Donald Trump and maga Republicans use the First Amendment Free Speech as a weapon to punish others who also have this freedom

"The postman always rings twice❓"- The weaponization of Free Speech haunts Donald Trump's legacy because he lies about everything.

Where the Battle Over Free Speech Is Leading Us

Echo essay published in The New Yorker magazine.
Doxing, deplatforming, defunding, persecuting, firing, and sometimes killing—all are part of an escalating war over words. What happens next? By Louis Menand

The United States is in a speech war. 😯😧😥

Normally, human beings fight over money or land or love, but that is not what is happening today. Today, people are fighting over words. People’s lives are being damaged and sometimes destroyed not for something they did but for something they said. We live in a society of doxing, trolling, cancelling, sanctioning, slandering, deplatforming, defunding, persecuting, prosecuting, firing, and sometimes killing over the expression of an opinion. A big part of the craziness is that some of the people going to war over words are casting themselves as champions of free speech. It’s the people they are trying to silence, they claim, who are the enemies.

The lord of misrule here is the person you would expect. On January 20th, his first day back in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” It accused the Biden Administration of chilling speech it disagreed with and announced that  "It is the policy of the United States to:
(a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;
(b) ensure that no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen;
(c) ensure that no taxpayer resources are used to engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen;
(d) identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.

Donald Trump and his Administration then proceeded to ban the Associated Press from certain press events because it did not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, sanction law firms that represented clients whose political views the Administration regards as unfriendly, arrest and seek to deport immigrants legally in the United States for opinions they expressed in speech or in print, defund universities for alleged antisemitic speech and leftist bias, sue the Wall Street Journal for libel, extort sixteen million dollars from the corporate owner of CBS because of the way a “60 Minutes” interview was edited, set about dismantling the Voice of America for being “anti-Trump” and “radical,” coerce businesses and private colleges and universities to purge the word “diversity” from their websites, and order the National Endowment for the Arts to reject grant applications for projects that “promote gender ideology.”

After threats from the head of the Federal Communications Commission, a late-night television personality had his show suspended because of some (rather confusing) thing he said about Trump’s political movement. Other media outlets were advised to get in line. Trump has proposed that licenses be withdrawn from companies that air content critical of him. The Administration has opened Justice Department investigations into and yanked security details from people whose political views it dislikes. It has also warned that it may revoke the visas of and deport any foreign nationals who joke about the death of Charlie Kirk. West Point cancelled an award ceremony for Tom Hanks, after having already winnowed its library of potentially offensive books.

Donald Trump is suing the Times, which he calls “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country,” for libel. (In the initial iteration of the case, the judge threw out the eighty-five-page-long court filing as “decidedly improper and impermissible.”) A top complaint in his lawsuit is that the paper ran its “deranged endorsement” of Kamala Harris on the front page. Apparently, this is tortious behavior. At press conferences, Trump makes noises about investigating reporters whose questions he doesn’t like. (Who’s the snowflake now?)

This is not social shunning. This is not speaking from the bully pulpit. Apart from the libel suits, which Trumpziism can add teeth to by threatening regulatory sanctions or by slow-walking mergers and other business deals that require government approval, this is the persecution of people and organizations based on point of view. Much of this is exactly what the Supreme Court has said the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from doing. The Administration is not even pretending to follow the law, let alone its own proclamations about free speech. It’s getting results, so why should it❓

Compared with all this, a bunch of college students shouting down the conservative political scientist Charles Murray—an incident at Middlebury College now immortalized through endless retelling—is small potatoes. Somehow, though, in the war of words, college students tend to get the blame. “Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking on a college campus,” the president of Barnard College, Laura Ann Rosenbury, wrote in a recent Times opinion piece. “This is a grim moment for higher education, for our country and for freedom of speech. Violence is never a legitimate means of disagreeing with a speaker on a college campus.”

What is she talking about? Neither Mr. Kirk nor his alleged shooter was a student. The incident says nothing about tolerance for speakers on college campuses, and it is irresponsible for a college president to suggest that it does. Rosenbury notes disapprovingly that there was a petition to rescind Kirk’s invitation. A petition is classic First Amendment-protected expression. Surely the president of Barnard is not suggesting that students are inciting violence when they sign a petition. She is effectively throwing a bone to the White House, which can claim that Mr. Kirk was the victim of academic cancel culture.

As many people have rightly remarked, the response to Mr. Kirk’s murder is emblematic of the current hypocrisy. Mr. Kirk is being celebrated as a champion of free speech who was willing to debate anyone anywhere and who was killed by someone who could not tolerate his views. At the same time, Mr. Kirk’s admirers are campaigning to get people who make negative comments about those views—which are, after all, highly controversial and designedly so—fired from their jobs. And many have been. The Attorney General initially suggested that Mr. Kirk’s detractors could be prosecuted for hate speech (which happens to be constitutionally protected). Evidently, saying racist things is not hate speech, but calling someone out for saying racist things is.

All this suggests that Christopher L. Eisgruber’s new book, “Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right” (Basic), is not ideally timed. Eisgruber is the president of Princeton University. It is a truth universally acknowledged that university presidents should not write books about their own schools, to which they have a fiduciary duty. The terms of their tenure require that they not do or say anything that might damage the school’s reputation or fund-raising capacity. It is therefore impossible for them to comment disinterestedly or openly on topics bearing on their own institutions.

Within the self-censoring limits of the genre, Eisgruber has sensible things to say, maybe too sensible. His main practical point is that, as he puts it, “speech must be both uncensored and regulated.” This seems to mean that we should be in favor of what are called “time, place, and manner” restrictions on campus speech—no chanting in the library, no bullhorns in the quad, and so on. Fair enough. There are all kinds of things you cannot lawfully do in public spaces. The problems arise when you try to draw the line of permissibility, and Eisgruber doesn’t help us much here. His own reactions to speech controversies at Princeton, as he relates them, seem to have been largely seat-of-the-pants. And, so far, reasonably successful.

Eisgruber also believes that speech should conform to norms of civility. “It is possible to believe in free speech and insist that people ought to address one another civilly and politely,” he writes. Again, nice to say. But the right to free speech is intended to protect what the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., called “opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

In the free-speech marketplace, “fuck you” is legal tender. But private universities can constrain speech in ways public universities cannot, and, if Princeton wants to impose civility constraints on its students, it may. No one is being forced to go there.

The same is true of the workplace. There is what we might call a free-speech norm in the United States, such that we are sensitive to the suggestion that someone is being penalized—not getting a promotion, say—for things they have said or beliefs they espouse.

Most Americans would not want to give up this norm. But it is unenforceable. You have a right to say what you like, but you do not have a right to host a late-night talk show. ❓A lot of campus speech regulation is an effort not to violate this norm, but this is not because students need a “safe space.” It’s because maintaining an ethos of free speech is central to the educational mission. You can’t run Princeton like Disney.

In general, Eisgruber thinks that “free speech is more robust on college campuses than in other sectors of our polarized society” and that “when it comes to getting free speech right, colleges and America’s young people deserve higher marks than they get.” A lot of what look like acts of censorship from the outside, he argues, are actually attempts to negotiate a level playing field.

There may be some whistling past the graveyard here. Many surveys show that college students are fearful of saying something that will alienate them from their peers or invite the disapproval of their instructors. And faculty worry that teaching certain subject matter and texts might offend students and, if students complain, lead to administrative sanctions. The faculty experience has been that administrations often side with the complainers. If this is so, it is because, until recently, the complainers have had agencies on their side that enforce federal anti-discrimination law (Title VI of the 1964, Civil Rights Act, Title IX, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, plus, for public schools, the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment). Universities did not want to sanction the professors, but they did want the complaints to go away.

You could say, as Eisgruber does, that campus speech anxieties reflect the polarization in our society as a whole, but the freedom to say what you think is not the essence of most jobs, and it is the essence of liberal education. Without the ability to speak freely, teachers are not educating and students are not learning.

Eisgruber discusses some of the well-known campus disputes, many of them venerable chestnuts in the free-speech wars, like the picketing of Charles Murray, which happened eight years ago, and the blowup over Halloween costumes at Yale, which happened when Barack Obama was President and we were still living on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. All the same, it is hard to fight off the sense that Eisgruber is mainly interested in defending Princeton. He is doing, much less recklessly, what Barnard’s president was doing with her opinion piece: he is preëmptively defending his institution against government attack.

That’s fine. That’s his job. But you would never know, reading his book, that there was a pro-Palestinian encampment on the Princeton campus in the spring of 2024. You would never know that there were sit-ins and that students were arrested. There is virtually no mention of Trump in the book, apart from a vague reference to “multiple Trump administration executive orders that targeted higher education” and a remark that Trump has not done a lot for civility norms. This is despite the fact, also not mentioned, that last April the Administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to Princeton.

Eisgruber spoke out quite assertively at the time in defense of academic freedom, but he has said little publicly since. That Harvard is in court and subject to multiple phony “investigations” as the government tries to bully it into submission goes unmentioned in his book, too. Yet he does see fit to critique Harvard’s institutional-voice policy, which limits public pronouncements by the university to issues affecting higher education, that being the one subject academics are competent to opine on. He prefers an approach unconstrained by such “mechanical formulae.” Again, fine as long as it works.

You also would not know from the book that in 2020, hundreds of Princeton graduate students, staff, and faculty—including professors from thirty-four of Princeton’s thirty-six departments—sent the university administration a four-thousand-word petition demanding that it address systemic racism by, among many other things, rewarding departments that have hired underrepresented minority professors and denying new appointments to departments that have not, and granting extra pay and sabbatical time to professors who are members of underrepresented minority groups.

The petitioners further demanded that the administration constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

This could be read, and by many people was read, as a chilling assault on the principle of academic freedom, which courts have interpreted as a component of the First Amendment protection of free speech.

Eisgruber’s elision of this episode—there is an oblique reference to “widespread student and faculty interest in seeing the university do more to address the effects of racism on the university community and America”—is understandable. The petition was widely circulated in the academic world, and it was not received with enthusiasm. The idea of a faculty committee empowered to vet scholarly publications for racial bias has, ineluctably, a Star Chamber vibe.

The omission is particularly unfortunate because it bears directly on the main point Eisgruber wants to make, which is that free speech and equality are not rival ideals but, in fact, belong together. His key text is the Supreme Court’s opinion in the 1964, case New York Times v. Sullivan. That is where the Court raised the bar in libel suits by public officials, ruling that, absent “actual malice,” meaning willful or reckless disregard for the truth, you can publish anything you want about someone the Court recognizes as public—a category that has expanded over the years.

Eisgruber, who is a scholar of constitutional law, believes that Sullivan is the cornerstone of American free-speech law. And it is significant, he argues, that it was a civil-rights case. It involved an advertisement in the Times soliciting donations to Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s defense fund that contained some factual inaccuracies. Those were the basis for the lawsuit, which was filed by an Alabama official. In ruling for the Times, the Court was in solidarity with the civil-rights movement. of course, the authors of the 2020 Princeton petition were also trying to strike a blow for racial equality. For them, a highly permissive interpretation of free-speech law gives cover to racists, and a permissive interpretation of the principle of academic freedom allows for the perpetuation of exclusionary scholarship.

Fara Dabhoiwala teaches in the history department at Princeton, but he was not a signatory to the petition. Which is surprising, since his new book, “What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea” (Belknap), is entirely in its spirit. (Although it is a good rule never to sign a letter you did not write. You will be responsible for every word.)

When we see “a dangerous idea” in the subtitle, we naturally assume that Dabhoiwala means dangerously good, in the sense of dangerous to bullies and tyrants. But this is not what he means. He means that free speech is a bad idea. Eisgruber thinks that the maximalist character of American free-speech law is the best thing about it, but Dabhoiwala thinks it’s the worst. (Maine Writer comment here...."who's on first"❓ )

When we think of the history of free-speech rights, we tend to think of the Anglo-American legal tradition. A virtue of Dabhoiwala’s book is that it is transnational, and there are discussions of free-speech traditions less familiar to American readers. The first free-speech law, for example, was enacted in Sweden, in 1766.

The point Dabhoiwala wants to make is that the Anglo-American concept

is not universal. On the contrary, he says, “America is now the only country in the world where even local ordinances against ‘hate speech’ are treated as presumptively unconstitutional.” First Amendment jurisprudence is absolutist and libertarian. Other nations have speech rights, but they are qualified. Hate speech can be prosecuted in the United Kingdom.

For a historian, Dabhoiwala is rather judgy. He calls free speech “a kind of secular religion, with its own shifting dogmas and hagiography,” an “inherently unstable fiction,” and “a contrived, invented concept.” 

Of course, all our concepts are invented. They are tools for dealing with the world, which happens to include a lot of other human beings, many of whom, sadly, don’t agree with us.

“The creation and interpretation of rules about ‘free speech,’ ” he says, “is a perennially mutable and politicized process: freedom is never equally distributed.” And he shows that, ever since the idea of free-speech rights arose in eighteenth-century Europe, the concept has been, as he puts it, racialized and gendered. 

Freedom of expression, like, to a large extent, the franchise, was understood to be a right enjoyed by white men. Even John Stuart Mill, the model nineteenth-century liberal and a feminist, did not think that Indians in British India were ready for free speech. In other words, free-speech rights—like all rights, really—reflect, and therefore can be enlisted to perpetuate, existing power relations.

But we don’t think the right to vote is suspect because the franchise was once restricted. Those restrictions may be shocking to twenty-first-century sensibilities, but aren’t they what we should expect? In a patriarchal and highly class- and race-stratified society like Mill’s England, it is not surprising to find legal rights reproducing those inequities.

We are in a different place today, and one of the things that make us feel we are is the expansion of First Amendment freedoms throughout the twentieth century, beginning in 1919 with the dissents of Justices Holmes and Louis Brandeis, and then in Court rulings in the nineteen-fifties and sixties that protected not only political speech but artistic expression. Yet Dabhoiwala thinks that the trend is all in the wrong direction. He says that, since the sixties, “American free-speech jurisprudence has gradually abandoned any conception of the common good, beyond its abstract obeisance to ‘free debate’ as the
highest ideal.”

The right way to determine what speech should be tolerated, he says, is to give up the “dubious distinction” between words and actions. “Their supposedly different potency,” he maintains, “is just a convenient myth.” We should regulate speech in the same way we regulate behavior. It is “perfectly reasonable to oppose utterances that you believe to be seriously harmful,” Dabhoiwala says, “and to argue that these shouldn’t qualify as ‘free speech.’ ”

Which is exactly what Trump argues. I hope that he has given Dabhoiwala second thoughts. When academics tried to stigmatize certain terms and beliefs, as they did at Princeton, they forgot the first rule of free speech: the postman always rings twice. Today’s policed are tomorrow’s policemen. (IOW fate or justice will inevitably catch up with you, even if you manage to avoid it the first time.)

If the Administration’s actions are so blatantly unlawful, why does everyone seem to be caving❓ Some of it is just cost-benefit analysis. Paramount, which owned CBS, wanted to merge with Skydance Media, a transaction that required government approval. The company calculated that it was not worth jeopardizing the deal over a news program, which is a tiny piece of its empire. Jimmy Kimmel’s show was suspended after Nexstar, which owns some thirty ABC affiliate stations, put pressure on Disney, which owns ABC. Nexstar intends to buy a competitor, Tegna, which owns thirteen ABC affiliates, and the transaction needs F.C.C. approval. (The following week, after a “thoughtful conversation” with Kimmel, ABC reinstated the show, but Nexstar and Sinclair said that their affiliates would not air it.)

Government agencies can be challenged in court, and some of those challenges have succeeded at the appellate level. But the buck has generally stopped at the Supreme Court. For some whom the government now casts as enemies in the free-speech wars, that’s a worry. Universities that shut down or rename their diversity offices are not merely trying to appease the President. They anticipate that the Court will back government agencies that interpret “diversity” as an alibi for impermissible racial classification, in violation of the equal-protection clause and Title VI. Professors who complain that their schools are “caving” when they drop the term “diversity” should know this. But university presidents can’t tell them the reason they are renaming diversity offices, because they would basically be telling the Court that they’re cheating and are just racially classifying students under a different rubric. So there is a lot of crosstalk.

In the case of the attacks on the First Amendment, one big concern (unmentioned by Eisgruber) is the future of Sullivan. Members of the Court, specifically Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have indicated an interest in overturning that holding, thereby reinstating a lower bar for libel suits by public figures by removing the “actual malice” requirement. There is little reason to assume that, given the right occasion, this Court will not overrule Sullivan, handing Trump another weapon in his war against free speech. 

Of course, if the law were to change, it might not be a total win for him. After all, no one is more reckless with the🤥 truth than Trump. He could be sued almost every time he opens his mouth. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the category of person covered by the “actual malice” standard in the original New York Times v. Sullivan decision.

Published in the print edition of the October 6, 2025, issue, with the headline “Sticks and Stones.”

Democrats must create visible non violent ways to effectively struggle against Donald Trump and Republican cultism

Bravo❗ 👏😘 Opinion by Robin Abcarian, published in the Los Angeles Times:

To all those engaged in the struggle against Trump’s anti-democratic bullying❗

The all-out war being waged by Donald Trump against so many American institutions and bedrock principles is sickening🤢 to watch.

In February, after Elon Musk took his chain saw to America’s most consequential foreign aid agency, I predicted that children would die as a result.

This month, PBS reported that a Nigerian mother of twins lost one of her babies to starvation, thanks to the dismantling of USAID. A former USAID chief nutritionist estimated that the cuts to food assistance could result in about a million children not receiving treatment for severe food nutrition and potentially 163,500 deaths. So much for rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Bill Gates told the Financial Times.

Every day brings a new horror as Donald Trump takes a blow torch to the Constitution.

He blackmails universities and corporations to force them to end efforts to diversify their student bodies and work forces. He makes life as hellish as possible for immigrants, legal and otherwise. He wants to kill off birthright citizenship. Suspend habeas corpus. Ditch due process. Accept “gifts” from foreign governments. Erase the line that separates church and state.

On Thursday, he ratcheted up his battle against Harvard University, announcing that it would no longer be permitted to enroll foreign students in what the New York Times described as “a major escalation of the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.”

The estimated 7,000 foreign students currently enrolled at Harvard, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem declared, would immediately have to transfer to other universities or lose their legal status.

While some Americans are positively reveling in the cruelty and chaos spewing from the White House, and many companies are knuckling under to Trump, those of us who oppose the descent into lawless bullying search for heroes and signs of hope anywhere we can find it.

Thankfully, Harvard is fighting back. With its $53-billion endowment, the school is uniquely suited to the task. Thursday, it filed a lawsuit challenging the termination of the school’s participation in the government’s student visa program. In April, it sued the administration over its revocation of $2.2 billion in research grants.

In January, Costco’s board of directors unanimously reaffirmed the company’s commitment to its diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In February, 97% of Apple’s shareholders voted against a proposal to abolish the company’s DEI initiatives. Executives at Delta Airlines have declared that diversity initiatives are a critical part of the company’s business strategy. Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont-based ice cream maker known for its progressive politics, said it would not be “intimidated or bullied” into abandoning its commitment to racial and social justice.

Recently, I found a ray of hope in an unlikely place: Madison, Wisconsin, where I was attending the law school graduation of my step-granddaughter, Kenna.

I happened to drive past a Penzeys Spices store and pulled over to take a look. In an effort to counter some of the despair the second Trump term has caused, I have taken refuge in cooking, which yanks me out of my head and distracts me from all the bad news.

When I can no longer stomach the headlines, I zone out with my favorite online chefs: Notorious Foodie, a home cook who ends each of his videos by throwing a towel at the camera (I highly recommend his lasagne), and Chef Reactions, who offers a split-screen snarky commentary of trashy cooking videos (think Sandra Lee’s infamous Kwanzaa cake).

At the checkout counter with my herbes de Provence, pumpkin pie spice and ground Turkish sumac berries, the cashier gave me a little blue spice packet with a bleeding red heart labeled “Resist! Keep America Alive.” On the back: “Season Liberally.”

I did not realize that I had stumbled into what is probably Ground Zero of the business world’s Trump resistance. Based in Wisconsin — the state that can take credit for bringing Musk to his knees, the company’s founder and owner, Bill Penzey, has always been vocally liberal, and the outrages of the Trump era have given him an abundance of material.

On his website, in newsletters and Facebook posts, Penzey combines his politics with specials on various spices. In 2017, on the second anniversary of Trump’s infamous slander of Mexican immigrants, Penzey offered his customers free bottles of Mexican vanilla. “It seems a good day to apologize to the people of Mexico and Latin America,” he wrote on Facebook.

On the Penzeys Spices website, next to the typical “About Us” tab, he has added another, “About Republicans.”

“We’ve arrived at the point where there’s no way to respect the nonsense the Republican Party is promoting and have any hope of overcoming the problems we as a nation and we as a planet face,” Penzey writes. “Given the choice between saving America and planet Earth or saving the feelings of Republican voters, we are choosing to side with saving our country and our world.”

I reached out to Penzey, but he declined to chat with me.

“I‘m content with just doing what we do,” he wrote. “Somehow talking to people about it all and having them try to sum it up never quite clicks. Sorry.”

Oh don’t be. Just keep doing what you do, Mr. Penzey, and let’s hope that democracy prevails.

@rabcarian.bsky.social @rabcarian

Donald Trump is worse than anyone expected: An inteview in German media with Der Spiegel

Harvard Professor Steven Levitsky*
"Right Now, the U.S. Is Ceasing to Be a Democracy"

Echo interview published in Der Spiegel by Claus Hecking (Cambridge)

Donald Trump is currently transforming the U.S. into an authoritarian state, argues Harvard Professor Steven Levitsky, author of "How Democracies Die." And he is using an unexpected twist in the authoritarian playbook to do so.

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Levitsky, Donald Trump is seeking to single-handedly abolish rights enshrined in the Constitution, is dissolving government institutions by decree and has begun talking about impeaching judges that would dare stand in his way. Is American democracy in danger?

Levitsky: We are currently witnessing the collapse of our democracy. Under Donald Trump, the U.S. is sliding into a form of authoritarianism. This will probably not be irreversible. But, the fact is: Right now, the U.S. is ceasing to be a democracy.

DER SPIEGEL: What form of authoritarianism are you talking about?

Levitsky: I call it competitive authoritarianism: Formal democratic institutions will be maintained, but the democratic substance is eroding. There is still democratic competition, but it is unfair because the incumbents are manipulating the game in their favor using state resources. We probably won't see tanks in the streets, our Constitution will remain in place, the opposition will not be banned, and elections will be held again. But, in those elections, there will no longer be a level playing field between Republicans and Democrats.

DER SPIEGEL: Where have you already seen indications of this development in the U.S❓

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 ataings Trump: Donald Trump and the Repubican adminisitration must facilitate the return of wrongly deported Kilmer Abrego Garcia who was put in an El Salvador prison with other illegally deported migrants. 

Levitsky: Donald Trump and his Republican administration are staffing government bodies like the judiciary, the intelligence services and regulatory agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission, with loyalists and instrumentalizing them to pressure and wear down political opponents, thereby diminishing their chances of winning an election. 

At the same time, they are trying to subdue or silence critical voices like the media, academics and other civil society actors. Within just a few weeks, Trump and his people have already massively increased the costs of opposition.

DER SPIEGEL: When comparing the moves Trump has made since his inauguration with those of established autocrats, where do you see the similarities❓

Levitsky: What is striking about the first two months of the Trump administration is not that it reminds me of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland, Narendra Modi in India or Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. It’s worse. Trump and his allies have been much more openly authoritarian than any of these figures. 

They are eagerly embracing authoritarianism. See, for example, the apparent enthusiasm with which they are refusing to comply with court orders and attacking justices.

DER SPIEGEL:  Deos freedom of opinion appear to still be guaranteed in the U.S.❓

Levitsky: In a free, functioning democracy, the media, entrepreneurs, academics and politicians should be able to speak out openly against the government without fear of personal repercussions. But now, more and more people, from journalists and university presidents to protesting students, are having to consider whether or not to oppose Trump because they might have to pay a price for doing so. And there is mounting evidence that Republican members of Congress are being put under massive pressure to vote with Trump on crucial issues that go against their convictions. Among other things, Trump supporters are said to be threatening them with violence against them and their families. We've only ever seen this kind of thing in other parts of the world until now.

DER SPIEGEL: Are Trump and his people following a script❓

Levitsky: There's a classic pattern: First, a would-be autocrat must gain control of the institutions responsible for investigations, prosecutions and the like. Trump's first step in office was precisely to replace these "referees" with his followers. He appointed his former lawyer Pam Biondi to head the Justice Department, and Kash Patel to head the FBI.

"It's bizarre: the Donald Trump and his followers are using the strategy employed by the ruler of little Hungary. They are trying to copy the Hungarian model."

DER SPIEGEL: ... who has written children's books portraying Trump as a king ...

Levitsky: ... and Trump also staffed the military and key regulatory agencies with loyalists. Hugo Chávez once did something similar in Venezuela, followed later by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and, above all, Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Orbán was once a center-right democratic politician, but after returning to power in 2010, he weaponized the state and established an authoritarian system. He taught Trump and the Republicans that the state can be a useful tool – by using it as a weapon for one's own political and ideological purposes. It's bizarre: Donald Trump and his followers are using the strategy employed by the ruler of little Hungary. They are trying to copy the Hungarian model.

DER SPIEGEL: Will Trump really be able to dominate the U.S. the way Orbán dominates Hungary❓

Levitsky: I don't think so. It's far more difficult to change the Constitution in the U.S. than in Hungary. Doing so requires two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress, after which three-quarters of the states must ratify the amendment. Furthermore, the opposition in Hungary was much weaker than the Democrats are here. There is a significant chance that Trump will lose control of the House of Representatives in the 2026 congressional elections.

DER SPIEGEL: Isn’t the U.S. democracy resilient enough to withstand Trump? After all, checks and balances – the separation of powers – have existed for over two centuries.

Levitsky: Unfortunately,😔😓😒😰 I have to say: The much-vaunted Constitutional checks are failing😢. Our Founding Fathers wanted to prevent an all-powerful tyrant. To this end, they created a series of institutions over 200 years ago: the Electoral College for electing the president, the separation of powers with an independent, bicameral legislature, and a largely independent judiciary. Not to mention a federalist system that grants far-reaching powers to the states. But they didn't foresee that one day there would be two strongly polarized parties, one of which is completely loyal to the incumbent president. To my knowledge, no U.S. president has ever had more control over a party than Trump has today over the Republicans – a party that holds a majority in both houses of Congress. 

This means that Congress, our legislative branch, is ceding its power to Trump.

DER SPIEGEL: And during his first term, Trump was already able to appoint three justices to the Supreme Court, who now often rule in his favor. Are we seeing a coup from the top❓

Levitsky: I would call it an attempted coup: abuse of power on a grand scale. I would only call it a coup if Trump openly violated the Constitution and openly refused to comply with Congress or the Supreme Court.

DER SPIEGEL: Even before Trump was sworn in for his second term, you warned that the U.S. could slide into authoritarianism.

Levitsky: It's been worse than expected. First, the new administration is acting much faster and more comprehensively than foreseen. Second, we didn't expect Elon Musk. He is a new element in the authoritarian playbook. I've never seen such a concentration of political, economic and media power in a democratic system as Musk currently combines. And he has never been elected to any office. Now, with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), this man is wreaking havoc on our state. He's most likely violating our Constitution and numerous laws, but he's not even being monitored.

DER SPIEGEL: The president is granted numerous powers in the U.S., and Trump is taking advantage of this by ruling with countless executive orders.

Would such a concentration of power be possible in a parliamentary democracy like Germany❓

Levitsky: In principle, it's more difficult for outsiders like Trump to rise to the top of a traditional party and win it over. But, even in parliamentary democracies, there can be a dynamic where traditional parties weaken and an outsider gains majorities with his own party. See Berlusconi in Italy. And if an authoritarian politician gains control of a traditional party, like Orbán in Hungary, he can cause great damage even in a parliamentary system. 

I'm worried about the United Kingdom right now, because Nigel Farage's so-called Reform Party is leading in the polls there. The UK has a much more centralized, majoritarian political system. If Farage in the UK were to win a parliamentary majority, he could cause even more damage than Trump.

Elon Musk has no oversight what he is doing with DOGE is very likely unconstitutional. His ghoulish photo op taken with a chain saw has become an iconic rallying symbol for the RESISTANCE.

DER SPIEGEL: In contrast to Trump’s first term, there has so far been very little public resistance. (But it is beginning, Senator Corey Booker's 24 hour filibuser speech to the Senate was amazing;  Hands Off❗ and No Kings❗ rallies attracting millions of people, Town Hall meetings with legislators are filled to capacity- all are contributing to building anti-Trump  coalitions, Maryland Senator Van Hollen's trip to El Salvador to meet with the  wrongly deported Kilmer Abrego Garcia.)

Levitsky: I was always convinced that attempts to abuse power would meet with considerable resistance in the U.S. After all, we have such a rich, diverse democracy, a strong, prosperous private sector and independent, financially strong universities. But in the first weeks of Trump II, we are witnessing an unexpectedly high degree of self-censorship, capitulation or even subordination. Some of the richest and most powerful business leaders are bowing down to Trump. Leading media outlets are being pressured by their owners to accommodate Trump. Leading universities have been silent about the devastating attack on our universities and science. If this continues, Trump will be able to do far more damage than I recently thought possible.

DER SPIEGEL: Why is that❓

Levitsky: Many Americans are naive. They take democracy for granted in our country. With the exception of a handful of immigrants, we don't know what it's like to live in an autocracy. This is a huge disadvantage we have relative to, for example, Germany, Poland or South American societies. Furthermore, the election results had a demoralizing effect on Trump’s opponents. They are disillusioned and exhausted. I get paid to talk about democracy; I've been talking about Trump constantly for nine years. When he was re-elected in November, all I wanted to do was go home, eat ice cream, and watch hockey on TV. But people are now recovering from this shock, and we're seeing the first nationwide protests – in front of Tesla dealerships, for example.

DER SPIEGEL: Why have Democrats remained largely silent in the face of Trump’s deportations and executive orders, many of which have been of questionable legality❓

Levitsky: The Democrats are still dominated by a generation of older politicians who were politically socialized in the 20th century within tried-and-true democratic norms. Many of them seem quite disoriented. They are counting on the system to protect them. And following Trump's first term, they expected his second administration to not be that bad.
DER SPIEGEL: They’ve been caught off guard❓

Levitsky: I compare it to a 15-round boxing match where a boxer charges in the first round and throws a thousand punches. He may be exhausted by the fourth round, but in the first round, he lands so many punches that his opponent lies stunned in the corner. That's what's happening to the Democrats now. They've been hit by a barrage of unexpected blows.

DER SPIEGEL: Many Democrats are still advocating for a wait-and-see approach – until Trump has caused so much damage in the U.S. that voters turn away from him and toward the Democrats.

Levitsky: It's possible that the Democratic Party could win elections in the future if its people simply keep quiet and hide in the corner. Trump is already massively weakening our economy with his trade policy. But the interests of the Democratic Party are not the same as the interests of our society. And Trump is currently ruining our country and our democracy.

DER SPIEGEL: Can Trump still be stopped❓

Levitsky: Yes. Autocrats are most destructive when they enjoy high levels of popular support: Politicians like Putin or Chávez sometimes have or have had 70 or 80 percent support. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, on the other hand, was able to do much less damage because he lacked this backing. And Trump is not a popular president. He didn't reach 50 percent in the election – and now his approval ratings are clearly below that mark and falling. More than half of the country rejects him. And Trump is making many new enemies, whether with the civil service layoffs or his erratic trade policy.

"I think we can still restore our democracy."

DER SPIEGEL: What happens next❓

Levitsky: It may sound a bit clichéd, but ultimately it's true: Citizens must defend democracy. This isn't just about taking to the streets. We must begin building a committed opposition together with civil rights organizations, universities, businesses and politicians from the Democratic Party.

DER SPIEGEL: Is there anything that gives you hope?

Levitsky: The form of authoritarianism Trump is pursuing isn't irreversible. I think we can still restore our democracy. But, we Americans have to take action.

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Levitsky, thank you very much for this interview.

*Steven Levitsky, born in 1968, is a professor of government and Latin American studies at Harvard University. He is also the director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. His research focuses on democracy and authoritarianism, parties and institutions. His book "How Democracies Die," co-authored with Daniel Ziblatt, has been translated into more than 30 languages and has received numerous awards, in addition to being on the DER SPIEGEL bestseller list. In 2024, Levitsky and Ziblatt published "The Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point."

American voters cannot be distracted from the threat of a fascist Trumpzi danger

Cliché for today:  The more things change the more they stay the same....warning 101....⚠️

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe: "I can imagine Kennedy and Churchill teaming up to write an updated version of their original essays and titling this version, 'Why and While America Slept'.”

Eighty four years ago, the book version of John F. Kennedy’s senior thesis at Harvard was published. 

John F. Kennedy as a Harvard student, with a copy of his book, "Why England Slept".

Titled “Why England Slept,” it built upon a work written by Winston Churchill in 1938, titled “While England Slept.”

Both works explored why so many in Great Britain ignored the rising threat posed by German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, as they attacked and occupied one European country after another in the wake of Hitler becoming chancellor in 1932.

Both JFK and Churchill lamented that by the time Great Britain woke up to the threat Hitler and the Nazis posed to British democracy, it was almost too late.

I recently reread JFK’s “Why England Slept” and as I read his thesis, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Why are so few Americans alarmed by the threat Donald Trump and his neo-fascist MAGA political enablers and cult followers pose to our constitutional republic?”

This year’s election is undoubtedly the most critically important the nation has faced since 1860, and its outcome will determine what kind of country America will be for years, perhaps generations, to come.

Yet many, if not most, people seem oblivious to the dark political clouds gathering all around us and the threats they pose to all that Americans claim to believe in and hold dear.

I can imagine Kennedy and Churchill teaming up to write an updated version of their original essays and titling this version, “Why and While America Slept.”

Let’s hope enough Americans wake up between now and Novenber 5th, to avert a political disaster the likes of which the world has not seen since Hitler became chancellor.

From Michael Cook in Gloucester, Massachusetts

Freedom of speech means tolerance against dangerous bigotry

Maine Writer opinion: Students who are demonstrating in support of the Palastinians are not providing equal free speech forums for a Jewish response.

NYTimes opinion.....the sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

Columnist David French opinion in the New York Times:

On Monday, March 11, roughly 200 Jewish students and supporters marched through the campus at the University of California, Berkeley, but what was newsworthy is that they were not attacked. Local news hailed that they were able to, as one headline noted, “successfully march without confrontation.”

The march came two weeks after violent protests forced the cancellation of an event that was to feature an Israeli speaker and was organized by Jewish students. The event — which had already been moved from another location because of safety concerns — was canceled, and the building evacuated by police, after protesters broke through doors and reportedly assaulted Jewish students. There was no way to ensure safety, universityadministrators explained, “given the size of the crowd and the threat of violence.”

At the time that I read accounts about the violence at Berkeley, I was also reading two legal complaints against Harvard and the other against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both complaints make for horrifying reading, detailing a cascading series of antisemitic incidents, including acts of violence and physical intimidation. 

The moral and legal injury is compounded by blatant double standards on the part of the universities. As the complaint filed against Harvard states, “Harvard permits students and faculty to advocate, without consequence, the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world. 

Meanwhile, Harvard requires students to take a training class that warns that they will be disciplined if they engage in sizeism (discrimination on the grounds of a person's size), fatphobia, racism, transphobia, or other disfavored behavior.”

My entire legal career has defended free speech💬  on campus, including the free speech of Muslim students and staff members. 

I’ve also walked through metal detectors at a tense and volatile Columbia University to defend the academic freedom of Jewish students challenging antisemitic statements made by university professors.

And during those decades of litigation and my subsequent years in journalism, I have never seen such comprehensive abuse directed against a vulnerable campus minority group as I’ve seen directed at Jewish students and faculty, since Hamas’s terror attack on October 7, 2023.

Obviously antisemitism isn’t the only hatred afoot in America. Since October 7, there have also been horrifying incidents of anti-Muslim violence. Shortly after the Hamas attack on Israel, the chancellor of the state university system of Florida ordered the deactivation of chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine based on the absurd idea that its written materials provided “material support” for a designated terrorist entity in violation of federal law. (The order has not been enforced.) But what’s happening to Jewish students and faculty at several elite campuses is so comprehensive and all-consuming that it can only be described as systemic antisemitism.

Which brings me to the complaints against M.I.T. and Harvard. 

One should always use caution when evaluating such documents. They represent the allegations of one side. There are times when litigation ultimately proves the accuracy of a complaint’s claims and times when the allegations fall apart under scrutiny. (There are also times when the case grows stronger as the plaintiffs obtain discovery, read internal communications and depose witnesses under oath.) 

Complaints against M.I.T. and Harvard, however, don’t simply ask us to trust them. Time and again they provide screenshots, quotes from emails and photographs that offer visual evidence of their claims.  And make no mistake, the claims are dreadful. At M.I.T., for example, the plaintiffs claim not only that the university allowed pro-Palestinian protesters to hold protests that violated university rules, but, also, that those protests were so threatening that Jewish students were afraid to get near them. M.I.T. Hillel warned students to “not directly engage protesters for your physical safety and well-being” and ideally to avoid the area. This resulted in parts of campus being effectively closed to Jewish students.

The complaint also charges protesters with literally putting a bounty on a Jewish student who had engaged in a physical altercation at a protest, promising an $800 award for identifying the student. According to the complaint, “The student stayed locked up in their dorms for weeks with their friends bringing food, check-ins from the police, and their family terrified for their safety.”

The plaintiffs also claimed that protesters engaged in “targeted protests outside the offices of Jewish professors and the office of M.I.T.’s Israel internship program,” a part of the university’s global experiences program known as MISTI. The complaint quotes a professor who said, “They insistently rattled the door handles of offices that were closed with staff inside …. Their chants included:‘From the river to the sea…’, ‘MISTI, MISTI, you can’t hide,’ and others associating MISTI with genocide.” 

Maine Writer opinion here- It is the Hamas terrorists in Gaza that intends to eliminate the Jews! 

Blood libel*❓ ❗also makes its dreadful appearance.😡💀 The complaint quotes an M.I.T. postdoctoral student (as the complaint notes, postdocs are both students and employees of the university) posting on X, “Zionists not only steal our lands, food, and culture, but our dead bodies as well for organ harvesting.”

*blood libel- the accusation that Jewish people used blood from Christians in rituals....

These incidents represent only a fraction of the claims against M.I.T. The complaint against Harvard likewise details protests that shut down parts of campus, physical assaults against Jewish students and disruptions of classroom instruction so frightening that one caused “Jewish students to flee for their safety, with some removing identifying garb to avoid attack.”

Pervasive fear is a theme of the Harvard complaint. It details an incident at Harvard Law School where campus police allegedly observed passively as a mob of protesters “stormed Harvard Law’s main building, marched down the length of the building’s primary first-floor hallway, and blocked the hallway outside the study room where [Students Against Anti-Semitism and a visiting speaker] were hiding. Fearing a violent attack, students in the study room removed indicia of their Jewishness, such as kippot, or hid under desks.”

Pause and think about that for a moment. In the year 2024, at one of the most prestigious and powerful academic institutions in the world, the plaintiffs claim that Jewish students felt the need to hide under their desks for their physical safety.

Just after I finished reading the complaints against Harvard and M.I.T., I read Franklin Foer’s gut-punch cover story in The Atlantic. Titled “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” it begins like this: “Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: ‘I’m scared,’ she wrote.” In the days following October 7, her classmates were staging a walkout to protest Israel, and the atmosphere was tense. “Parents were texting one another ideas about where in the school their children could hide,” Foer wrote. “Zolt Hara placed a call to the dean of students. By her own admission, she was hysterical. She says the dean hung up on her.”

I urge you to read Foer’s entire story, just as I urge you to read both of the legal complaints I’ve described. If you do, you’ll see that there is a certain dreadful sameness to all these stories: Universities and schools demonstrate far greater tolerance for antisemitic speech and behavior than for virtually any other kind of offensive speech or behavior. They bend or break the rules to accommodate pro-Palestinian protests. Jewish students then face intimidation and even assaults.

To defeat systemic antisemitism, universities don’t have to stifle free speech. They simply need to uphold their legal obligations to Jewish students. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires universities that receive public funding to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment and discrimination, and a leading indicator of discrimination is blatantly disparate treatment. If you permit protesters who target Jewish students to break university rules, you’re asking for a lawsuit. If you’ve permitted the campus environment to deteriorate to such a degree that Jewish students reportedly hide under their desks for safety, then you should face catastrophic monetary penalties.

Moreover, no one should excuse the targeting of Jewish students in America as mere “anti-Zionism.” When American Muslims are targeted or persecuted because of the actions of Muslims overseas, we rightly see that as pure, undistilled Islamophobia. The same principle applies to American Jews✡️. When you see the radical left target Jews and then claim they’re merely anti-Zionist, they give the game away — to them, Judaism is Zionism.

I’ve focused on the radical campus left in this newsletter. I know full well that antisemitism is bursting out on the right as well. Foer’s concerns that the hard right and hard left are rendering America less safe for Jews are very well founded. And that should grieve us all.

The story of American Judaism is inseparable from the American story. I think often of the famous exchange between George Washington and the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, R.I. 

We know the soaring promises of the Declaration of Independence, but we also know that the early American republic did not live up to those ideals. Our nation’s slow progress toward fulfilling its promise began in part with that exchange in Newport.

The congregation wrote Washington with both a clear text and a clear subtext. Here is the key sentence: “Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events) behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People — a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship.”

George Washington's text was written in 1790, in response to a letter from the Jews in Newport Rhode Island. The letter conveys a deep gratitude for the opportunity to live in a free nation. But, the subtext is equally clear. It’s a question: Do these high values apply to us, your Jewish neighbors? Washington’s response was clear and unequivocal: “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham,” he wrote, “who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

This letter was an indispensable early step in the long and painful process of extending the blessings of liberty to America’s most marginalized and persecuted communities. It would be a grim irony indeed if breaking Washington’s promise to American Jews signaled the beginning of a different kind of American migration, back into the darkness of ancient bigotries.

There is no excuse for hypocrisy. There is no excuse for harassment. It seems clear that M.I.T., Harvard and other campuses have failed to uphold their moral and legal responsibilities. Now it falls upon the engine of American justice to impose its consequences and to prove — to this generation and the ones that follow — that this truly is a government “which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).