Trump's threats force institutions to choose: Cut a deal or fight back

Washington: As President Donald Trump flexes his power over universities, law firms, media companies and more, some of the country's most powerful institutions have faced a choice, to cut a deal with the White House or fight back.

In recent weeks, an increasing number are choosing to do battle with the president.

Harvard University refused this week to cave to what its president called "assertions of power, unmoored from the law." More than 500 law firms have thrown their support behind some of their embattled peers as Trump seeks retribution against lawyers who represented or helped his political foes. The country's oldest newswire fought Trump in court after it was banned from the Oval Office.

The new face of resistance is not like the one of Trump's first term, when officials who opposed his agenda from inside the government tried to establish guardrails to prevent some of the president's more radical ideas.

Now the fight is out in the open. The guardrails are gone, in large part because Trump demands loyalty from everyone around him. With almost no opposing voices inside the White House, the president's campaign against the institutions of government, society and law have been more intense and have played out faster than they did during his first term.

And while Trump has succeeded in wrenching enormous concessions through threats, lawsuits and coercion -- and he has shown no signs of stopping -- there are hints of a shift in strategy among some of his targets.

Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, said a buzz began building among the faculty as Trump turned his focus to the university in recent weeks.

"It was probably the main topic of conversation," Tribe said. "When will the university finally stand up? When will the endowment, which is supposed to be there partly for extreme emergencies, be part of what Harvard looks to in order to basically reinforce its spine?"

The initial response by some organizations to Trump's political assault was to try to appease the president. Several elite law firms decided to settle with the White House in order to maintain their ability to do work with the government. Columbia University relented in the face of the president's threat to cancel $400 million in federal support.

The "flood the zone" strategy inside the White House has left many Democrats and others opposed to Trump's policies resigned to the fact that they control few centers of power with which to fight back.

Harvard's decision to reject the Trump administration's demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum could embolden other universities across the country to push back. The erstwhile leader of the Democratic Party, former President Barack Obama, called on other institutions to "follow suit" after Harvard.

There were already some rumblings of resistance in recent weeks, with the mass "Hands Off" protests in cities across the country. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, have also drawn significant crowds on their "Fighting Oligarchy" tour.

"Those rallies have built momentum by just showing that there are lots of people who don't like what he is doing," said Nikolas Bowie, a Harvard law professor who has urged the university's administration to resist the demands. "Even though Trump is kind of picking people and individuals and institutions off one by one, for everyone to just see, 'Oh, we all think what's happening is wrong,' is important."

Leah Greenberg, a founder of the progressive group Indivisible, which helped organize the Hands Off rallies, said momentum had been building for months as outrage grew, from activists in the streets to the halls of elite institutions.

Harvard's stance is "crucial and important," Greenberg said. "I say that as someone who doesn't spend a ton of time praising Harvard," she added. "There was a sense that American society is folding to Trump's will. Saying, 'Oh, hell no, we aren't,' it's helpful for a lot of people."

At Harvard, hundreds, including Bowie, rallied to call on the school to stand up to the Trump administration's demands, while hundreds of faculty members signed a letter urging Harvard to condemn Trump's attempt to remake higher education.

At Yale University, nearly 1,000 faculty members signed a letter calling on their leaders to resist Trump's demands. And the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spoke out against the Trump administration's treatment of its international students.

The Trump administration has argued that its goal in going after elite universities is to crack down on antisemitism on college campuses. But its demands are much broader, including audits of staff members to prevent Harvard from considering racial diversity in hiring decisions and audits of the student body's ideological views.

The administration also demanded that the university reduce the "power" on campus held by certain students, faculty members and administrators.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday that Harvard "has not taken the president or the administration's demands seriously."

"Why are the American taxpayers subsidizing a university that has billions of dollars in the bank already?" she asked. "And we certainly should not be funding a place where such grave antisemitism exists."

Refusing the demands came with a cost. Within hours of Harvard's decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract.

And then on Tuesday, Trump threatened Harvard's tax-exempt status, even though federal law prohibits the president from "directly or indirectly" telling the IRS to conduct specific tax investigations.

Much of federal funding for universities is for student aid and research. Harvard revamped its website to emphasize the importance of its research, highlighting its work aiding stroke survivors, treating sickle cell disease and combating chronic absenteeism in schools.

Tribe said he had heard colleagues worry about how the funding cuts could affect their research, but not as much as they were concerned about the larger principle at stake.

"I know people at the medical school and elsewhere who are cheering what Harvard did," Tribe said, "although they are at the same time grieving for the likelihood that their clinics will end up being closed and that the lifesaving research they're doing will either be discontinued or put on indefinite hold."