, if not especially, unpopular causes with which many of us may well disagree.”

Khalil’s case will be especially notable, too, because the administration appears to have venue shopped it. Khalil was hustled off to Louisiana from New York City, where he had been living in a Columbia University apartment building. Trump appears to count on getting a more sympathetic hearing from judges in Louisiana, especially on appeal.

Stephen I. Vladeck, source: The Federalist Society

“The Fifth Circuit is the court I’d least want to be in if I were Khalil,” Vladeck told The New York Times. “It is a court where immigrants in general have a historically poor track record, and it’s a court in which judges are going to be most sympathetic to the government’s ability to point at someone and say, ‘You supported Hamas.’”

Recall, moreover, that Trump seems to have a particular animus toward Columbia. His administration is imposing $400 million in federal funding cuts on the university, much of which is imperiling medical research. He’s blaming what his minions in a Department of Education release call “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

Never mind that the Anti-Defamation League has praised many of the university’s efforts to battle antisemitism, even while contending it has a ways to go. Or that critics such as Times of Israel blogger Ethan Brown argue that the administration action “targets the wrong institution, disrupts critical research in climate science, technology, and medicine, and does nothing to protect Jewish students.” He argues: “We deserve real protection from harassment on campus, not a political stunt that exploits our community to attack our values.”

As a rabbi of my acquaintance put it in a personal note regarding both Khalil and the funding cut: “I’m really angry that all of this is supposedly being done for the sake of Jews. Deporting a green card-holder for organizing campus protests — no matter how much I disagreed with the protests and their antisemitic rhetoric — won’t make Jews any safer, it will just erode free speech rights for everyone … Columbia has one of the highest proportions of Jewish students AND Jewish professors — all of whom are losing a massive amount of research funding supposedly to protect Jews.”

Dr. Rasha Alawieh, source: The Patriot Ledger

As for Alawieh, her offense appears to be a matter of holding unsavory views. On a two-week trip home to see her parents in Lebanon in February, she attended a funeral for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, killed last fall in an Israeli air attack. She also was accused of having photos of him and “fighters and martyrs” on her phone that she deleted to avoid running afoul of border protection agents in returning to Boston.

“According to Dr. Alawieh, she follows [Nasrallah] for his religious and spiritual teachings and not his politics,” court documents in her case stated.

Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist in the U.S. under a visa that let her to work as an assistant professor at Brown University, was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel at Logan Airport on March 13 and then deported the following day.

When relatives went to court on March 14 to keep her in the U.S., a federal judge set a hearing for March 17 and ordered that she stay in Massachusetts. By then, however, she was on a plane bound for Paris, the initial stop on the way to Lebanon. The judge cancelled the Monday hearing, though he has scheduled others in coming weeks.

“A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

Alawieh, who had been in the U.S. since 2018 on an H-1B visa, was not known to be politically active. A demonstration supporting her drew some 200 people to the Rhode Island State House on March 17, including several doctors wearing their scrubs. Signs there read “Hands off our colleagues. Hands off our patients. Abolish ICE.”

Dr. Paul Morrissey, center, source: The Boston Globe

Among those on hand were Dr. Paul Morrissey, surgical director of organ transplant division at Brown University Health. He told The Boston Globe that Alawieh works on getting people in Rhode Island on the list for a kidney transplants, a crucial job at a time of acute need for the organs.

“It’s an unfortunate set of circumstances,” Morrissey said. “It’s putting a strain on our office. Her work has been exceptional.”

Dr. George Bayliss, who directs the organ transplant division at Rhode Island Hospital, also condemned the deportation. Alawieh had been part of the transplant service at the hospital.

“This is outrageous,” Bayliss told the Globe. “This is a person who is legally entitled to be in the U.S., who is stopped from re-entering the country for reasons no one knows. It’s depriving her patients of a good physician.”

He added: “She’s really a very humble and able person … She takes care of her patients. She is talented and thoughtful and a great addition to our division.”

Sacco and Vanzetti had plenty of people speaking up for them in their day. In the end, it made no difference. Will that be the case for Khalil and Alawieh? And will they just be the first of many to come?

“All of Germany hears the Fuhrer”

Posted on March 16, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s war on the press has antecedents

German poster promoting the People’s Receiver. It reads “All of Germany hears the Führer with the People’s Receiver.” Source: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Germany in the early 1930s was a global leader in mass communications. It had more newspapers than other European nations and an influential film industry, one of the world’s largest. But, as we all know, Adolf Hitler soon trampled on all that.

“Within months of Hitler becoming chancellor, his regime destroyed the country’s free press,” historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum report. “It shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers. The propaganda ministry issued daily orders dictating what could be published. Oversight of radio, film, newsreels, theater, and music likewise fell under its rule… After 1933, the Nazi regime broadcast propaganda over the radio to homes, factories, and even city streets.”

Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, made his intentions clear in a speech at the Reich Broadcasting Co. on March 25, 1933. “We make no secret of it: broadcasting belongs to us, no one else,” he said. “And we will place broadcasting in the service of our ideas, and no other idea will be given a chance to speak.”

Are we seeing a similar effort now in Donald J. Trump’s Washington? Recall that the president made attacking the press a pillar of both his presidential campaigns and a hallmark of his first term in office. To Trump, the media are “truly the enemy of the people.” And, certainly, he now is doing his best to stifle American journalism, both domestically and abroad.

Internationally, Trump has just all but shuttered the Voice of America, using an executive order to put on leave some 1,300 journalists there. All full-time staffers at the VOA and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting, which runs Radio and Television Martí, were affected, as NPR reported. The move followed a late Friday night edict from President Trump that the VOA’s parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, must eliminate all activities that are not required by law (it’s a minor inconvenience for Trump that Congress chartered the agency).

VOA delivers news coverage to countries where a free press is threatened or nonexistent, according to The Washington Post. “At its start, VOA told stories about democracy to people in Nazi Germany,” the paper reported. “VOA and affiliates such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia are designed as a form of soft diplomacy, a way to tout the United States’ free-press values in countries where antidemocratic forces prevail.”

The service’s impact, has been huge. In effect, it has carried America’s pro-democratic and free-press values to some 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week.

“VOA promotes freedom and democracy around the world by telling America’s story and by providing objective and balanced news and information, especially for those living under tyranny,” the now-suspended VOA director Michael Abramowitz, wrote in a post on social media. “For more than 80 years, Voice of America has been a priceless asset for the United States, playing an essential role in the fight against communism, fascism, and oppression, and in the fight for freedom and democracy around the world.”

But as it has covered antidemocratic regimes that Trump admires, such as those in Russia and Hungary, the service appears to have offended the president. “It is another chilling sign of Trump’s desire to upend the U.S.’s relationship with the world, press freedom advocates say — and to eliminate the flow of information he doesn’t like,” The Washington Post reported.

Of course, Trump can’t directly control what America’s independent media say about him — but he’s doing his best.

He has barred the Associated Press and Reuters from some White House events, for instance. His White House substituted two Trump-friendly outlets, Newsmax and Blaze Media, in the small group of correspondents who have access to the Oval Office for some press conferences. The press office ousted HuffPost from the group after one of its reporters posed a critical question to Trump on Air Force One.

He’s also using his bully pulpit to bludgeon critical outlets, habitually singling out some for verbal whippings. In his recent Justice Department speech, he said: “I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.” Of course, he meant MSNBC, using his trademark — and juvenile — slur style for it.

But, as Just Security has recounted, Trump has also moved far beyond words. His Federal Communications Commission reinstated previously dismissed complaints against CBS, NBC, and ABC relating to Trump’s claims of unfair pre-election coverage. FCC chief Brendan Carr, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the commission, also launched an investigation into National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), following up on Trump’s repeated calls to yank broadcasting licenses of outlets he disdains.

NPR, in particular, is facing an assault by Trump minion (or, perhaps, puppetmaster) Elon Musk “Defund NPR,” Musk wrote on X. “It should survive on its own.” Carr’s FCC probe is attacking the legality of the radio network’s underwriting. And in petty slights, the Department of Defense ordered NPR, The Washington Post, CNN and The Hill to give up their offices at the Pentagon. Trump-friendly Breitbart News will fill NPR’s space, while Newsmax replaces CNN and The Free Press replaces The Hill.

Earlier, Trump brought a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS for its “60 Minutes” pre-election show, alleging “partisan and unlawful acts of voter interference.” He took umbrage at an October 2024 interview with then Vice-President Kamala Harris. Even as it has pursued a settlement, CBS-parent Paramount is seeking dismissal of the suit. Meanwhile, Trump sicced his FCC on the network with an investigation. The stakes are high for Paramount, as it depends on Washington for a proposed merger with Skydance Media.

Before taking control of various levers of power in Washington, Trump sued a slew of publishers, broadcasters, and platforms including Meta, ABC, CBS, and Gannett’s Des Moines Register. As Just Security reported, Meta settled with Trump for $25 million, Disney parent ABC settled for $15 million. Both had business and legal reasons – not journalistic ones — for settling. Meta chief Marc Zuckerberg has been cozying up to the president, perhaps hoping that he will quash a multistate lawsuit against Meta that the Federal Trade Commission, for now, is leading. And Disney could have faced a hostile jury in Florida.

Trump has also cowed Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post who triggered an exodus among subscribers and several editorial page departures by forcing the paper’s editorial page to be less critical of Trump. Let’s remember that in 2018, Trump threatened to punish Bezos’s Amazon, possibly by changing its tax treatment.

To be sure, the Trump onslaught has ignited some pushback — although it’s an open question about how effective statements of protest can be against someone who wields the power of Washington.

Some 40 media organizations on Feb. 21 issued a joint statement condemning his efforts in barring AP from the White House press pool. “When leaders try to silence reporters through intimidation, legal threats and denial of access, they are not protecting the country; they are protecting themselves from scrutiny,” the statement said. “This is how authoritarian regimes operate — by crushing dissent, punishing those who expose inconvenient facts and replacing truth with propaganda.”

Recall that Trump imperiously barred AP from the press pool because he was offended that it refused to refer to the “Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America,” as he unilaterally coined it. AP is continuing to pursuit a lawsuit in the matter. And, fortunately, the judge handling the case has suggested that Trump might lose that fight, saying: “It might be a good idea for the White House to think about whether what they’re doing is really appropriate given the case law.”

There’s even more to be concerned about than the exclusion of reporters. The Trump Administration is training its guns on what has been reliable government information. Its efforts could mask the economic effects of Trump’s antigovernment and economy-dampening measures, such as tariffs.

Trump’s Commerce Department Secretary, Howard Lutnick, wants statisticians to remove government spending from reports of gross domestic product. Federal government spending accounts for about 6.5% of GDP and it contributed 0.25 percentage point to the economy’s 2.3% annualized growth rate in the fourth quarter, according to Reuters.

The Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, a nationwide group of business journalists, warned that this “raises the possibility that GDP and other economic data will be distorted, particularly if the Bureau of Economic Analysis eliminates the government accounts from its releases.” In other words, Lutnick wants to monkey with the data to put a happier face on a likely economic slowdown in the coming year, a contraction that may top 2 percent in the opening quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

“We don’t think it is a coincidence that the administration has curbed access to the White House for Bloomberg, Reuters and the Associated Press while simultaneously suggesting it may want to obscure the effect of its cost-cutting measures on the overall economy,” SABEW said. “There is the potential for long-term damage to the public’s right to know what’s going on with the economy – and the ability to make sound decisions based on accurate, complete data.”

Cooking the books has some history with Trump. Recall that the Trump Organization was convicted in 2022 on 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. His chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, was jailed for five months in connection with lying for his boss. And separately Trump personally was convicted last year on 34 felony counts based on falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star.

After Hitler came to power, he used the might of the state to crush dissent. Is it overwrought to contend that Trump is doing the same now, albeit by more subtle means than seizing the media outright? Trump’s approach seems more akin to that of Hungarian despot Viktor Orbán, who has used media buyouts by government-friendly oligarchs to control the messages Hungarians hear.

“He’s a very great leader, very strong man,” Trump has said of Orbán, who has held power as Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, with a prior four-year stint from 1998-2002. “Some people don’t like him ’cause he’s too strong.”

Of course, Trump sees himself in the same mold. Trump, whom critics see as delusional on many fronts, has also cast himself as akin to another strong leader, Britain’s Sir Winston Churchill.

But, before going into politics, Churchill worked as a journalist. As a part-time war correspondent, he traveled to Cuba, Afghanistan, Egypt and South Africa. And, while he insisted on wartime censorship for military reasons, he also defended the press.

“A free Press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free man prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny,” Churchill reportedly said in 1949. “Where men have the habit of liberty the Press will continue to be the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.”

By contrast, Trump has nothing but loathing for the liberty of the Press.

Echoes of the ugly past

Posted on March 14, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s jackboots are making a mark on universities

Nazis barring Jews from the University of Vienna, 1938. Source: Holocaust Encyclopedia

In 1933, the Nazis imposed a Civil Service law that excluded Jews and political opponents from positions in universities, among other places. At the liberal Frankfurt University, a Nazi commissar told a faculty meeting that Jews were forbidden on campus and launched into an abusive tirade, pointing his finger at one department chairman after another and saying, “You either do what I tell you or we’ll put you into a concentration camp.”

The war on education was on. Hitler’s minions were determined “to root out any dissent to their policies and ideology that remained in German higher education,” as Facing History & Ourselves described it.

Are we hearing echoes today in Donald J. Trump’s siege on universities? Is it overwrought to make such a comparison? Maybe not.

Certainly, it’s clear that Trump’s Republican Party is determined to bring higher education to heel ideologically. In the process, it is instilling fear among students, faculty and administrators as it attacks everything from diversity programs to medical and scientific research and global outreach efforts.

At Columbia University, for instance, Trump’s administration is cutting $400 million in federal support, the details of which are just now emerging. To point to one example, hundreds of researchers at the school’s Irving Medical Center have lost 232 grants for scientific research. These amount to about a quarter of the center’s research portfolio, according to Dr. Joshua Gordon, the chair of psychiatry at Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

And Trump’s reason for this – a bizarre inversion of the Nazi tack — is that the school has failed to protect its Jewish students. Never mind that Columbia’s administration last spring squelched the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that had riled the campus and inarguably spawned a hostile environment for Jews. That was last year’s news, but apparently Trump hasn’t paid attention to extensive changes on the campus.

“Unlike some universities that have ignored or downplayed campus antisemitism, Columbia has been strengthening its policies and taking action, even earning praise from watchdog groups like the ADL,” blogger Ethan Brown wrote in the Times of Israel. “If the government truly wanted to support Jewish students, they would be encouraging these efforts, not singling out an institution making progress while leaving worse antisemitism offenders untouched.”

Brown added: “Addressing campus antisemitism required a scalpel. Instead, Trump used a sledgehammer. Jews celebrating this tactic miss the bigger picture — it targets the wrong institution, disrupts critical research in climate science, technology, and medicine, and does nothing to protect Jewish students. We deserve real protection from harassment on campus, not a political stunt that exploits our community to attack our values.”

Johns Hopkins, source: The Baltimore Sun

And then there’s the even bigger financial blow Trump is delivering to Johns Hopkins University, with cuts starting at $800 million. That effort, led largely by Elon Musk, has led to staff eliminations of at least 2,000 people so far, most of whom have worked in USAID-related Hopkins programs overseas.

These cuts will end projects ranging from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to a range of global efforts, according to The Wall Street Journal. Among them are a nearly complete eight-year effort aimed at convincing people in more than 50 countries to adopt behaviors such as sleeping under mosquito nets in Mozambique and using contraception in Nigeria. One dead project involved providing chlorine tablets and soapy water and messages about hygiene to prevent diarrhea deaths in Bangladesh.

“We are, more than any other American university, deeply tethered to the compact between our sector and the federal government,” Hopkins President Ronald Daniels wrote last week, as The Washington Post reported. “The breadth and depth of this historic relationship means that cuts to federal research will affect research faculty, students, and staff and will ripple through our university.”

Nearly half the university’s total incoming money, he wrote, came from federal funds last year.

But the administration efforts are even worse at the Baltimore school. Hopkins, which spends more than any other U.S. university on research — some $3 billion — stands to lose at least another $200 million under a Trump plan to cut National Institutes of Health grants for so-called indirect costs. Last month, Hopkins and a dozen other schools who would lose money sued, and those NIH cuts are on pause while the legal challenges move forward.

Remember that scientists at Johns Hopkins University have done extraordinary things. Some invented cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Others confirmed the authenticity of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And still others introduced the rubber glove to surgery and, much later, others landed the first spacecraft on an asteroid. Twenty-nine people associated with Hopkins have won Nobel Prizes.

With Trump, that legacy is under assault. Similarly, schools nationwide are under the gun.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln, source: Princeton Review

As reported by Inside Higher Ed, those that have paused hiring or trimmed budgets because of funding cuts include Brown, Duke, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington, Emory University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Vermont.

Trump’s plans to eliminate the federal Department of Education, moreover, are threatening student loan programs. By fiat, he and his education chief, Linda McMahon, have already cut the department’s staff in half. And Trump has said that the main task for McMahon – whose main claim to fame is cofounding and running the WWE wrestling outfit – is to put herself out of a job.

As the Associated Press reported, Trump has vowed to cut off federal money for schools that push “critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content” and to reward states and schools that end teacher tenure and support universal school choice programs.

Academic freedom? Intellectual independence? Fuhggedaboutit.

Diversity programs have been a particular target of the administration and of Republican-dominated state legislatures across the country. As reported by Inside Higher Ed, presidential “[e]xecutive orders denounced ‘dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences,’ and the Department of Justice promised to investigate ‘illegal DEI’ activities.” Claiming that universities have “toxically indoctrinated students” with ideas about “systemic and structural racism,” McMahon’s Education Department launched an “End DEI Portal.” And more than 30 states have considered or enacted laws curtailing DEI.

The attacks have cast universities into disarray. Some have canceled and then reinstated cultural events, as Inside Higher and others have reported. Some have scrubbed DEI websites and canceled race-focused events. Others have vowed to “resist.” More than 60 higher education organizations called on the department to rescind its DEI Dear Colleague letter, and one lawsuit seeks to block the DCL and another has won a preliminary injunction regarding the executive orders.

So far, however, Trump and his allies have been succeeding in cowing many schools, sometimes with efforts that go far beyond financial pressure. Even as it has triggered new protests, for instance, ICE’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian who was active in Columbia demonstrations, has cast a chill on longstanding academic commitments to free speech.

Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth; source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

“I was really shocked that someone in the United States would be arrested for having participated in a lawful demonstration,” Wesleyan president Michael S. Roth told Politico. “… I thought there would be some crime that had been committed for which the individual was being held accountable. But as I learned more about it, I saw that this was part of this broader attempt to intimidate people from protesting in ways that the White House doesn’t like.”

Many students and faculty members, Roth added, “are reeling … this is the greatest fear in civil society, including in the higher education system, since the McCarthy era. People are really afraid to be targeted by the government, whose powers are extraordinary, and when they’re willing to arrest or detain someone without charge and threaten to deport him without charges, that’s very frightening.”

Along with Khalil, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is seeking to arrest a second so-far-unnamed person — who, like Khalil, is a legal permanent resident — in connection with campus protests, according to The Atlantic. Trump has said on social media that Khalil’s is “the first arrest of many to come.”

Amid the fearful atmosphere, many university administrators are holding back on commenting on national matters, apparently trying to avoid drawing Trump’s ire. In Roth’s terms, “the infatuation with institutional neutrality is making cowardice into a policy.”

Roth, one must note, is an ardent defender of Israel, but also advocates free speech and academic freedom. “You have to respect the rights of people with whom you disagree, and I think presidents, deans and professors, we should model that as best we can,” he said.

Largely an academic disappointment in his two years at Wharton himself, Trump runs into most of his opposition from well-schooled folks. And his supporters are dominated by the undereducated. So, his attacks on education are not all that surprising. They resonate among people who are either envious of those with more schooling or feel left behind by them.

Still, the assaults are troublingly effective. Schools may have some success in fighting the president’s efforts in the courts, but with Congress and the Senate mostly behind him, their battle will be uphill. At least until the midterm elections, they are in for far too much grief. The Nazis would have been proud.

The price of ignorance

Posted on March 12, 2025 by Joe Weber

If buyer’s remorse isn’t afflicting Trump backers, it should be

Ray Bradbury was onto something in “Fahrenheit 451.” He gave us a protagonist, Guy Montag, who was a fireman – but hardly in the conventional sense. Montag’s job was to set fire to homes that housed books. The reason: ignorance was essential to dominating society.

That seems to be something Donald J. Trump understands quite well.

When Trump was elected, some readers were irked at a column in this space that suggested that economic ignorance among his supporters helped drive his victory. The piece argued that Trump’s backers didn’t understand the causes and remedies for inflation, didn’t grasp the dangers of tariff threats, and didn’t understand how chaos in the Oval Office could put our country under a cloud.

Trump was happy to exploit that ignorance, as he promised to quash rising prices, enrich the country through tariffs and kill the “deep state” that he contended was holding America down.

Well, might some of those Trumpers be having just a bit of buyer’s remorse now?

After all, the stock market under Trump has reflected anything but optimism. As of the market close on March 11, the much-watched S&P 500 index had dropped nearly 6.4 percent since Trump was inaugurated. The tech-heavy NASDAQ composite index had plunged even more, some 11 percent, and the Dow had lost 3.6 percent. On March 12, NASDAQ index eked out a 1.2 percent gain for the day and the S&P 500 index bounced up nearly a half point, but the Dow slipped another 0.2 percent.

What’s more, inflation has hardly been tamed. Beyond the avian-flu-related price of eggs, the inflation rate turned upward a half-percentage point in January and another 0.2 percent in February. Also, there’s precious little to crow about in job-creation, with a weaker-than-expected jobs report in February that helped nudge the unemployment rate up to 4.1 percent, as labor force participation slipped.

And dour outlooks seem to be spreading. Consumer sentiment has tumbled to a 15-month low, as layoff announcements shot up to a 4.5-year high, as Forbes reported.

That all means the Federal Reserve, fearful of contributing to more inflation, is standing pat on interest rates, with its repeated rate cuts of last year now very much in the rearview window. In the dry language of the folks at J.P. Morgan, “The Fed is likely to hold off on further decreases in interest rates in the near-term as it assesses the strength of the U.S. economy within the backdrop of heightened fiscal policy uncertainty.”

Uncertainty, indeed. So much so that people are using the “R word.” Talk of recession is in the air.

“The economy will likely suffer a downturn if the Trump administration follows through on the tariff increases it has announced and maintains those tariffs for more than a few months,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, posted on X. And Jonathan Millar, senior economist at Barclay’s told USA Today that if Trump imposes all his planned tariffs, “then we’ll probably get a recession.”

Even Trump refuses to rule out the possibility that his policies – especially his on-again off-again threats of tariffs against allies and adversaries alike – could plunge the United States into a downturn. In fact, he seems to be softening up Americans for a rough road by saying the country is in a “period of transition” and his earlier comment that Americans could feel “some pain” from his burgeoning trade wars.

It’s no wonder that investors – who, after all, put down markers on the future with every stock buy or sell – are heading for the exits. And it’s no wonder that forecasters are getting more jittery than they’ve been in months.

Zandi told ABC News that his firm raised its gauge of the probability of a recession to 35 percent. “That’s uncomfortably high — and it’s rising,” Zandi said.

And Goldman Sachs boosted the odds of a recession in the coming 12 months up from 15 percent to 20 percent. More pessimistically, J.P. Morgan Chase economists pegged the chances of a recession this year at 40 percent – up from 30 percent at the opening of the year — citing “extreme U.S. policies,” Bloomberg reported.

To be sure, many such forecasters have proven to be Chicken Littles in the past. In the halcyon days of Biden’s term, during the summer of 2023, Goldman’s crystal ball signaled a more than 30 percent chance of a recession, according to Forbes. That was just before the U.S. “ripped off seven consecutive quarters of more than 1.5% GDP growth and the stock market surged, even as monetary policy remained restrictive.”

Moreover, economists such as Paul Krugman are arguing that talk of a “Trumpcession” is premature. The data so far don’t suggest that, he holds, even while he warns of “a palpable sense of disappointment in the Trump economy.”

Nonetheless, a slowdown – if not a full-blown recession – seems very much on the horizon. Even before the latest Trump-induced tumult, the Congressional Budget Office, for instance, was expecting a meager 1.9 percent gain in GDP this year and 1.8 percent the following year, down from 2.3 percent last year. And The Conference Board sees decelerating growth throughout the year, ending with the economy eking out a 1.7 percent gain in the closing quarter.

The problem is not so much ignorance among Trumpers – who, perhaps, can be forgiven for that, given the state of economic education in our schools. Instead, the problem is ignorance in the Trump Administration that is driving its growth-threatening policies.

As the president stubbornly clings to his tariff policies – imposing a 25 percent levy on Canadian steel and aluminum, even while backing down from a threat to double that figure – do he and his advisers not really appreciate the market disruption they are causing? Are they blind to the declines Trump is spawning in the retirement kitties of millions of Americans?

Certainly, he doesn’t seem to care much.

“Markets are going to go up and they’re going to go down. But you know what? We have to rebuild our country,” Trump told reporters, according to USA Today. He made the comment as he promoted Tesla vehicles alongside Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the guy driving widespread government layoffs.

Can both men be so dense? As soon as legislators oblige him, Trump plans to kill a $7,500 federal tax incentive for electric cars. So, it’s no surprise that investors are giving the stink eye to Tesla, one of the leading makers of such cars, paring its share price from above $424 a share on Inauguration Day to below $231 recently.

And is it helping to “rebuild our country” to lay off tens of thousands of federal workers, with at least 62,530 of them dismissed in the opening two months of this year alone, by one recent count? And that doesn’t include the just-announced nearly 50 percent cut in the staff of the Department of Education, bringing that unit down to fewer than 2,200 people. That department provides money, such as Pell Grants, to students to attend college and funds elementary and secondary schools nationwide.

Is it helping when Trump imposes tariffs that are triggering retaliation from around the world against American farmers and other producers? The trade war he has launched promises to be costly for everyone, companies and consumers alike.

Canada, the largest steel supplier to the U.S., will slap 25 percent reciprocal tariffs on American steel products and raise taxes on tools, computers and servers, display monitors, sports equipment, and cast-iron products, for instance. The European Union, similarly responding to Trump’s measures, will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon and motorcycles, peanut butter and jeans.

Prices will rise across the world. “We deeply regret this measure,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “Tariffs are taxes. They are bad for business, and even worse for consumers.”

So much for the battle against inflation.

The U.S. last endured a brief recession during Trump’s first term, with the downturn lasting from February to April 2020. The economy at that point was slammed by the dawn of the Covid epidemic.

Now it seems the economy is taking body blows from tariffs, federal workforce reductions and a decline in consumer attitudes. If a “Trumpcession” isn’t imminent, is it unavoidable over time under such pressures? Unless Trump and his minions get a crash course in economic sanity, they might find out the hard way. That may give his supporters plenty of reason for doubt.

The Big Picture

Category Archives: Politics