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Columbia's Dangerous Agreement With the Trump Administration
Columbia's Dangerous Agreement With the Trump Administration

Atlantic

time5 days ago

  • Politics
  • Atlantic

Columbia's Dangerous Agreement With the Trump Administration

Exhausted and demoralized, Columbia University agreed last night to pay the Trump administration $221 million in exchange for peace. By early next week, it will deposit the first of three installments into the U.S. Treasury, as part of a settlement that ends the government's investigations into the school's failure to protect Jewish students from discrimination. By paying tribute to the administration—and making other concessions aimed at shifting its campus culture ideologically—Columbia hopes to ensure that research grants will begin to flow again, and that the threat of deep cuts will be lifted. In the context of the administration's assault on American higher education, Columbia will feel as if it has dodged the worst. A large swath of the university community, including trustees who yearned for reform of their broken institution, may even be quietly grateful: When past presidents attempted to take even minor steps to address the problem of campus anti-Semitism, they faced resistance from faculty and obstreperous administrators. Ongoing federal monitoring of Columbia's civil-rights compliance, arguably the most significant component of the deal, will almost certainly compel the university to act more decisively in response to claims of anti-Jewish bias. Franklin Foer: Columbia University's anti-Semitism problem Columbia's decision to settle is understandable, but it's also evidence of how badly the Trump era has numbed the conscience of the American elite. To protect its funding, Columbia sacrificed its freedom. The settlement is contingent on Columbia following through on a series of promises that it made in March, when the Trump administration revoked $400 million in grants. The university agreed to install a vice provost to review academic programs focused on the Middle East to ensure they are 'balanced.' It also pledged to hire new faculty for the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. As it happens, I agree: Many of Columbia's programs espouse an unabashedly partisan view of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and more faculty at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies would be a welcome development. The fields that will receive scrutiny have professors with documented records of bigotry. Columbia has long nurtured a coterie of activist academics who regard Israel's very existence as a moral offense. Some have been accused of belittling students who challenged their views—and their example helped shape the culture of the institution. In time, students mimicked their teachers, ostracizing classmates who identified as Zionists or who simply happened to be born in Israel. After October 7, 2023, life on campus became unbearable for a meaningful number of Jewish students. But in the government's ideological intervention into campus culture, a precedent has been set: What Secretary of Education Linda McMahon calls 'a roadmap for elite universities' is a threat to the free exchange of ideas on campuses across the country, and abuse of that map is painfully easy to contemplate. In part, many people at Columbia have shrugged at the settlement's troubling provisions regulating the ideological composition of academic departments because the university already announced those steps in the spring. But it's chilling to see them enshrined in a court document—signed by the university's acting president, Claire Shipman, along with Attorney General Pam Bondi and two other Cabinet secretaries. The university's deal with the Trump administration 'was carefully crafted to protect the values that define us,' Shipman said in a statement. The settlement contains a line meant to allay critics who worry about the loss of academic freedom: 'No provision of this Agreement, individually or taken together, shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring, university admissions decisions, or the content of academic speech.' If the government doesn't like whom Columbia hires, it can raise its concerns with a mutually agreed-upon 'monitor' named Bart Schwartz, a former prosecutor who worked under Rudy Giuliani during his tenure as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who will ostensibly render a neutral verdict. Schwartz's ruling, however, won't be binding. And if the government remains dissatisfied with Columbia's conduct, it reserves the right to open a new investigation. But Shipman's protestations of independence ring hollow. The university has already agreed, under duress, to alter the ideological contours of its faculty. And even if I happen to support those particular changes, I can't ignore the principle they establish. The tactics now being used to achieve outcomes I favor can just as easily be turned toward results I find abhorrent. That's the nature of the American culture war. One side unearths a novel tactic; the other side applies it as retribution. The Trump administration is likely to take the Columbia template and press it more aggressively upon other schools. It will transpose this victory into other contexts, using it to pursue broader purges of its perceived enemies. There's no need to speculate about hidden motives: Both Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance have been explicit about their desire to diminish the power and prestige of the American university, to strip it of its ability to inculcate ideas they find abhorrent. They are trying to tame a profession they regard as a cultural adversary. 'This is a monumental victory for conservatives who wanted to do things on these elite campuses for a long time because we had such far-left-leaning professors,' McMahon told Fox Business. Universities are desperately in need of reform. The paucity of intellectual pluralism in the academy undermines the integrity of the pursuit of knowledge. Failure of university trustees and presidents to make these changes on their own terms has invited government intervention. But the government has a new toehold in faculty rooms, not just at Columbia, but at every private university in the country.

Anti-Semitism Gets the DEI Treatment
Anti-Semitism Gets the DEI Treatment

Atlantic

time17-07-2025

  • Politics
  • Atlantic

Anti-Semitism Gets the DEI Treatment

To do the same thing over and over and expect a different result is one definition of insanity. According to Robert Shibley, a special counsel of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), it's also Columbia University's approach to addressing anti-Semitism on campus. On Tuesday, Claire Shipman, Columbia's acting president, announced in an email to the community that the university would take several steps to quell anti-Semitism on campus. Columbia will appoint Title VI and Title VII coordinators to review allegations of discrimination. It will launch new programming around anti-Jewish discrimination, send out regular messages affirming its zero-tolerance policy on hate, and use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of anti-Semitism for certain disciplinary proceedings. In her message, Shipman promised that the university would continue making reforms until it had stamped out anti-Semitism. 'In a recent discussion, a faculty member and I agreed that anti-Semitism at this institution has existed, perhaps less overtly, for a long while, and the work of dismantling it, especially through education and understanding, will take time,' she wrote. The message was notable for how closely it resembled the communications that university presidents have previously sent out about other forms of discrimination. Replace the references to 'anti-Semitism' with 'racism,' and Shipman's message could practically have been lifted from the statements of summer 2020. As university presidents contort themselves to respond to campus anti-Semitism, they seem to be replicating the DEI push of the past decade, bureaucracy and all. It's not just Columbia. Harvard University is also implementing new trainings, evaluating its administrative complaint structure, and adopting a more expansive definition of anti-Semitism. Franklin Foer: Columbia University's anti-Semitism problem Setting aside the question of insanity, Columbia's approach is risky: University leaders may be implementing reforms that aren't proven to work, or are proven not to work. Giving anti-Semitism the DEI treatment is also ironic: Universities are instituting these policies under pressure from the Trump administration, which is simultaneously engaged in an effort to root out DEI from governing and educational institutions across the country. Anti-Semitism is a real issue at Columbia. As my colleague Franklin Foer documented, university administrators slow-walked responses to anti-Jewish discrimination; such apathy directed at any other protected group would have led to scandal. In the days after Hamas's brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Columbia's student newspaper interviewed dozens of Jewish students about life on campus. Thirteen students said they had suffered attacks or harassment. Under President Donald Trump, campus anti-Semitism has also been a pretext to wage war on universities. In March, the Trump administration used Columbia's perceived deficiencies in combating anti-Semitism as an excuse to yank $400 million in research funding. It demanded far-reaching concessions as a precondition for getting the money back. Columbia soon acquiesced to the reforms, with only minor changes. But the administration still didn't restore the funding. The two parties have been locked in protracted negotiations ever since, though they are reportedly nearing a deal. Shipman's Tuesday announcement was one attempt among many to satisfy the administration. Assaf Zeevi, an Israeli professor at Columbia's business school, told me he was encouraged by the latest reforms. He cautioned, however, that these efforts would matter only if the university demonstrates that it will discipline students who harass their Jewish peers or violate protest policies. Otherwise, the recently announced measures are no more than lip service. (Columbia did not immediately provide comment.) Universities have built up their antidiscrimination apparatuses for decades now. Yet they seemed utterly ill-equipped to address anti-Semitism on their campuses. 'It suggests that whatever tactic universities were using and the huge growth in the bureaucracy dedicated to this hasn't been effective,' Shibley told me. 'I don't think there's any reason to assume that adding some coordinators or throwing more people at the problem is going to solve it.' Rose Horowitch: The era of DEI for conservatives has begun Ineffectiveness is one concern. Here's another: As the university sets up a new anti-Semitism bureaucracy, it runs the risk of repeating the overreach of the DEI movement. What began as a well-intentioned effort to address real issues of discrimination resulted in a proliferation of administrators who, in certain instances, evolved into a sort of speech police. David Bernstein, the founder of the North American Values Institute, has criticized DEI initiatives for flattening nuanced issues. 'I don't like the idea of training anybody in ideas,' he told me. 'Just as I'm critical of DEI programs for providing simplistic answers about power and privilege to complex issues, I'm worried that campus anti-Semitism training will use the same playbook.' The appointment of new Title VI coordinators and the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism could also tend in that direction. FIRE has opposed universities adopting the IHRA definition, arguing that it could be used to punish speech that merely, if harshly, criticizes Israel's government. Universities' existing policies are sufficient to punish anti-Semitic speech, Shibley said. The problem is that schools haven't enforced them. And then there's the fact that the Trump administration, even as it has focused on addressing anti-Semitism, has pushed universities to get rid of efforts that have the faintest whiff of DEI. The notion that some version of the DEI bureaucracy is appropriate for anti-Semitism and only anti-Semitism is nonsensical. 'Ultimately, the most important thing a university can do to deal with this anti-Semitism problem is to embrace the free expression of ideas and to make sure that they have faculty who embrace a genuine liberal education," Bernstein told me. The experiments in addressing anti-Semitism are likely to continue all summer and into the next academic year. 'Hopefully, some will work,' Shibley told me. 'I'm concerned, though, that many of them are going to cause government overreach and end up causing more problems than they solve.'

Americans Don't Do This
Americans Don't Do This

Yahoo

time29-04-2025

  • Politics
  • Yahoo

Americans Don't Do This

Just when you think you'll never laugh again, Columbia University students pick up a new cause: free speech. Who among us wants to step on the punch line by asking questions? For example, do these newfound champions of the First Amendment really mean it, and will their next move be to champion a Zionist whose speech has been policed (probably by them) and demand that his right to free expression be upheld? Magic 8 Ball says: Don't count on it. Two kinds of speech are routinely censored on college campuses: anything that could come under the broad taxonomic category of 'hate,' and certain statements of fact that might cause pain to community members. The vague goal is a student life in which feelings of 'belonging' and 'inclusion' are extremely important, and actively fostered. Students have come to understand the college campus as a place where never is heard a discouraging word. Observers question whether these institutions are thereby inculcating fragility in their students instead of resilience. Yes and no. Protesters at Columbia certainly seem to be swayed by the notion that speech can be a form of violence. Yet they are anything but fragile. Casting an event which included the murder of children as an act of 'armed resistance' requires cool calculation. (What, exactly, was Hamas resisting in those children? ) [Franklin Foer: Columbia University's antisemitism problem] I have a pretty high tolerance for student protests, even as the outrageous cost of college has turned many of them into exercises in bourgeois decadence. But the Columbia protests have been different from past campus uprisings in several stark ways. They have exposed the whole 'belonging' and 'inclusion' system of handling offensive speech as fraudulent. The amount of intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students over the past year and a half should have been more than enough to alert that particular cavalry, but Jewish students turn out to belong to the only religious minority unprotected by it. (A regular talking point to emerge from last year's encampment was that no Jewish students at the university had reason to feel harassed or intimidated by the protests, an assertion that was at best ignorant and at worst sinister.) And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed. Down to the marrow of my bones, I am an American. And we don't do this. Everything that has failed in American universities has failed because of the opposition to freedom of expression. It's a sorrowful subject for me because I am an almost literal child of UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, which kicked off when I was 3 years old, a faculty kid among thousands of them. That movement followed an earlier struggle for free expression: the fight against an anti-Communist loyalty oath that faculty and staff were required to sign beginning in 1949. As a girl, I knew adults who had suffered the consequences of refusing to do so. One of them was the medievalist Charles Muscatine, my father's colleague in the English Department, whose previous crimes against the state included storming the beaches of Normandy. Years later, he explained why he didn't sign: 'It was a violation of academic freedom, which is the idea that in a free society, scholars and teachers are allowed to express and believe anything that they feel to be true,' he said. 'As a young assistant professor, I had been insisting to the kids that you stick to your guns and you tell it the way you see it and you think for yourself and you express things for yourself, and I felt that I couldn't really justify teaching students if I weren't behaving the same way. So I simply couldn't sign the oath.' Muscatine knew he could lose his job because of it, but he was a principled man and willingly left the university after being fired. A dramatic legal battle took place, in which the cause of academic freedom was pitted against Red Scare thuggery, and in 1952, the First Amendment won big. Many fired faculty, including Muscatine, returned to the university. [Caitlin Flanagan: America's fire sale–get some free speech while you can] More than a decade later, however, a second battle at Berkeley—concerning not compelled speech but freedom of expression itself—would change the nature of campus life forever. In the fall of 1964, a group of students who had gone to Mississippi to take part in Freedom Summer returned to campus, eager to tell their California peers what was happening in the South. The students set up tables near Sproul Plaza—then, as now, a locus of student life. They were told to disband; political speech was not allowed. The university's intention was apparently to squash anything that might encourage racial tension, and obviously it was asserting a power it did not possess. As the students of the Free Speech Movement pointed out, the university was a public institution, and they did not forfeit their constitutional rights when they stepped onto campus. The university's administration had no honest way to resist this challenge, and the students won. I grew up the daughter of a man who, like Muscatine, had also seen combat in the Second World War, who stood firmly on the side of the Free Speech Movement, and whose belief in a university's commitment to academic freedom was absolute. I knew that the search for truth required that speech must always, always be protected, and I knew that tenure was not a sweet deal that promised a lifetime's employment, but a guarantee that no matter what political pressure was brought to bear on a scholar and his work, he would not lose his job because of it. If students and faculty cannot speak, write, and think freely, a university is an imitation of what it ought to be. One night last spring, dozens of protesters at Columbia participated in the time-honored tradition of occupying Hamilton Hall. (The question of how many of these people were actually students at Columbia and its affiliated institutions is a charged one.) Keen students of the ways of this particular form of 'resistance,' they took hostages of their own: three maintenance workers who were inside the building when the protesters entered. Two of the three men—Mario Torres and Lester Wilson—spoke on the record with The New York Times in a May 8, 2024, article. Torres was at work on the building's third floor when he heard a commotion below. He found five or six protesters blocking a staircase with chairs. Proving himself to be the single best employee of Columbia University since Lionel Trilling clapped his erasers a final time and went home for good, Torres said, 'What the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?' Torres said he was told that he didn't make enough money to get involved and was offered 'a fistful of cash' to look the other way. To that Torres replied, 'I don't want your money, dude. Just get out of the building.' It was a face-off between the values of the Ivy League and those of the working class, and I know exactly where I stand on that particular matchup. In his interview with the Times, Torres, who says he was injured during the incident and bootlessly called public-safety officers for help, spoke for many of us when he said of Columbia, 'I cannot believe they let this happen.' Wilson, another maintenance worker, went down to the ground floor only to find that the main doors had been shut tight with zip ties. 'So, I begged them,' Wilson said. Eventually someone cut the ties and allowed him to leave (the other two men were allowed to leave soon after that). When a maintenance worker has to beg for his freedom, his fate in the hands of people whose messes he literally has to clean up, you have to wonder if these people are on the right side of anything at all. In their complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently opened an investigation into their claims, Torres and Wilson report something we have not heard before: that long before the spring of 2024, they had been repeatedly ordered to erase swastikas off Columbia University chalkboards. I am not inclined to disbelieve the testimony of these two hardworking men. To believe in free speech means that you support the cause even when the speech in question is repugnant to you. In a perverse way, you almost run to those cases; it's how you keep clean accounts with yourself. For this reason, I am on Mahmoud Khalil's side. [Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil's detention is a trial run] To the degree that any layperson can understand the range of legal issues undergirding his case—which include a law from the anti-Communist 1950s and the apparently undecided issue of the extent to which a noncitizen has First Amendment rights—what is clear is that the government's desire to deport Khalil is largely related to the nature of his political speech. A two-page memo about Khalil by Secretary of State Marco Rubio released earlier this month does not allege any criminal activity. Yet Khalil's position that a genocide is occurring in Gaza is exactly the kind of potentially offensive but protected speech America was designed to tolerate. Our country has had a legally enforceable right to free speech since the 18th century, and we did not become great in spite of it. We are the inheritors of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, not Joseph McCarthy or Leon Trotsky. If America is folding up its tent, as it perhaps seems to be doing, hold your head high. Once you were part of the greatest idea in the history of the world. Article originally published at The Atlantic

Americans Don't Do This
Americans Don't Do This

Atlantic

time29-04-2025

  • Politics
  • Atlantic

Americans Don't Do This

Just when you think you'll never laugh again, Columbia University students pick up a new cause: free speech. Who among us wants to step on the punch line by asking questions? For example, do these newfound champions of the First Amendment really mean it, and will their next move be to champion a Zionist whose speech has been policed (probably by them) and demand that his right to free expression be upheld? Magic 8 Ball says: Don't count on it. Two kinds of speech are routinely censored on college campuses: anything that could come under the broad taxonomic category of 'hate,' and certain statements of fact that might cause pain to community members. The vague goal is a student life in which feelings of 'belonging' and 'inclusion' are extremely important, and actively fostered. Students have come to understand the college campus as a place where never is heard a discouraging word. Observers question whether these institutions are thereby inculcating fragility in their students instead of resilience. Yes and no. Protesters at Columbia certainly seem to be swayed by the notion that speech can be a form of violence. Yet they are anything but fragile. Casting an event which included the murder of children as an act of 'armed resistance' requires cool calculation. (What, exactly, was Hamas resisting in those children? ) Franklin Foer: Columbia University's antisemitism problem I have a pretty high tolerance for student protests, even as the outrageous cost of college has turned many of them into exercises in bourgeois decadence. But the Columbia protests have been different from past campus uprisings in several stark ways. They have exposed the whole 'belonging' and 'inclusion' system of handling offensive speech as fraudulent. The amount of intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students over the past year and a half should have been more than enough to alert that particular cavalry, but Jewish students turn out to belong to the only religious minority unprotected by it. (A regular talking point to emerge from last year's encampment was that no Jewish students at the university had reason to feel harassed or intimidated by the protests, an assertion that was at best ignorant and at worst sinister.) And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed. Down to the marrow of my bones, I am an American. And we don't do this. Everything that has failed in American universities has failed because of the opposition to freedom of expression. It's a sorrowful subject for me because I am an almost literal child of UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, which kicked off when I was 3 years old, a faculty kid among thousands of them. That movement followed an earlier struggle for free expression: the fight against an anti-Communist loyalty oath that faculty and staff were required to sign beginning in 1949. As a girl, I knew adults who had suffered the consequences of refusing to do so. One of them was the medievalist Charles Muscatine, my father's colleague in the English Department, whose previous crimes against the state included storming the beaches of Normandy. Years later, he explained why he didn't sign: 'It was a violation of academic freedom, which is the idea that in a free society, scholars and teachers are allowed to express and believe anything that they feel to be true,' he said. 'As a young assistant professor, I had been insisting to the kids that you stick to your guns and you tell it the way you see it and you think for yourself and you express things for yourself, and I felt that I couldn't really justify teaching students if I weren't behaving the same way. So I simply couldn't sign the oath.' Muscatine knew he could lose his job because of it, but he was a principled man and willingly left the university after being fired. A dramatic legal battle took place, in which the cause of academic freedom was pitted against Red Scare thuggery, and in 1952, the First Amendment won big. Many fired faculty, including Muscatine, returned to the university. Caitlin Flanagan: America's fire sale–get some free speech while you can More than a decade later, however, a second battle at Berkeley—concerning not compelled speech but freedom of expression itself—would change the nature of campus life forever. In the fall of 1964, a group of students who had gone to Mississippi to take part in Freedom Summer returned to campus, eager to tell their California peers what was happening in the South. The students set up tables near Sproul Plaza—then, as now, a locus of student life. They were told to disband; political speech was not allowed. The university's intention was apparently to squash anything that might encourage racial tension, and obviously it was asserting a power it did not possess. As the students of the Free Speech Movement pointed out, the university was a public institution, and they did not forfeit their constitutional rights when they stepped onto campus. The university's administration had no honest way to resist this challenge, and the students won. I grew up the daughter of a man who, like Muscatine, had also seen combat in the Second World War, who stood firmly on the side of the Free Speech Movement, and whose belief in a university's commitment to academic freedom was absolute. I knew that the search for truth required that speech must always, always be protected, and I knew that tenure was not a sweet deal that promised a lifetime's employment, but a guarantee that no matter what political pressure was brought to bear on a scholar and his work, he would not lose his job because of it. If students and faculty cannot speak, write, and think freely, a university is an imitation of what it ought to be. One night last spring, dozens of protesters at Columbia participated in the time-honored tradition of occupying Hamilton Hall. (The question of how many of these people were actually students at Columbia and its affiliated institutions is a charged one.) Keen students of the ways of this particular form of 'resistance,' they took hostages of their own: three maintenance workers who were inside the building when the protesters entered. Two of the three men—Mario Torres and Lester Wilson—spoke on the record with The New York Times in a May 8, 2024, article. Torres was at work on the building's third floor when he heard a commotion below. He found five or six protesters blocking a staircase with chairs. Proving himself to be the single best employee of Columbia University since Lionel Trilling clapped his erasers a final time and went home for good, Torres said, 'What the hell is going on? Put it back. What are you doing?' Torres said he was told that he didn't make enough money to get involved and was offered 'a fistful of cash' to look the other way. To that Torres replied, 'I don't want your money, dude. Just get out of the building.' It was a face-off between the values of the Ivy League and those of the working class, and I know exactly where I stand on that particular matchup. In his interview with the Times, Torres, who says he was injured during the incident and bootlessly called public-safety officers for help, spoke for many of us when he said of Columbia, 'I cannot believe they let this happen.' Wilson, another maintenance worker, went down to the ground floor only to find that the main doors had been shut tight with zip ties. 'So, I begged them,' Wilson said. Eventually someone cut the ties and allowed him to leave (the other two men were allowed to leave soon after that). When a maintenance worker has to beg for his freedom, his fate in the hands of people whose messes he literally has to clean up, you have to wonder if these people are on the right side of anything at all. In their complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently opened an investigation into their claims, Torres and Wilson report something we have not heard before: that long before the spring of 2024, they had been repeatedly ordered to erase swastikas off Columbia University chalkboards. I am not inclined to disbelieve the testimony of these two hardworking men. To believe in free speech means that you support the cause even when the speech in question is repugnant to you. In a perverse way, you almost run to those cases; it's how you keep clean accounts with yourself. For this reason, I am on Mahmoud Khalil's side. Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil's detention is a trial run To the degree that any layperson can understand the range of legal issues undergirding his case—which include a law from the anti-Communist 1950s and the apparently undecided issue of the extent to which a noncitizen has First Amendment rights—what is clear is that the government's desire to deport Khalil is largely related to the nature of his political speech. A two-page memo about Khalil by Secretary of State Marco Rubio released earlier this month does not allege any criminal activity. Yet Khalil's position that a genocide is occurring in Gaza is exactly the kind of potentially offensive but protected speech America was designed to tolerate. Our country has had a legally enforceable right to free speech since the 18th century, and we did not become great in spite of it. We are the inheritors of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, not Joseph McCarthy or Leon Trotsky. If America is folding up its tent, as it perhaps seems to be doing, hold your head high. Once you were part of the greatest idea in the history of the world.

What happened to 'The Resistance'?
What happened to 'The Resistance'?

CBC

time07-03-2025

  • Politics
  • CBC

What happened to 'The Resistance'?

Donald Trump's first four years in office were met with protest and obstruction — a popular movement which came to be known as 'The Resistance.' It featured a coalition that included members of the media, establishment Republicans, figures on the left, celebrities and business leaders. Forty days into his second term, many are wondering: what happened to 'The Resistance.' Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and joins us to discuss 'Resistance Fatigue,' the Trump administration's plan to overwhelm the attention of the public, and whether people are, today, too overburdened to care. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: Subscribe to Front Burner on your favourite podcast app. Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on YouTube

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