Some courts stand tall against Trump’s depredations

Judge Allison D. Burroughs was unequivocal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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