The parallels between Donald Trump’s offensive against law firms and his related campaign against American higher education are unsubtle. In both instances, the president has launched what are effectively extortion campaigns, telling firms and schools they’ll face harsh penalties unless they meet the White House’s unreasonable demands.
In both instances, some of the targets have tried to appease the Republican, while others have chosen to fight. In both instances, Trump has publicly taunted his victims.
And in both instances, at least some of the president’s targets have come to realize that bending the knee in the face of authoritarian-style pressure doesn’t always work out well.
Nearly a month ago, for example, Columbia University agreed to most of the White House’s demands in the hopes that Trump and his team would restore $400 million in federal funding. Not only were those hopes soon dashed — Columbia didn’t get its money back — but the administration soon after proposed installing oversight personnel to help run the school in ways that would make the president happy.
In effect, the White House responded to Columbia’s appeasement by trying in part to take over Columbia.
Other universities took note. Take Harvard, for example.
The White House approached Harvard with 10 demands on a wide variety of topics, including the installation of outside auditors who would monitor academic departments to ensure “viewpoint” diversity, as defined by Team Trump. Harvard rejected the terms.
As NBC News reported, the retaliatory response was swift.
The federal government on Monday night said it was freezing more than $2 billion in grants to Harvard University after the school said it would not accept Trump administration demands that included auditing viewpoints of the student body. … [The administration] said that $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million ‘in multi-year contract value’ would be frozen to the Ivy League university.
This might not be the full extent of the punishment. The morning after Harvard resisted the extortion scheme, the president turned to his social media platform to peddle a new and related threat.
“Perhaps 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?’” the Republican wrote. The developments mark a breakthrough moment in an extraordinary and historically unusual fight: No previous White House has ever tried to use the power of the state to steer the nation’s preeminent institutions of higher learning in an ideological direction favored by the president. It also helps to set the stage for a series of legal fights that will be of enormous importance, as a variety of leading universities — Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Princeton, Penn et al. — face Trump’s wrath. The consequences have the potential to be far-reaching. I didn’t agree with everything in The Washington Post’s recent editorial on the subject, but the paper’s editorial board noted, “U.S. research universities, and the federal funding that supports them, are one major reason Americans have collected more Nobel Prizes than citizens of any other country. They also help make the United States the world’s innovation engine and the top destination for foreign students. No other country is as adept at converting raw human talent and ideas into cutting-edge products. Research universities anchor innovation clusters such as Silicon Valley, which in turn fuel the country’s economic growth.” The stakes, in other words, are quite high. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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