Big Thought: Trump comes for the universities, students, and the First Amendment
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
This past Friday, the federal government served Columbia University notice that they’d be shutting off $400 million in already-approved grants. The freeze came just five days after the announcement of a review of Columbia’s federal contracts for its alleged failure to curtail campus anti-semitism.
Anand Giridharadas
You may recall that former Columbia president Minouche Shafik did quite a lot to satisfy the demands of congressional anti-antisemites during last spring’s wave of protests against the war in Gaza. Unlike many campuses, Columbia called in city police and allowed arrests on campus property. Shafik ultimately lost the confidence of university administrators and faculty and resigned just before the beginning of the fall term.
Funding freezes were only the beginning. This past weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Mahmoud Kahlil, a former student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs set to graduate this May. Khalil had been a visible spokesperson for campus protestors and a negotiator with the university. He’s married to an American, and is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. — a green card holder. Reportedly he’d feared arrest or worse and had asked the university for help, but had received none; ICE officers were allowed access to his on-campus apartment.
Big Thought, Small Step, Deep Breath — for March 5, 2025
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Welcome to the Trump economy. No matter how much President Trump tried to hype the economy last night, the numbers don’t lie. Your stock portfolio and/or retirement account is shriveling, business leaders are panicking, and today we are reporting that the new Trump tariffs could cost the average American family $2,000 this year.
Welcome to the Resistance, everyone who didn’t think that Trump is dangerous but did think he would be good for business.
After a month of gamesboyship, the Trump tariffs finally went into effect on Monday: new 25 percent levies on imports from Canada and Mexico; plus another 10 percent on Chinese imports, on top of the 10 percent imposed in February. All three countries — America’s biggest trading partners — are retaliating with tariffs on U.S. exports. As predicted, the stock market’s nosedive intensified as investors sold off stocks, anticipating a further slowdown in consumer spending.
The tariffs imposed during the first Trump administration were relatively inconsequential, but this time they’re likely to have a much bigger impact: the world economy is more fragile, the tariffs themselves are broader in scope, and there is nobody within the administration to put the brakes on. There is less that lawmakers could do even if they were motivated to push back, since Trump has invoked emergency powers — supposedly to address the threat of fentanyl trafficking — to conduct his chaotic and manic trade war.
Today’s Big Thought is about how this affects you — and, frankly, how it affects Trump supporters (current ones, at least) whom you might know and talk to.
A tariff is a tax on imports. Despite what Trump thinks, that tax gets paid not by China or Mexico or Canada, but by whoever imports goods into the country. And those importers face a choice — they can keep prices the same and make less money once they sell those goods in the U.S., or they can pass the costs along to consumers.
What do you think they tend to do?
Ding ding ding! They pass it on. So the tariff very quickly becomes a tax — on you.
Since tariffs are collected on everything from finished goods and food to raw materials like lumber and consumables like oil, they can affect almost everything you buy. That means higher prices — inflation, as economists call it. Remember it?
You’re going to pay more for stuff. And how much more will this Trump tax cost you?
The Budget Lab at Yale has just crunched the numbers, and what they found is damning. American households can expect to lose an average of $2,002 in real income this year, assuming that America’s trading partners-turned-adversaries retaliate in full, which is likely. So that is a $2,000 tax hike on every American household.
Every single Democratic Party official needs to be chanting this phrase nonstop from now on: the $2,000 Trump tax. Forward this item to your most Trump-loving friends and relatives. (Hi, newcomers! Welcome to The Ink. Hope you have $2,000 saved!)
From the beginning, the idea has been to overwhelm you. To flood the zone, as Steve Bannon promised, Only in the song does the one automatically follow the other. In real life, you don’t get to be “the land of the free” if you are not also “the home of the brave.”
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
As I write this, there are scattered and inspiring examples of bravery all around us — prosecutors, judges, even the occasional lawmaker. But in the main, we are proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are not the home of the brave. We are a country full of people smilingly capitulating to a tyrant.
Here in this city is a mayor who just went ahead and said it: “I’m collaborating.” A word more well chosen than he knew.
Collaborating. Yes, collaborating. That is exactly what he was doing. When he all but invited Donald Trump’s immigration raids into this city forged of the world in exchange for his own narrow freedom.
Collaborating. Exactly that. It is fashionable now. Bravery, less so.
It’s the media owners who are rejecting advertisements from the pro-democracy movement and letting go of cartoonists who challenge power and settling bogus lawsuits to protect their wider commercial interests, and trying to position themselves in the Dear Leader’s good graces. Why do they even own newspapers? Maybe they would be better off owning banks. Do they know what newspapers are for?
Collaborating.
It is the astonishing number of Democratic legislators and leaders who have no lack of courage when asking you for $5 via text message, but who ghost harder than single men in their 20s when the time comes for us to reap our investment in them. They say some big things, but they refuse to put a blanket hold on nominees or otherwise shut down the business of government until the coup that is plainly occurring is stopped. Turns out you should always get your spinal surgery before an authoritarian takeover.
Collaborating.
Then there are the CEOs, who, five years ago, proudly positioned themselves as avatars of a new future of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and now purge those programs from their own companies. They have more power with the resources at their command than most people who have ever lived, but it is not enough to give them courage. They would sell out their own colleagues, make them feel less part of the team, in order to please a Dear Leader who would sell them out in a Wall Street second.
Collaborating.
It’s the liberal and progressive nonprofits and foundations that we learn are pulling back from supporting the vital work of organizing for democracy, at kind of the exact moment when you would want to be organizing for democracy. They have chosen the wrong time to collapse. In the good times, they boast to the world of their missions to advance justice and freedom and equality. And then when an actual fascist takes the American presidency, suddenly they’re pulling back, they’re protecting their assets, they’re going safe.
Collaborating.
It is the university leaders who, instead of defending their faculty — one of the only bastions of protected thinkers who can actually tell the truth without fear because of tenure — are bending over backwards to please the wannabe autocrat. Campuses are now full of fear of a new McCarthyism. How does it feel to work for leaders who do not have your back?
Collaborating.
We are learning about ourselves as a country. We are learning who among us and around us is brave. Apparently, you don’t even need all of your fingers and toes.
Maybe it was always a mistake to count on these big institutions to protect us. They haven’t been for some time now. Yes, there are a handful of brave lawmakers, brave judges, brave media voices, brave others. But in general, it is now very clear after this first month that no one is coming to save us.
It’s time to take back our country. Not only from this authoritarian nightmare, but also from the collaborators too insipid and weak and chickenshit — too skinless and boneless — to stand up for us.
It is becoming time to be the home of the brave, if we wish to be the land of the free.
