America has periodically faced great national tests. The Civil War and Reconstruction. The Great Depression. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. And now we face another great test — of our Constitution, our institutions, our citizens — as President Donald Trump ignores courts and sabotages universities and his officers grab people off the street.
I’ve spent much of my career covering authoritarianism in other countries, and I’ve seen all this before. The chummy scene in the White House this week with Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was telling. “Trump and Bukele Bond Over Human Rights Abuses in Oval Office Meeting,” read Rolling Stone’s headline, which seemed about right.
With chilling indifference, they discussed the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a father of three who is married to an American citizen and who in 2019 was ordered protected from deportation by an immigration judge. The Trump administration nonetheless deported Abrego Garcia as a result of what it eventually acknowledged was an “administrative error,” and he now languishes in a brutal Salvadoran prison — even though, in contrast to Trump, he has no criminal record.
This is a challenge to our constitutional system, for the principal lawbreaking here appears to have been committed not by Abrego Garcia but by the Trump administration.
Appellate judges in the case warned that the administration’s position represented a “path of perfect lawlessness” and would mean “the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process.”
Then the Supreme Court ruled that Trump must obey the district judge’s instruction to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Trump and Bukele effectively mocked our federal courts by making it clear that they had no intention of bringing Abrego Garcia home.
Trump prides himself on his ability to free hostages held in foreign prisons, yet he presents himself as helpless when it comes to bringing back Abrego Garcia — even though we are paying El Salvador to imprison deportees.
Defying the courts
A remarkable New York Times investigation found that of the 238 migrants dispatched to the Salvadoran prison, most did not have criminal records and few were found to have ties to gangs. Officials appear to have selected their targets in part based on tattoos and a misunderstanding of their significance.
This is the same administration that marked for deletion a photo of the World War II bomber Enola Gay, seemingly because it thought it had something to do with gay people. But this ineptitude is intertwined with brutality. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said that those sent to the Salvadoran prison “should stay there for the rest of their lives.”
Trump’s border “czar,” Tom Homan, suggested that governors of sanctuary states should be prosecuted and perhaps imprisoned. “It’s coming,” he said.
Much of this echoes what I’ve seen abroad. In China, the government has cracked down on elite universities, crushed freethinking journalism, suppressed lawyers and forced intellectuals to parrot the party line. One university lecturer recalled how an ancient historian, Sima Qian, had spoken up for a disgraced general and been punished with castration: “Most Chinese intellectuals still feel castrated, in that we don’t dare stand up for what is right,” the lecturer told me — and I suspect some American university presidents feel that way today.
In Communist Poland, in Venezuela, in Russia, in Bangladesh and in China, I’ve seen rulers cultivate personality cults and claim to follow laws that they concocted out of thin air. “We are a nation of laws,” a Chinese state security official once told me as he detained me for, um, committing journalism. In North Korea, officials hailed Kim Jong Il’s book, “The Great Teacher of Journalists,” less in hopes of improving my writing than as a demonstration of utter fealty to the boss. Trump’s Cabinet members can sometimes sound the same.
Trump’s defiance of the courts comes in the wider context of his attacks on law firms, universities and news organizations. The White House this week appeared to ignore a separate court by blocking Associated Press journalists from a White House event.
In the face of this onslaught, many powerful institutions have caved. Nine law firms have surrendered and agreed to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for the administration’s preferred causes. Columbia University rolled over.
Harvard stands fast
We needed a dollop of hope, and this week it came from Harvard University. Facing absurd demands from the administration, it delivered a resolute no, standing fast even as Trump then halted $2.2 billion in federal funding and threatened the university’s tax-exempt status. (A conflict alert: I’m a former member of Harvard’s board of overseers, and my wife is a current member.)
Yes, critics of elite universities make some legitimate points. For many years I’ve argued that we liberals sometimes ignore a crucial kind of diversity on campuses: We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us, but only if they think like us. Too many university departments are ideological monocultures, with evangelical Christians and social conservatives often left to feel unwelcome.
It’s also true that there is a strain of antisemitism on the left, although Trump exaggerates it to encompass legitimate criticisms of Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip. (And note that there is parallel antisemitism in the Trump orbit, with Trump himself trafficking in troubling tropes about Jews.) Top universities amplify their own elitism when they admit more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 50%, as some do. Admission preferences based on legacy, sports and faculty parents perpetuate an unfair educational aristocracy.
Yet Trump is not encouraging debate on these issues. Rather, like autocrats in China, Hungary and Russia, he’s trying to crush independent universities that might challenge his misrule. One difference is that China, while repressing universities, at least has been smart enough to protect and boost academic scientific research because it recognizes that this work benefits the entire nation.
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White House proposes eliminating Head Start funding as part of sweeping budget cuts Trump officials’ defiance over Abrego Garcia’s deportation is ‘shocking,’ appeals court says Supreme Court keeps hold on Trump’s restrictions on birthright citizenship but sets May arguments Federal judge will hear arguments as groups try to block Trump’s executive order on elections Trump says he’s in ‘no rush’ to end tariffs as he holds talks with Italy’s MeloniI hope voters understand that Trump’s retaliatory funding freeze primarily strikes not Harvard’s main campus but researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The university has 162 Nobel Prize winners, and scientists there are working on cancer immunotherapy, brain tumors, organ transplants, diabetes and more. It was a Harvard researcher who discovered the molecule that is the basis for the GLP-1 weight-loss medications that have revolutionized obesity care.
Programs now facing funding cuts address pediatric cancer and treatment for veterans. The federal government already issued a “stop-work order” on Harvard research on Lou Gehrig’s disease. The upshot is that Trump’s lust for power and vengeance may one day be measured by more Americans dying of cancer, heart disease and other ailments.
All this illuminates an administration that is not only authoritarian but also reckless; this is vandalism of the American project. That is why this moment is a test of our ability to step up and protect our national greatness from our national leader.
Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist.
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