Why Appeasing Donald Trump Won’t Work
Good morning. For a while there, in these early days of Donald Trump’s second term, our national institutions were falling over themselves to bend the knee. Columbia University, after having $400 million in federal funding yanked, acceded to a litany of MAGA-ified demands that included an unprecedented intrusion upon departments offering courses in Middle East studies. A handful of big law firms followed suit, agreeing to pro bono deals with the administration after Trump threatened to punish them for their previous representation of interests against him or employment of lawyers who crossed him in the past.
A predictable thing happened on the road past appeasement, as Molly Jong-Fast writes in her column this week: Trump reportedly began considering asking for more from those who buckled, floating the idea of pro bono work on behalf of the coal industry from some of the nation’s whitest-shoed legal outfits. Pretty much everyone should have seen that coming, Jong-Fast notes, with bullies being fairly predictable creatures. Harvard certainly seems to have anticipated it. The university charted a novel path by having the temerity to push back on a host of aggressive demands made by the administration—which were actually sent in error, according to The New York Times, but no matter. That is the only way to deal with such ultimatums, Jong-Fast writes. Even as the university’s tax-exempt status is now in the crosshairs, the school is in a stronger position than those institutions that have already bowed.
Representative Sean Casten has been thinking a lot about fear and surrender these days himself. As Eric Lutz found when he recently interviewed the Illinois Democrat, Casten has started to see a shift from apathy to action in his district. One way to kindle those flames, he says, is the humble town hall. In Casten’s experience, these hyperlocal open forums can, by their very nature, serve as an antidote to Trumpism. “Fascism works if everybody is afraid of being a tall poppy,” the congressman says. “But we can all be tall poppies.”
“We are covering this administration without fear, without favor, and with a lot of coffee,” MSNBC host Alicia Menendez tells Natalie Korach, describing the approach she’ll take with coanchors Michael Steele and Symone Sanders Townsend on their new show. In addition to rounding out the little “never scared” motif of this morning’s newsletter, the three are moving from the network’s weekend programming block to weeknight prime time, taking Joy Reid’s old slot. Korach has a whole lot more on the show, which will be called, very accurately, The Weeknight.
Finally, in news that does seem at least a little scary: The National Institutes of Health has been talking up plans to set up a national registry of people with autism. This revelation comes after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s comments wildly demeaning a large swath of the autistic community. As Issie Lapowsky writes, such a roster would, yes, have some really dreadful historical parallels.
—Matthew Lynch, executive editor
