Dear Weekend Jolter,
The locus right now of President Trump’s multipronged test of the limits of presidential authority is Harvard. While he torches the institution on Truth Social, his administration has frozen billions in grants and contracts to the university, Harvard is suing, and its tax-exempt status could be targeted next. The president also has threatened funds to other elite schools and, this week, signed an order using the college accreditation system to press for changes nationally including greater “intellectual diversity” on faculties.
Trump is using a blueprint drawn up by his predecessors in leveraging the power of the purse to achieve his policy aims, just more aggressively. In so doing, as our recent editorial noted, he is laying the groundwork for “pervasive federal monitoring” of universities, heedless of how “the coercive power of the federal executive might be leveraged by a future Democratic administration.” It is yet another area where the federal government has too much power, no matter which party wields it. But what shouldn’t be lost is that the higher-education confrontation never should have reached this point. At innumerable junctures over the years, the Ivy Leagues and other schools could have moderated, could have taken an off-ramp for the betterment of the student experience, and didn’t. Now, they’re stuck with Trump.
Several Ivies long tolerated an intolerant environment for free expression. The latest report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) put Harvard at the bottom of its rankings for the second year in a row (the school again notched the lowest possible “0.00” score), with Columbia and NYU’s speech climate also rated “abysmal.” Documenting the suppression of expression that factored into the scores, the report flagged 20 “speech controversies” at Harvard since 2020 “that resulted in a deplatforming, a scholar sanction, a student sanction, or an attempted disruption of an event.” Let’s also not forget that the Supreme Court’s landmark anti–affirmative action ruling responded, in part, to Harvard’s discriminatory admissions practices; the case surfaced the astonishing detail that an African-American student in the fourth-lowest decile was more likely to be admitted than an Asian American in the top decile.
Beyond the Ivies, Jeb Allen, a sophomore at Amherst College, recently wrote for NR about his experience as a conservative on campus and the threats he faced for daring to question DEI orthodoxy:
For a recent article advocating sincere dialogue within academia about DEI, I was stalked and filmed on campus, received hundreds of ad hominem attacks, and was escorted out of the dining hall by the Amherst police after a student’s social media post encouraged others to kill me over what I had written. The backlash grew so severe that our school’s president sent a campus-wide email condemning the vitriol. Members of a student body that claims to champion tolerance and inclusivity have cussed me out in public, asserted the campus would be better if I committed suicide, and said that, despite being my friends, they couldn’t be seen talking to me for fear of judgment by others.
While some universities have started to pull back on DEI, address antisemitism, and make other changes, the point is that it shouldn’t have taken Trump. The October 7 aftermath, if nothing else, should have been enough.
When Trump withheld $400 million from Columbia and demanded reforms (demands Columbia ultimately acceded to), Noah Rothman recalled the chaos that engulfed the New York campus in 2024. This is the school where classes had to go remote or hybrid amid anti-Israel disruptions, where a mob later took over an academic building in a scene so chaotic the NYPD had to be called in to make arrests and restore order. As recently as January, protesters claimed to have “cemented” sewage lines as part of an outburst of vandalism. “Whether because of institutional capture or its lethargic leadership, it had become unavoidably clear that Columbia could not restore a climate of free inquiry to its campus on its own,” Noah concluded.
Earlier this year, Harvard settled two civil rights lawsuits related to antisemitism. On multiple occasions, Harvard pulled back on penalties it had imposed on participants in the school’s anti-Israel encampment. The university allegedly ignored an action plan from its own antisemitism task force, though it has since committed to strengthening policies as part of the settlement.
The problems were not isolated to elite schools. As James Lynch reported last fall, antisemitic incidents nationwide surged over 200 percent from October 7, 2023, to September 24, 2024 — and 500 percent on college campuses, according to preliminary data from the Anti-Defamation League. A new ADL audit reflects more modest increases in total incidents for the full years of 2024 over 2023 — but an 893 percent increase over a decade, hitting “the highest number on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents 46 years ago.” The report called college campuses “epicenters of antisemitic activity” in 2024 (and it’s not over).
Today, a boundary-testing president wants to make an example of these institutions. The danger is that, with Trump as their nemesis in the struggle over reform, some schools will adopt a bunker mentality to resist salutary changes — or pause business as usual only to resume once a friendlier administration is in power.
Harvard has the resources to fight back most aggressively and appears to be taking that road. John Yoo and Robert Delahunty write that Trump could have a strong case to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status, pointing to a 1983 Supreme Court opinion. Stanley Kurtz contemplates a way out of this cul-de-sac, for both sides, and proposes the establishment of a so-called School of General Education, “where the governing dean and the newly recruited faculty are committed to a traditional ‘great books’ approach” (related to model legislation he has coauthored). “If America’s negotiator-in-chief wants to walk away with a huge victory, and if the leaders of the American academy come to realize that they cannot flourish as enemies of half the country, a solution is available,” Stanley writes.
Unfortunately, the moment for reconciliation may have passed.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Firing Powell is not the way: Trump’s War on the Fed
On the “peace process”: Forcing Ukraine to Surrender to Russia Is No Path to Sustainable Peace
On Pope Francis: Pope Francis, R.I.P.
On the MoCo court case: Don’t Force Sex and Gender Ideology on Little Kids
ARTICLES
Jim Geraghty: Trump’s ‘Team of Vipers’ Is Back
Christian Schneider: Social Media Is Killing the Democratic Party
Rich Lowry: Trump Shifts His Own Vibe
Dominic Pino: The Great Easter Speech That Never Happens
Jay Nordlinger: America Rattles Denmark
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Remembering a Father, Francis
Noah Rothman: Wisconsin’s Experiment with Arbitrary Power Has Gone Too Far
Philip Klein: The Doom Loop of Antisemitism
Jeffrey Blehar: Elizabeth Warren Runs Out of Room to Lie
Karl Marlantes: Marines Don’t Betray Allies and Reward Foes
James Lynch: Medical Schools Nationwide Promote ‘Weight Inclusivity’ in Ongoing DEI Push
Dan McLaughlin: Mandatory Woke Education Collides with Religious Liberty at the Supreme Court
David Zimmermann: When ‘Made in America’ Isn’t an Option, Small Business Owners Facing Tariffs Have Nowhere to Go
CAPITAL MATTERS
Daniel Klein talks up the “stuff surplus”: The Surplus Americans Don’t Hear About
Dominic Pino, on a topsy-turvy world: Somehow the World’s Fiscal Role Models Are Now Greece and Argentina
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White reviews The President’s Wife: Don’t Cry for Catherine Deneuve
Brian Allen has one of his periodic potpourri columns, and the magnificent Sagrada Família is front and center: Gaudí on the Sainthood Track, and Hunter Biden as a Starving Artist
L’EGGO MY EXCERPTS
Christian Schneider gets to the heart of what ails the Democrats:
The Democratic Party of old was like a farmers’ market: a place where a bunch of people with wildly different interests came together in a spirit of cautious cooperation. Union workers, environmentalists, feminists, professors, animal rights activists, civil rights leaders, and Hollywood glitterati could all coexist under one big political tent. It was almost like if you majored in progressivism, you had to minor in one of its sub-ideologies.
These disparate Democrats didn’t necessarily like one another, but they tolerated the strangeness of the coalition because it won elections. Everyone knew that the path to power meant compromise, so you ignored some of the more pungent aromas at the produce stands next to yours.
But that was before social media made it impossible to ignore anyone.
It’s Democrats who pay the price. Today, one public school teacher with a TikTok account, green hair, and a septum piercing can hijack a political movement. Six college students with a bullhorn and a drum can become the face of a party they don’t even belong to. Ragtag speakers at a climate rally demanding the end of capitalism become stand-ins for every Democrat running for office in a red or purple district.
In the social media era, the Democratic coalition’s balancing act has tipped hard toward the loudest and most ideologically rigid participants. Republicans, meanwhile, have figured out how to use this to their advantage. They don’t have to paint all Democrats as radical; they just have to show the country what the very visible radicals are saying, kick back, and let the algorithm do the rest.
Consider the average voter in a swing state. Maybe people in that category aren’t deeply engaged in politics. Perhaps they’re just trying to keep up with their mortgage, their kids’ playdates, and what’s happening on The White Lotus. And then they log on to Facebook and see a viral video of a progressive activist shouting down a speaker for not using the proper pronouns. Or they see their liberal neighbors lionizing a telegenic young man who shot a health insurance executive in the back, depriving his two sons of a father. To those voters, this is now what the Democratic Party stands for. Not jobs, not health care, not education, but fringe cultural obsessions that alienate more people than they attract.
Worse, social media doesn’t just project the fringe voices outward, it gives these voices leverage to shame and silence moderates within their own coalition. The purists don’t want to persuade; they want to punish.
Noah Rothman spotlights an almost unbelievable twisting of the law in Wisconsin, upheld by the courts:
Elections have consequences. One of the consequences associated with the Democrats’ retention of the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s majority is that Badger State voters may be subject to an utterly lawless and arbitrary taxation regime into the unforeseeably distant future.
It all began with a troll. A quirky feature of Wisconsin’s state constitution provides the governor with the power of partial veto — a mechanism that allows the governor to unilaterally amend legislation by striking words, numbers, or even punctuation from statute, even in ways that wholly alter the legislature’s intent. Governors of both parties have used (and misused) this authority in the past, but Democratic Governor Tony Evers took this power to a new and shockingly contemptuous level.
Last summer, Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled legislature sent a school funding bill for the 2024-25 school year to the governor’s desk. Evers simply scratched out the “20” and the hyphen so the bill would fund the Wisconsin school system until the year 2425. With a sigh and a wink last week, the liberal-led Supreme Court found no abuses of the governor’s constitutional authority in this maneuver.
“We are acutely aware that a 400-year modification is both significant and attention-grabbing,” read the majority opinion written by Justice Jill Karofsky. “However, our constitution does not limit the governor’s partial veto power based on how much or how little the partial vetoes change policy, even when that change is considerable.”
The 4–3 decision was a party-line ruling, and Karofsky’s conservative counterparts were not convinced that the state’s constitution sanctions Evers’s caprice.
“Instead of reading what the bills actually say, and construing the partial veto power accordingly, this court treats bills presented to the governor as simply a set of alphanumeric ingredients from which the governor can cook up whatever he pleases,” read Justice Brian Hagedorn’s dissent. Not only did the Wisconsin Supreme Court abandon a “reasonable reading” of the state constitution, it redefined the word “veto.” Even the so-called “Vanna White veto” is “still at root the power to influence legislation by subtraction, not addition.” It is the “power to say ‘no,’” Hagedorn observed; “it logically cannot be the power to create.”
Jay Nordlinger reports from Denmark, in an expanded version of his magazine piece:
Recent weeks have been good for Jolly Cola — a Danish soft drink. Many Danes are boycotting American products, and there is no product that says “America” more than Coca-Cola. In this country, Coke partners with Carlsberg, the Danish brewer — but never mind: The symbolism’s the thing. On the bottles and cans of Jolly Cola, there is a slogan: “A real Danish original — since 1959.”
In addition to boycotting products, Danes are canceling their trips to America. Hundreds have even demonstrated outside the U.S. embassy here. “Back Off, U.S.A,” read a sign. Another sported an old standby: “Yankee, Go Home.”
This is very, very unusual. Denmark has long been a pro-American country, and the Yanks and the Danes have long been close allies. Suddenly, everything is different. There is shock and hurt in this country, especially among people who have been the most America-admiring.
Several people have related to me their lifelong love affairs with America. Per Stig Møller remembers singing a song as a child, right after the war. It celebrated Uncle Sam, with his glorious tall hat.
Møller had an initial career as a literary scholar, then spent many years as a politician, and is now back to writing. He was Denmark’s foreign minister from 2001 to 2010.
The last few months have been jolting. In came the second Trump administration. The U.S. radically changed posture on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Denmark is robustly pro-Ukraine and anti-Putin. In April, there was President Trump’s launch of a worldwide trade war, which he dubbed “Liberation Day.” Since then, the war has been “paused.”
A war of this type, says Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard, is “based on completely absurd calculations and ignorant of 250 years of economic thought.” Mr. Kurrild-Klitgaard is a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen. We will hear more from him, and Mr. Møller, and others, in due course.
Not least on the Danish mind — far from least — have been Washington’s threats to this country over Greenland. In his first term, Trump mused about buying the territory. The Danes said it was not for sale. This term around, Trump has spoken in belligerent tones. Here is a sampling of his statements:
“The ownership and control of Greenland is an absolutely necessity.” “We have to have Greenland. It’s not a question of, ‘Do you think we can do without it?’ We can’t.” “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100 percent.”
More than once, Trump has explicitly refused to rule out the use of military force in his getting of Greenland. Military force against Denmark — a founding member of NATO.
CODA
And just because, here’s Yo-Yo Ma doing the tango, so to speak. One doesn’t need a reason.
Hasta luego.