A tale of two Dons

Posted on July 3, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump appears to have exceptional role models

Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, source: Screen Rant

Ya gotta hand it to Donald J. Trump. His immorality and dishonesty rival only his self-dealing and self-delusion. But he works the system like nobody else, except maybe another Don, the fictional mob boss Don Corleone, who bestows deadly punishment if crossed.

Consider Washington Don’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” Of course, it passed, even as several Republican legislators decried it either for boosting the national debt by between $3 trillion and $4 trillion over a decade or for slashing Medicaid by $1 trillion, along with imposing cuts in food aid to the poor. The bill squeaked by the Senate in a 51-50 vote, with the tie broken by Vice President JD Vance. It slipped by in the House 218-214.

In the Senate, just three Republicans showed some cojones. Kentucky’s Rand Paul and the already-endangered Maine Sen. Susan Collins voted no. They joined North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, who announced he would retire before casting a vote that would otherwise have led to a Trump-backed primary challenger in 2026. “Tillis is a talker and complainer, NOT A DOER!” Trump said on his Truth Social. “He’s even worse than Rand ‘Fauci’ Paul!”

In the House, the only Republicans to stand tall were Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. And Massie has felt Trump’s wrath for a while now. “MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!” Trump posted last week.

Truth isn’t a high priority for Trump and his minions. But some of these opponents spoke uncomfortable truths about a bill that will reward high-end earners with a continuation of 2017 tax cuts, which were otherwise slated to expire, at the expense of lower-income Americans, particularly in healthcare.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, source: Newsweek

“The Medicaid program has been an important health care safety net for nearly 60 years that has helped people in difficult financial circumstances, including people with disabilities, children, seniors, and low-income families,” Collins said. “Approximately 400,000 Mainers – nearly a third of the state’s population – depend on this program…. A dramatic reduction in future Medicaid funding, an estimated $5.9 billion in Maine over the next 10 years, could threaten not only Mainers’ access to health care, but also the very existence of several of our state’s rural hospitals.”

Collins took a principled stand even though recent polls suggest she would face an uphill fight if she seeks a sixth term next year. As Newsweek reported, a University of New Hampshire poll found that only 14 percent of Mainers have a favorable opinion of Collins, compared to 57 percent who see her unfavorably. Another 26 percent are neutral, the poll found, while 2 percent say they don’t know enough about her to say. That gives her a net favorability rating of –42, which is virtually unchanged from June 2022, when her rating stood at –40.

Similarly, Tillis warned that his party was making a mistake “and betraying a promise” in imposing the healthcare cuts.

But just as the Godfather’s Don seemed shrewd in his criminal operations, so do Washington Don and his allies seem in their politically foul ones — or at least they are trying to. “At the core of Republicans’ newly finalized domestic policy package is an important political calculation. It provides its most generous tax breaks early on and reserves some of its most painful benefit cuts until after the 2026 midterm elections,” The New York Times reported.

But will that bit of wool-pulling work?

Perhaps Washington Don and Co. expect so many folks to enjoy such 2025 tax benefits as a higher standard deduction and the elimination of taxes on tips and overtime that they won’t bridle at the pain borne by less well-off folks through cuts in health insurance and Medicaid. Maybe the Republicans are betting that this lag will shield some of their Congress members from furious constituents.

Is the electorate that dumb, though? It’s true that nearly a majority did vote for Trump last November, so perhaps he and vulnerable Congress members can count on such folks again. Still, when onerous work requirements and trims in Medicaid benefits begin to hit, perhaps some Trump supporters will realize what they voted for.

Nonetheless, the Don’s ability to work the system is extraordinary. In other ways, too, he has shown his brilliance at manipulation, particularly when it involves fellow billionaires.

He played Shari Redstone at Paramount like a fiddle, extorting a $16 million settlement for an offense by CBS’s “60 Minutes” that amounted to nothing more than common television editing. Earlier, he fleeced Disney’s ABC for the same amount because an anchor called him a rapist when the technical term was sexual abuser. And he cowed Jeff Bezos into changing the editorial policy at The Washington Post to abandon election endorsements and end its practice of running a broad array of opinion.

All the outfits had reasons for genuflecting to Trump. Redstone wants to sell Paramount to Skydance in an $8.4 billion deal that Trump’s Federal Communications Commission must rule on, and on which it’s been dragging its feet. For its part, Disney fretted that it might have lost a lawsuit brought by Trump in red Florida and worried that such a fight could hurt its brand, its “family-friendly movies, television shows and theme park rides that appeal to people of all political persuasions,” as The New York Times noted. And Bezos is beholden to Trump for business units far more important to him than the Post, notably a rocket company and Amazon.

Like a mob boss, Trump knows where the pain points are.

But, despite these high-profile scalps in his record of press intimidation, Trump hasn’t yet reached the level of an autocrat he admires, Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Recall that Trump said of Orbán: “He’s a very great leader, very strong man. Some people don’t like him ’cause he’s too strong.” Striking a different tone, the Associated Press, has explained how the Hungarian rules through “a sprawling pro-government media empire that’s dominated the country’s political discourse for more than a decade.”

For now, the U.S. still remains blessed with some courageous media outfits that haven’t been cowed. For those in the electorate who pay attention, they offer a beacon illuminating the ways of Trump and his GOP.

Consider the exceptional piece The New York Times recently ran that explained how Trump’s business empire was teetering last year, making it financially necessary for him to run for reelection to the White House. “His office building in Lower Manhattan generated too little cash to cover its mortgage, with the balance coming due. Many of his golf courses regularly lacked enough players to cover costs. The flow of millions of dollars a year from his stint as a television celebrity had mostly dried up,” the paper reported. “And a sudden wave of legal judgments threatened to devour all his cash.”

But now that he’s the leader of the free world, Trump’s businesses appear to be thriving. Many consider this self-dealing beneath a U.S. President, but Trump is as shameless as a Third World tinpot dictator.

“The president and his family have monetized the White House more than any other occupant,” the Times reported. “The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.”

Similarly, The Atlantic shines bright lights on Trump’s misuse of his elected position:

“He’s accepted a $400 million plane as a gift from a Middle East autocracy that hosts both Hamas and the Taliban, and also may be the home of a new Trump hotel,” Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg said on PBS’s “Washington Week with The Atlantic. “He’s dined with top investors in one of his cryptocurrency projects and reportedly promised to promote the crypto industry from the White House. He’s pardoned prominent Republicans and reality T.V. stars, including a man convicted of securities fraud, who, with his wife, donated $1.8 million to Trump’s reelection campaign, for good measure.”

Goldberg added that Trump’s family is charging half a million dollars to join a private club in Washington, D.C. He’s building a golf resort in Vietnam, a country that sought and got tariff relief, and a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City. “The Trump organization is planning to build a Trump Tower in Riyadh, for good measure,” Goldberg noted. “After a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to pay $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, the most expensive licensing fee ever paid for a documentary.”

So, not all media voices have been silenced or humbled. As a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team called the Paramount capitulation “another win for the American people” and said that Trump was holding “the fake news media accountable,” many others have noted the sword the president’s wields through the FCC.

Trump’s efforts might even constitute bribery, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has suggested.

“With Paramount folding to Donald Trump at the same time the company needs his administration’s approval for its billion-dollar merger, this could be bribery in plain sight,” Warren said in a statement. “Paramount has refused to provide answers to a congressional inquiry, so I’m calling for a full investigation into whether or not any anti-bribery laws were broken.”

Some independent media, too, have suggested that such potent language is well-suited to Trump and his cronies. Mother Jones headlined a piece about the Paramount dealings “Trump’s Mob-like Shakedown: A Scandal Starring ‘60 Minutes,’ Paramount, and the FCC”

“This is an Olympic conflict of interest,” the outlet’s Washington bureau chief, David Corn, wrote. “Trump, via [FCC Chairman Brendan] Carr, can squeeze Paramount and Redstone and force a settlement of his lawsuit, which could result in Paramount paying millions to him. It’s a mob-like shakedown: Hey Paramount, you want your billions? Reach a deal with Trump. And Carr is his Luca Brasi—the enforcer who applies the pressure to serve the criminal kingpin.”

Of course, bribery – or rather the despotic misuse of government power by a sitting president – would not be inconsistent for a man convicted of 34 felonies, as well as someone on the hook for $90 million plus because of his sexual abuse. And it would not be inconsistent for someone who keeps an iron grip on his party through means any real Godfather would envy.

In about a year and a half, with Congressional elections, voters will get the chance to either show their admiration for the Don’s handiwork, celebrating it in the perverse way some fans of novelist Mario Puzo exalted mob chiefs, or to make a different call. Just 29 percent of voters support Trump’s bill, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, as reported by The New York Times. And roughly half of voters — including 20 percent of Republicans — say they expect the bill to hurt them and their families, according to a Fox News poll.

Trump, who is also a skilled huckster, will now set out to persuade the skeptics — and those done dirty by his bill — that what they see with their own eyes and feel in their own wallets isn’t really there. Will Americans fall for his claims, as they did last November? As they still say on CBS and ABC, stay tuned.

The sins of the past

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Joe Weber

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

Jefferson looks over his university; source: PresidentsUSA.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “end of the beginning?”

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s attack leaves us with uncertainties aplenty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can both views be true at the same time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long live democracy or long live the king?

Posted on June 16, 2025 by Joe Weber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poster at anti-Trump demonstration in Frisco, Colorado

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go West, young man (and woman)

Posted on June 4, 2025 by Joe Weber

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

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

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

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

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

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

Former Moldova PM Natalia Gavrilita, source: NY Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harvard international students, source; NY Times

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

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

“There are none so blind …”

Posted on May 6, 2025 by Joe Weber

Sometimes, misinformation is a choice

An old acquaintance who handled PR for the New York Stock Exchange when I covered it years ago has become something of a troll on LinkedIn. A committed Trumper, he makes a point of sharing or “liking” often bizarre claims that reinforce the president’s narratives.

For instance, this fellow recently warmed to a meme that claimed that DOGE had found a Louisiana man with 34 names and addresses who was collecting $1.1 million a year in Social Security payments. Never mind that several other posters warned that this was bogus or that I had shared a Snopes fact-check tracing the post’s lineage and demonstrating how it was false.

My acquaintance’s response: “There’s a lot of truth out there that you are ignoring.” And he, like Trump, then invoked President Biden’s alleged flaws (never mind that Biden hasn’t been president since January).

Is the common practice in PR to not admit when one is wrong and, instead, to deflect, changing the subject when it’s unpleasant? Do they teach that in PR school or do people just learn that on the job, developing bad habits that perhaps their bosses love?

Similarly, a cousin often shares memes such as one that shouts: “OBAMA EXPOSED AS FOREIGN-BORN CIA ASSET — MILITARY CONFIRMS TREASON, ELITE TRAFFICKING TIES, AND FRAUDULENT PRESIDENCY.” Another, she drew from Breitbart, proclaims “100 DAYS OF GREATNESS,” citing the recent jobs report and arguing that the economy was defying doomsayers.

The nonsense about Obama is obvious, as is the fact that he left the presidency in January 2017 after two terms. For its part, the enthusiastic Breitbart link flies in the face of stock market plunges, the Commerce Department’s report of shrinkage in the gross domestic product and the flatness in the unemployment rate at 4.2 percent, up from as low as 3.4 percent in the spring of 2023. The post labels as “doomsayers” the responsible forecasters who have upped the chances of the recession, something even Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledges.

Such memes and the people who share them raise a host of questions. Among them: do the creators and the sharers pay attention to legitimate news sources? And, more troubling, how gullible are they? Have they lost — or never had — all sense of critical thinking?

Perhaps they live in a world – as Trump at least pretends to – where such sources as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Reuters, AP, etc., are outlets of “fake news,” all conspiring to embarrass him with false reports. Perhaps, as a result, they turn to a world of wacko memesters, swallowing whole each new bit of pabulum that flows by algorithm onto their phones or laptops.

Admittedly, mistrust in legitimate media abounds and has grown over the years. According to Gallup, as of this past February, Americans are divided into rough thirds with just 31 percent trusting the media a great deal or a fair amount, 33 percent saying they do “not [trust it] very much,” and 36 percent, up from 6 percent in 1972, saying they have no trust at all in it. The slide has been a long time in coming: About two-thirds of Americans in the 1970s trusted the “mass media — such as newspapers, TV and radio” either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to “[report] the news fully, accurately and fairly,” Gallup reported. “By the next measurement in 1997, confidence had fallen to 53 percent, and it has gradually trended downward since 2003.”

Trump rode such media distrust into successful elections in 2016 and again last fall. Give him credit: as a talented huckster, he knows how to get on board a train when his marks are coasting along on it. His charges against the media played into the hands and hearts of the 49.8 percent of voters who elected him last November and the 41 percent to 43 percent who approve of his job performance lately, though not most of us, the estimated 53 percent to 55 percent who disapprove of his work lately.

We also know that sources of responsible news coverage have been drying up or have been cowed by Trump. His browbeating has led to pullbacks on editorial comment at The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, for instance. Indeed, it’s passing rich that The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for cartoons by Ann Telnaes, who quit the paper in January when it refused to run a cartoon criticizing owner Jeff Bezos for his Trump obsequiousness.

Trump’s pursuit of CBS for “60 Minutes” already has driven a major producer to quit, citing a loss of journalistic independence. The network’s parent, Paramount, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of the company to Skydance, run by the son of tech billionaire Larry Ellison. Recall that Trump sued over what he regarded as a deceptively edited interview in October with Vice President Kamala Harris, a suit most experts see as baseless and far-fetched.

Moreover, the numbers of newspapers publishing across the country have plummeted, depriving Americans of vital sources of independent information. More than one-third of print newspapers have disappeared in the last two decades and of the rewer than 5,600 papers remaining, some 80 percent are weeklies, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative.

So, if Trumpers ever tapped sources of responsible journalism before, they will have fewer such opportunities going forward. Instead, they will have memesters and the likes of flaks such as White House spokesman Karoline Leavitt. Remember that in March Leavitt inadvertently spoke truthfully in saying that Trump’s Department of Justice would focus on “fighting law and order,” with more substantial misstatements following, such as her claim that tariffs constitute “a tax cut” for Americans.

Then there is Leavitt’s insistence that the Trump Administration is “complying with all court orders,” even as it has refused to bring home an immigrant it has admitted was wrongly deported. Remember that the Supreme Court ordered his return with no dissents.

Like Leavitt, my acquaintance who worked in PR may subscribe to the Trumpian notion that reality is whatever that president says it is. And my cousin may simply be misinformed by relying on random Netizens instead of turning to real news outlets. The tragedy for American democracy is that over the coming few years, if trends continue, the misinformation and deceit they accept may become institutionalized. We seem well on that way to that now.

On a personal note, this Substack will be on hiatus for about three weeks. My wife and I will go biking in Scandinavia, happily if temporarily distant from the Big Liar. Stay strong, dear readers, and stay well informed for us.

‘You say you want a Revolution, well …’

Posted on May 1, 2025 by Joe Weber

If they’re going to change the world, universities need to do more

Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, 1830. Source: DiPLO

A couple weeks ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks called for something akin to a revolution.

“It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising,” he wrote in a piece headlined “What’s Happening is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.” He argued: “It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.”

Are we beginning to see the rise of such a rival power or, more properly, rival powers? Glimmers are emerging in some universities that are uniting to fight federal funding cuts and other actions President Donald J. Trump has taken to shatter what he sees as “woke” culture.

But, so far, the efforts seem oddly timid. Either university administrators fear being too out front in hopes they can avoid Trump’s vindictiveness or they think — mistakenly — that they can weather the gathering storm.

Rutgers profs David Salas-de la Cruz, left, and Paul Boxer

Showing less fear, a pair of Rutgers professors — chemist David Salas-de la Cruz and psychologist Paul Boxer — in March drafted a “mutual defense compact.” They proposed bringing together the 18 schools in the Big Ten athletic and academic conference in resistance to Trump.

This compact would commit the schools to provide “meaningful” cash for a defense fund aimed at supporting any member “under direct political or legal infringement.” It would provide legal counsel, governance experts, and public affairs offices “to coordinate a unified and vigorous response” that could include countersuit actions, strategic public communication, amicus briefs and expert testimony, legislative advocacy and coalition-building.

Quickly following suit, faculty senates at more than a dozen of the schools endorsed the idea. Encouragingly, they include those groups at Rutgers, one of my alma maters, and my prior employer, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The resolution passed at Rutgers called on the university’s president, Jonathan Holloway, to “take a leading role in convening a summit of Big Ten academic and legal leadership” to start the compact.

But Holloway has demurred. While he supported the “ethos” of the resolution, he did not formally endorse it, noting that he is stepping down at the end of the academic year, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. “I’m a president walking out the door in two months,” he said in a senate meeting. “Presidents going out the door have no lobbying power with their peers.”

Instead, Holloway encouraged faculty senators to “work with their colleagues in other university senates and shared-governance councils, whether in the Big Ten or beyond, to further test their thinking, understand what may or may not be possible, and identify the local constraints and freedoms that define the actions of peer institutions,” according to a spokeswoman.

Mealy-mouthed? PR-speak for “no way can we do this”?

Already, a spokesman for Ohio State told The Washington Post that “it is not legally permissible for the university to participate in a common defense fund.” Other administrators have not taken up the idea publicly, including representatives for leaders at Indiana and Nebraska who did not respond The Chronicle’s request for comment.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that the top university officials may hope a duck-and-cover strategy will serve them better. But that is likely only because they haven’t yet had to fight, as Harvard has. Recall that Harvard has brought suit against the administration for freezing billions in federal grants.

Some Harvard professors have even pledged to donate 10 percent of their salaries this year to support the university’s fight. “If we as a faculty are asking the University administration to resist the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom, we should also be willing to share in the financial sacrifice that will be necessary,” Harvard Kennedy School professor Dani Rodrik told The Harvard Crimson.

So far, all but one of the Big Ten schools have been spared the sort of attacks Trump had lobbed at Ivy League schools. The exception, Northwestern, lost $790 million.

But Trump’s wrath – and his social engineering – may be unavoidable. Nine of the Big Ten schools have gotten a letter from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights warning of “potential enforcement actions” if they failed “to protect Jewish students on campus, including uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities,” according to The Post.

Of course, the claim of fighting antisemitism is little more than a ruse, an excuse to undertake a far-reaching remake of higher education. Yes, antisemitism is a real issue — especially at Harvard and my other alma mater, Columbia — and needs to be rooted out. But, for Trump, it’s just a pretext.

As for other schools that have stayed clear of the president’s broad-gauge volleys, it is just a matter of time before they are hauled into the fight, like it or not.

Take note that the hit list of Project 2025 – the right-wing blueprint that Trump is following, despite disavowing it during the campaign – has a hefty array of education targets.

The agenda includes so-far incomplete measures such as capping support for indirect research at universities, authorizing states to act as accreditors or setting up alternatives to current accrediting bodies, terminating the public service loan forgiveness program, banning critical race theory and eliminating PLUS loans, among other things. Here is a handy tracker on how the Project’s efforts are proceeding.

As Ms. reports, only one-third of the Project’s efforts have been completed, so much more remains for the balance of Trump’s term.

And perish the thought that any shreds of diversity efforts could remain unscathed on campus. Schools could be prosecuted on civil rights grounds for that, including programming aimed at putting first-generation students on the same footing as others. The administration is investigating at least 45 schools in an effort to end “racial preferences and stereotypes.”

“Big Ten institutions haven’t been in the crosshairs, but they can read the writing on the wall,” Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for the American Council on Education, told The Post. For many college presidents he represents, the prevailing thought now is: “Trying to keep a low profile won’t stop the attacks.”

Yet he said he also suspects they would be wary to sign on to the compact without knowing exactly what it would require.

Only administrators, not faculty senates, can commit their institutions to the united front.

The Rutgers university senate supported the Big Ten compact with its vote on March 28. Organizers there plan a teach-in next week and May Day protests in support of the compact, journalism professor Todd Wolfson told The Washington Post. He expects a protracted fight with administrators over the summer.

“We have had to lead and they have followed us,” Wolfson said. “Now we will demand they actually put resources into defending our campuses.”

Wolfson also serves as president of the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP is a union with chapters at more than 500 schools, including several in the Big Ten. It was among the first groups to sue the Trump administration over federal cuts to higher education funding.

Separately, about 10 Ivies and elite schools have put together what The Wall Street Journal called a private collective to fight deep cuts already mandated against them.

Perhaps because their schools already are being scorched by Trump, individual trustees and presidents are involved in the collective. The newspaper reported that participants have discussed red lines they won’t cross in negotiations with the White House. One such red line, for instance, is relinquishing academic independence, including autonomy over admissions, hiring, and what they teach and how it is taught.

The group has gamed out how to respond to demands presented by the Trump administration, which has frozen or canceled billions in research funding at schools it says haven’t effectively combated antisemitism on their campuses.

So far, Trump’s minions have been successful in picking off universities and law firms by attacking them one by one. So it’s not surprising that they are fretting about unification efforts, according to a source cited by the Journal. Within the past two months, the task force warned the leadership of at least one school not to cooperate with other schools to defend against the task force demands, one source told the paper.

Additionally, the American Association of Colleges and Universities has come out with a statement condemning what it called “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American colleges and universities.” The petition was signed by more than 500 higher-education leaders nationwide.

“We speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” the statement said.

Speaking, of course, isn’t enough. As Harvard has done, taking the fights to court – the last redoubt, given the supine Congress – will be essential.

Brooks’s “uprising” has a long way to go, but Trump is certain to give timid administrators plenty of reason to man the barricades.

Guilt and regret?

Posted on April 21, 2025 by Joe Weber

Perhaps not for J.D. Vance

Though he’s an outspoken atheist, British author Ian McEwan is something of an expert on guilt and regret. His 2001 novel, “Atonement,” gives us both in spades through a young girl who wrongly accuses a housekeeper’s son of assaulting her sister. The girl spends her life trying to make amends, something she can’t quite ever do.

McEwan may have something to teach Vice President J.D. Vance. Recall that Vance, a seemingly devoted convert to Roman Catholicism, has long been carrying water for his conscience-free White House master. At his boss’s command, he has battled the pope and U.S. leaders of the Church, particularly over immigration.

In the wake of Pope Francis’s death on Easter Monday – barely a day after the Church’s top leader briefly met with the vice president – it’s easy to think of the McEwan character, Briony Tallis, whose awful error prompted a lifetime of regret. One must wonder: will the pope’s sudden passing spawn such sentiments in the vice president, for whom Francis was in theory an infallible confessor? Will Vance have second thoughts now about his actions and arguments?

On Easter Sunday, Vance visited the pontiff in Rome. Ever gracious, the pope gave him chocolate eggs for his children.

But the day before that, on Saturday, Church officials gave the vice president reason to ponder whether the horrific policies he and his president have carried out on migrants are misguided – as Francis long contended. Vance met with a pair of the pope’s deputies, Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Archbishop Paul Gallagher, who seem to have given him an earful.

“There was an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners,” a Vatican statement said. “Finally, hope was expressed for serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic Church in the United States, whose valuable service to the most vulnerable people was acknowledged.”

So, did this lead to a Damascus moment for Vance? Did he show any signs of reconsidering his anti-migrant efforts? Did he show any regret or guilt over the wrongful deportation and imprisonment in El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and others like him?

It appears not. Indeed, Vance’s often-demonstrated arrogance and slavishness to Donald J. Trump seemed on display in the description of his meeting there by his office.

The vice president and Parolin “discussed their shared religious faith, Catholicism in the United States, the plight of persecuted Christian communities around the world, and President Trump’s commitment to restoring world peace,” Vance’s spokespeople said.

As the Associated Press reported, the Holy See has expressed alarm over the administration’s crackdown on migrants and cuts in international aid while insisting on peaceful resolutions to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The reference to “serene collaboration,” moreover, appeared to refer to Vance’s claim that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was resettling “illegal immigrants” in order to get federal funding, an assertion Catholic leaders deny.

In a Feb. 10 letter the pope suggested he had been following the “major crisis” in the U.S. concerning the mass deportations program.

“The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” he wrote, as Axios reported.

Earlier, Vance had defended the administration’s actions by invoking on X the medieval Catholic theological concept of “ordo amoris.” The Yale-educated lawyer argued, legalistically, that this “order of love” idea meant responsibility to one’s family supersedes an obligation to a “stranger who lives thousands of miles away.”

“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance posted, according to AP.

But the pope set him straight. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis responded. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating … on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

That led another White House bully into the fray. Trump “border czar” Tom Homan, also a Catholic, weighed in against the pope, essentially telling his infallible church leader to butt out. Homan told reporters that Francis “ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us,” The Hill reported.

The contretemps between the leaders of the Church and the lackeys in the White House almost certainly will have no impact on U.S. policy. After all, that is guided by a cruel monomaniac who seems to believe himself far more infallible than any mere pope. And, for his part, Vance is a reliable toady.

But one must wonder whether many American Catholics, especially in light of their leader’s death, will now question the White House approach. Certainly, Trump has given them ample reason — again — to question his mental stability and vindictiveness. Consider what the president had to say on Easter:

“Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country,” Trump wrote on social media. “Happy Easter also to the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten!”

Unhinged? Vile? Why do otherwise bright people like Vance not see that?

The key to Vance’s apparent blindness may lie in his autobiography. The vice president, who detailed the string of men his drug-addicted mother brought into his life in his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir, has long sought father figures. Trump, it appears, is the ultimate one.

Certainly, Francis — a kind, compassionate and thoughtful man — would have made for a better mentor, a father figure with a heart. But it may be that Vance’s Catholicism doesn’t run all that deep and his thoughtfulness is surprisingly shallow.

Long into her old age, the fictional Briony Tallis made up stories in which she atoned for her errors, though she failed in reality to do so. Perhaps Vance someday will develop enough self-reflection to succeed where Tallis didn’t. For now, however, he seems as oblivious as his master.

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.

The Big Picture

Category Archives: Politics