Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Katherine Stewart: It’s great to be here.
Stewart: Well, the president is targeting a particular institution with illegal and unconstitutional methods to serve a frankly destructive and nihilistic end. This attack on Harvard in particular, and universities more broadly, is really an attack on a source of American strength. The Trump administration doesn’t have a vision for how to improve American education. He’s really only promising to debilitate it. It’s attempting to coerce a cultural and scientific institution to conform to his ideological agenda. It’s a grotesque violation of the First Amendment. The administration is really demanding that Harvard let the MAGA power elite control its hiring of faculty, its curricula, its choice of students. This is exactly the kind of government manipulation of the pursuit of knowledge that autocrats love, and that is antithetical to democracy.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): Harvard has to show us their lists. They have foreign students—about 31 percent of their students are foreign based, almost 31 percent. We want to know where those students come. Are they troublemakers? What countries do they come [from]? And we’re not going to.... If somebody is coming from a certain country and they’re 100 percent fine, which I hope most of our [are] but many of them won’t be.... You’re going to see some very radical people. They’re taking people from areas of the world that are very radicalized. And we don’t want them making trouble in our country.
Stewart: It would be catastrophic. Look, first of all, a lot of these foreign students pay full fare. And if you get into Harvard and your family doesn’t have a lot of money, these foreign students will subsidize you, essentially. Some students of very limited means actually get a free ride at places like Harvard. In addition, many of these foreign students have exceptional talent, and they’re going to end up contributing to the American economy in some way or contributing to our cultural environment. We have to also think about the fact that the House GOP bill that Trump is pushing is going to slash funding that’s available for hundreds of thousands of students of limited means who frankly can’t afford college without of it. So the idea that somehow he’s going to just turn around and offer those spots to deserving American kids is absurd.
Sargent: Well, it strikes me that capitulation here really is not an option, although it might happen, because Harvard is one of the most important educational institutions in the country—the oldest university. And for them to essentially capitulate to this demagoguery about their foreign student body could send a terrible message to the world and to foreign students who are considering coming to the United States in the future, right? If you’re a foreign student abroad who’s thinking of coming here, what do you read into something like that? What do you read into it that the president of the U.S. is saying that you might be a terrorist? And what would be the set of consequences that would unfold if Harvard somehow knuckles under here?
Sargent: It’s really alarming. The whole world is watching this happen. The whole world is watching us slide toward fascism, basically. Let’s listen to some more audio of Trump. Here goes.
Sargent: This is really mob speak, Katherine. Here, Trump is basically saying that there’s no clear way Harvard can satisfy him, which I think is the whole point of the exercise. To the point you made just before, the autocrats’ whim must be a source of fear and uncertainty at all times. You’ve written on this. Can you talk about it?
Sargent: And it’s the whim—this feeling of being on thin ice all the time, never exactly sure what the autocrat’s going to do next—that’s the main event here, right? To create this climate of terror, really, of the autocrat and his ever-shifting sets of demands. Isn’t that the essence of autocracy really at its core?
The remarkable fact about all the law breaking, frankly, is how little the administration has done to cover its tracks. They really want you to know that they have corrupted the Department of Justice so that they can basically say, We can do it and we can get away with it. And they’re doing it because that’s what autocrats do. They want us to think the laws don’t apply anymore and all that matters is pleasing their leader.
Stewart: It’s really important. The courts are slow rolling this. I saw a statistic and I’m not sure it’s correct, but a huge percentage of the illegal moves that Trump is trying that are challenged in court are rolled back. Yes, there’s been capitulation, but there has been a lot of pushback because of what he is doing. Look, we—those of us who believe in democracy—have the law on our side. We have the Constitution on our side. So it’s really important to push back. His strategy is to, of course, break the law over and over again out in the open until the law appears to be broken. But the fact is we still have a Constitution. We still have some institutions that are standing up, and it’s really more important to stand up than ever before.
Stewart: No kings. We have a lot of people showing up now for “No Kings” rally. And a king is exactly what Trump wants to be in the run-up to the 2024 election. He posted a paraphrase of a quote traditionally attributed to Napoleon. He posted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Now, whether or not Napoleon said it, he certainly meant it. He came to power in a 1799 coup on the pretext of the French Republic faced an apocalyptic emergency. And that thin rhetoric of emergency is a thin cover for lawbreaking, but it’s been part of the MAGA coalition from the start.
Sargent: Every last bit of resistance is absolutely crucial here. I want to play one more audio of Trump. Listen to this.
Sargent: Note that Trump here claims to want to spend money on trade schools. Guess what? If Trump wants to spend lots more money on vocational education, he and the GOP Congress can pass something into law that appropriates this money. What strikes me about this—and we have a piece on this up at tnr.com, check it out folks—is that Trump only really gets interested in spending on trade schools if he can say he’s taking the money from Harvard to do so. Everything is zero-sum. Everything has to serve the MAGA Two Minute Hate of the moment. Can you talk about that?
Sargent: Just to close this out, I want to predict that the American people are going to see things the way you’re laying this out. There’s a school of punditry out there which holds that, Oh, well, if Trump attacks elite institutions, he’s automatically going to have the people on his side. And there are certain pundits who will argue that because meritocracy has been gamed by elites, public anger over the failures of meritocracy, which are real failures, will translate into support for Trump when he goes after elite institutions. I’m going to say I think it’s more complicated than that. People recognize what you’re saying, which is that the university system is an engine of American innovation and greatness; that universities are things to cherish for all their flaws; and that Trump’s attacks on them aren’t actually about doing anything to correct from meritocracy’s failures, that they really are dictatorial and megalomaniacal. Katherine, I think the big point here is basically that we just can’t let them gaslight us into thinking the law is no longer a thing.
Sargent: Katherine Stewart, really well said. Thanks so much for talking to us today. We really appreciate it.
Stewart: Thank you.
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