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      Volodymyr Zelenskyy has courage. Pope Francis had it too. Why are there so many cowards? | Alexander Hurst

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      “Courage is seeking the truth and speaking it,” Jean Jaurès, the French philosopher and Socialist party leader, told a group of high school students in 1903. “It is not yielding to the law of the triumphant lie as it passes, and not echoing, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, mindless applause and fanatical jeering.”When the first world war reared its ugly, pointless head, Jaurès refused to give in to mindless fanaticism and attempted to coordinate a Franco-German general strike to stop the rush to war. In 1914, he paid for those efforts with his life when a 29-year-old French nationalist shot him twice in the back.Courage among ordinary people is not in short supply. The doctors and humanitarian workers who rush to war zones and refugee camps to care for those who need it. Rümeysa Öztürk, the PhD student who was arrested in the US for voicing an opinion against the relentless bombing of Gaza. Israeli conscientious objectors and an increasing number of other refuseniks. The protesters in Tbilisi, Belgrade and Istanbul who have repeatedly faced down their governments’ attempts at repression.Examples of political courage from those in power, though? These feel less numerous. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has displayed it endlessly. French judges did too, when they upheld the rule of law – which in normal times would simply be doing their duty, but in our times meant facing death threats. Pope Francis pushed reforms of the Catholic church to make it more compassionate and inclusive, and didn’t veer from them. He didn’t “change strategy” when attendance failed to pick up, because he didn’t have a strategy – he was simply doing what was right.View image in fullscreenOn the other hand, we’ve witnessed so many high-profile examples of political cowardice in recent months that I can only talk about them in broad categories. The US supreme court justices who, last summer, bent over backwards to create a monarchical presidency with impunity to break the law as it desires. The law firms that have offered up hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of pro bono work to an administration busy dismantling the rule of law.The CEOs and companies that have turned on the money tap and tripped over themselves to cancel inclusion initiatives to placate a president who is tanking their share prices. An almost comically conspicuous level of grift, alleged corruption and insider trading. Congressional Republicans who have sold out their country’s constitutional principles in order to avoid primaries – or perhaps, as the senator Lisa Murkowski put it, because “we are all afraid … because retaliation is real”.What is just? Who is acting with honour? With courage? When did we stop thinking it normal to consider such questions – and to demand those things from the people who lead us? To demand that they, well, lead?Left with basically no other choice, Harvard University finally made the decision to oppose the Trump administration’s outrageous demands. That is not to downplay the moral courage in the decision; other universities might have and did make different choices when they were in the same bind. As a result of Harvard’s stand, hundreds of college and university presidents have decided that sticking together is better than falling one by one.But perhaps in this moment, Harvard and other elite schools like it might take the opportunity to reflect on exactly what kind of virtues they have been instilling in their students. For years, nearly half of Harvard’s graduates have stepped straight from campus into roles at consulting firms and investment banks. It’s disheartening but perhaps not surprising, given that according to its newspaper, the Crimson, for the past four decades far more first-years have been concerned with “being well-off financially” than with “developing a meaningful life philosophy”.When the primary metric becomes “success” in amassing something – money, followers, territory, votes – society loses its moral centre. As Pankaj Mishra wrote in his 2017 book, Age of Anger, part of the crisis of the current moment is that commercial society has unleashed individuals who are unmoored from each other or from some greater social fabric.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt may sound quaint, almost conservative, to denounce a breakdown in society’s engagement with morality in public life. But I reject that. Without an ability to think and speak in real moral language, we end up in a place where there is no more shame in hypocrisy, no dishonour in rapacious greed; where if something is true or false matters less than how many people believe it. We end up in a place where the world’s wealthiest man has overseen a series of devastating aid cuts that will indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of children and sentence millions more to death from disease. There is an appropriate descriptive word for that: the word is evil.Much of the media – US media, most certainly – have a lot to answer for in the ways that they have oriented public conversation. Far too frequently, they have approached politics primarily as a horse race. What does this or that mean for a candidate’s electoral chances? How will it play out in the polls? Who is up, who is down? Who agrees, who disagrees, and what is each party saying about the other? What the media don’t like to do, because it’s far more difficult and far riskier, is to talk about whether the policies being proposed and the decisions being taken are morally commendable, just, honourable, courageous.A focus on speaking the truth, of the kind that Jaurès extolled, opens wide other doors. Among them, the ability to move from a political question – what do we want? – to a more courageous one: is this what we should want?

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist

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      Justice Dept. to Use False Claims Act to Pursue Institutions Over DEI Efforts

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      The department’s use of the law is all but certain to be met with legal challenges.The Trump administration plans to leverage a law intended to punish corrupt recipients of federal funding to pressure institutions like Harvard to abandon their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, Justice Department officials announced late Monday.President Trump’s political appointees at the department cited antisemitism on campuses as justification for using the law, the False Claims Act, to target universities and other institutions that Mr. Trump views as bastions of opposition to his agenda and a ripe populist target to rile up his right-wing base.“Institutions that take federal money only to allow antisemitism and promote divisive D.E.I. policies are putting their access to federal funds at risk,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “This Department of Justice will not tolerate these violations of civil rights — inaction is not an option.”The department’s use of the law is all but certain to be met with legal challenges. Last week, the Justice Department notified Harvard, which receives billions in government grants, of an investigation into whether its admissions process had been used to defraud the government by failing to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that effectively ended affirmative action.The department will seek fines and damages in most instances where violations are found. But it will consider criminal prosecutions in extreme circumstances, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche warned in a memo to staff.The initiative will be a joint project of the department’s anti-fraud unit and its Civil Rights Division, which has been sharply downsized and redirected from its historical mission of addressing race-based discrimination to pursue Mr. Trump’s culture war agenda.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Push to Defund Harvard Prompts Clash Over Veteran Suicide Research

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      The proposed termination of medical research funded by the V.A. is part of the Trump administration’s broader pressure campaign against the university.The Trump administration’s move to cancel a slew of federal contracts at Harvard University has sparked an internal clash over the impact on medical research intended to help veterans, including projects involving suicide prevention, toxic particle exposure and prostate cancer screening, according to emails reviewed by The New York Times.The dispute among officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs has focused in part on a collaboration with Harvard Medical School to develop a predictive model to help V.A. emergency room physicians decide whether suicidal veterans should be hospitalized, according to the records.Canceling that contract would result in “more veteran suicides that could have been prevented,” Seth J. Custer, an official in the V.A.’s Office of Research and Development, wrote in a May 8 email asking leaders at the agency to reverse their decision. But John Figueroa, a longtime private industry health care executive and a senior adviser to Doug Collins, the veterans affairs secretary, said that researchers at other institutions could do the work instead.Peter Kasperowicz, a V.A. spokesman, said that the department’s research contracts with Harvard were “under review.” He said the goal of the review was to ensure that “the projects best support the Trump administration’s veterans-first agenda.”Mr. Custer declined to comment. In a brief telephone interview, Mr. Figueroa said the V.A. was examining “every contract” it had issued. A White House spokeswoman declined to comment. So did a spokeswoman for Harvard.The tensions inside the V.A. over the Harvard contracts demonstrate how President Trump’s use of research funds as leverage in his broader pressure campaign on universities carries political risks. Mr. Trump and other Republicans have courted veterans as a key political constituency, and Mr. Collins has repeatedly promised that veteran care would not be affected, even as he enacts major cost-cutting measures and other changes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jewish Student Who Held Out in Lawsuit Against Harvard Agrees to Settle

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      Shabbos Kestenbaum sued Harvard University over allegations it did not do enough to curb antisemitism. He had continued his lawsuit even after other students settled.Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard Divinity School graduate who became a public figure as a fiery speaker at the Republican National Convention, on Thursday settled his lawsuit accusing Harvard of allowing antisemitism to fester on its campus.The terms of the settlement are confidential, but in a lengthy statement, Mr. Kestenbaum said he was “so proud to help lead the student efforts combating antisemitism within institutions of higher learning across the country, including by suing my alma mater.”He said that his lawsuit “drew the nation’s attention to the scourge of antisemitism at Harvard and other campuses, and it also caught the attention of President Trump and his Department of Education.”Harvard released a statement saying that the university “and Mr. Kestenbaum acknowledge each other’s steadfast and important efforts to combat antisemitism at Harvard and elsewhere.” It said that both sides were “pleased to have resolved the litigation.”In recent weeks, Harvard has gone to court to fight a Trump administration freeze on billions of dollars in federal research funding to the university. The freeze came after Harvard refused to comply with demands from the administration that Harvard do more to combat antisemitism — including by allowing the government to be involved in admissions, hiring and instructional decisions, among other things.The litigation and his outspokenness made Mr. Kestenbaum the face of the Republican-led campaign against antisemitism in universities, and something of a polarizing figure on Harvard’s campus.He graduated from the divinity school in May 2024, and in July he spoke at the Republican National Convention.“My problem with Harvard is not its liberalism but its illiberalism,” Mr. Kestenbaum said in his convention speech. “Too often students at Harvard are taught not how to think but what to think. I found myself immersed in a culture that is anti-Western, that is anti-American and that is antisemitic.”He has been in demand since then as a speaker for Jewish groups across the country.In his statement following the settlement, Mr. Kestenbaum said he had campaigned with Mr. Trump because the president planned to hold universities accountable.Mr. Kestenbaum, an Orthodox Jew, was a second-year divinity school student when the campus became the site of protests over the war in Gaza. Some Jewish students accused protests of veering into antisemitism, a charge that protesters, some of them Jewish themselves, have strongly denied.In January 2024, Mr. Kestenbaum and five other Jewish students sued the university, accusing it of becoming “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.” That case was settled the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.Harvard agreed to take a number of steps, including adopting a strict definition of antisemitism.But Mr. Kestenbaum refused to go along with the settlement and continued to litigate on his own, culminating in Thursday’s agreement. More

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      Trump administration piles pressure on Harvard with $450m more in cuts

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      Eight federal agencies will terminate a further $450m in grants to Harvard University, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday, escalating its antagonization of the elite institution over what officials frame as inadequate responses to antisemitism on campus.The latest funding cuts come after the administration cancelled $2.2bn in federal funding to the university, bringing the total financial penalty to approximately $2.65bn.“Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination,” the Trump administration’s taskforce to combat antisemitism wrote in a statement. “This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement.”The cuts represent a flexing of federal power over the US’s oldest and wealthiest university, first triggered by campus protests against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza – one that is only expected to expand in the coming days – but encompasses a far broader set of grievances against the institution and others like it perceived as politically liberal.Harvard has so far refused to yield, with the university’s president, Dr Alan Garber, who is Jewish, calling the previous attacks “illegal demands” from the administration “to control whom we hire and what we teach”. The university has refused to comply with the administration’s demands, outlined in a letter last month, which included shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs; cooperating with federal immigration authorities; and banning face masks, which appeared to target pro-Palestinian protesters.The school, which has an endowment of more than $53bn, had launched legal action against the initial $2.2bn funding freeze, arguing the university faced no choice after the Trump administration “threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status”.The Trump administration’s taskforce to combat antisemitism justified the latest funding reduction by claiming Harvard had “repeatedly failed to confront the pervasive race discrimination and antisemitic harassment plaguing its campus”.They referenced a series of alleged incidents, including a fellowship awarded by the Harvard Law Review, which the taskforce characterized as evidence of “just how radical Harvard has become”.Nationwide campus protests appear to be continuing, even as Columbia students were arrested last week. Dozens of students at California State University campuses are staging hunger strikes in solidarity with Gaza, as they simultaneously call on their school to divest from Israel.Harvard recently published its own investigations into allegations of both antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus, but these self-regulatory efforts appear to have done little to satisfy administration officials.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration’s announcement of the new funding cuts was signed by Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at the General Services Administration; Sean R Keveney, acting general counsel at the US Department of Health and Human Services; and Thomas E Wheeler, acting general counsel at the US Department of Education.Harvard did not respond to a request for comment. More

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      Trump blocks grant funding for Harvard until it meets president’s demands

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      The US Department of Education informed Harvard University on Monday that it was ending billions of dollars in research grants and other aid unless the school accedes to a list of demands from the Trump administration that would effectively cede control of the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university to the government.The news was delivered to Dr Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, in a deeply partisan letter from Linda McMahon, the education secretary, which she also posted on social media.“This letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek grants from the federal government, since none will be provided,” McMahon wrote.The main reason for the crackdown on Harvard is the school’s rejection of a long list of demands from the Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce, prompted by campus protests against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. McMahon also accuses the university of “a systematic pattern of violating federal law”.As Garber explained in a message to the Harvard community last month, the university decided to sue the federal government only after the Trump administration froze $2.2bn in funding, threatened to freeze an additional $1bn in grants, “initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status”.The government’s “sweeping and intrusive demands would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university”, Garber wrote.In its lawsuit against the Trump administration, Harvard said the government’s funding cuts would have stark “real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff [and] researchers” by ending crucial medical and scientific research.The text of McMahon’s letter, much like a Truth Social post from Donald Trump, is littered with all-caps words. “Where do many of these ‘students’ come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country – and why is there so much HATE?”“Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus,” McMahon claims.The university recently published its own, in-depth investigation of allegations that Gaza solidarity protests had crossed the line into antisemitism, and a second that looked at anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.But McMahon’s letter is not mainly about the claim that Jewish students feel unsafe at Harvard – a view the school’s president, who is himself Jewish, has some sympathy with – but is filled with extended diatribes about a series of other grievances, including: the supposed far-left politics of Penny Pritzker, a member of the university’s governing board who previously served as US commerce secretary during the Obama administration; the complaints of Harvard alumnus and Trump supporter Bill Ackman; what McMahon calls the “ugly racism” of Harvard’s efforts to diversify its student body; complaints about what Fox News has termed a “remedial math” course which is intended to address gaps in new students’ math skills following the Covid pandemic; accusations that the Harvard Law Review has discriminated against white authors; and two brief fellowships the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health offered to the former mayors of New York and Chicago, Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot.In language that seemed to echo Donald Trump’s own, McMahon told Harvard’s president that De Blasio and Lightfoot, who were recruited to share their experiences of bringing universal pre-kindergarten to New York, and leading Chicago through the pandemic, are “perhaps the worst mayors ever to preside over major cities in our country’s history”.“This is like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation,” McMahon wrote.“Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni,” McMahon wrote. “You have an approximately $53bn head start.” More

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      The way universities can survive the Trump era? Band together in an alliance | David Kirp

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      Higher education is under attack from the person who inhabits the White House. Universities are being threatened with an array of punishments, including the cutoff of their federal contracts and grants, the loss of their nonprofit status and a tax on their endowment. The Trump administration is demanding a say in whom they admit, whom they hire and even what courses they teach.It’s a grim message – abandon your fundamental values, or else. The idea of an “existential moment” has become a cliche, but this situation warrants that grim description. Academic freedom, the lifeblood of higher education, is being threatened.How should these colleges and universities respond?Columbia University has learned the hard way that you can’t negotiate with an autocrat – give an inch and he’ll just come back for more. Harvard has been widely praised for saying “no” to Trump, and justifiably so. But Harvard couldn’t have done anything else. The demands were so outrageous that if the university had capitulated it might as well have closed its doors.The cutoff of $2.2bn in federal contracts and grants, as well as the threat to rescind the university’s tax-exempt status, will take a bite out of research, teaching and financial aid, if ultimately upheld by the courts. But Harvard is, far and away, the richest university in the world, with an endowment north of $50 billion. That’s larger than the gross domestic product of nearly 100 countries. With its deep pockets, it is uniquely situated to carry on, while its phalanx of best-in-the-nation lawyers do battle in the courtroom.Other schools in Trump’s sight include far less wealthy private universities like Northwestern, as well as flagship public universities like the University of California-Berkeley, which have a comparative pittance to draw on. If they say shut the door when Trump & Co. come calling, the consequences would doubtlessly be devastating. But the Columbia debacle shows that there is really no option.Universities compete on many fronts. They vie for contracts and grants, professors and students and endowment contributions. Because they fetishize prestige, they take aggressive action to boost their place in the US News pecking order.But in these desperate times such competition is a ruinous course. The only strategy with a prayer of succeeding is for universities – public and private, well-endowed and scraping by – to come together, making it crystal-clear that they won’t give in to assaults on academic freedom.That’s precisely what happened last week, when more than 200 college and university presidents signed a statement, issued by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, which forcefully condemns the federal government’s “political interference” and overreach” for “endangering higher education.”Stanford, Chicago and Dartmouth are among the top-ranking schools that didn’t sign on. Perhaps their presidents believe that “duck and cover” is their best strategy. As Columbia – which did sign – can tell them, good luck with that.Higher education has long rested on its laurels, confident that Americans appreciate its intrinsic value, but that hasn’t been true for years. The just-issued statement of principle should be coupled with a full-throated campaign to make their case—to demonstrate the importance of universities and colleges in preparing the coming generation to contribute to society as well as carrying out essential, cutting-edge research.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe AACU manifesto makes a great start, but more is needed to win this war. Well-off universities need to come to the aid of their financially weaker brethren, underwriting essential and expensive legal support, when the anti-university forces come calling.“Nato for higher education” – a mutual defense pact is a long-shot approach, but it might just convince the bully in the White House to back off. The tariff mess is just the latest example of how the Mister “Art of the Deal” turns tail when confronted with strong opposition.What’s more, colleges and universities have no viable option – to borrow a line from Benjamin Franklin, they can “hang together or hang separately.”

      David Kirp is professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley and the author of The College Dropout Scandal More

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      We’ve never seen a more error-prone, incompetent presidency | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      As we pass the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s second term, it’s time to take note of a key element of how this administration governs: by mistake. I’m being serious. Have we ever seen a more error-prone, incompetent and fumbling presidency? In their rush to implement a barely concealed authoritarian agenda, this administration is producing a litany of blunders, gaffes and slip-ups. At times, they’ll seek to hide those mistakes by projecting a shield of authoritarianism. At other times, they’ll claim the mistake as a method of walking back an unpopular authoritarian agenda item. Either way, it’s a unique style of rule, one that I call “rule by error”.On 11 April, for example, the White House’s taskforce on antisemitism sent Harvard University a letter detailing a laundry list of actions that Harvard would have to undertake if the university wanted to avoid having over $2bn of multiyear federal grants frozen by the government. But the actions were extreme and would have resulted in the end of Harvard’s intellectual independence. Days later, Harvard wrote back: “Nah, I’m good,” they told Trump’s people. (More precisely, they wrote that the university is “not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration”.)Harvard’s response garnered much popular support against a bullying Trump administration, including a photo caption in the Onion that read: “Nation Can’t Believe It’s On Harvard’s Side.” Then, a few days later, several unnamed officials told the New York Times that the Trump administration’s letter, which had been signed by three officials from the administration and sent on official letterhead from an official email account, had been sent to Harvard by mistake. Oops.Maybe it was sent in error, which frankly still speaks poorly of this administration, but it’s also possible that as the wind began blowing favorably in Harvard’s direction, some in the administration were looking for a way out of the trap they had set for themselves.But that’s hardly the only error this administration has admitted to, nor is it the worst, not by a long shot. Kilmar Ábrego García, an Salvadorian man who lived in Maryland with his wife and five-year-old child, was grabbed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents on 12 March and deported three days later to El Salvador, despite having a deportation protection order forbidding him from being sent there. In a 7 April court filing, Robert Cerna, the acting Ice field office director, admitted that Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error”.Did owning up to this error result in the return of Ábrego García? Absolutely not. Trump’s administration continues to this day to defy the courts while doubling down on its own failures. During a recent Oval Office meeting between the US president and Salvadorian president, Nayib Bukele, White House aide Stephen Miller disputed even the existence of an error, despite all the evidence. “The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing that since has been relieved of duty,” Miller said, presumably referring in his tortured English to the fact that the administration fired Erez Reuveni, a career justice department attorney who represented the government in court during the Ábrego García case. The lesson here? You’re better off shooting the messenger than correcting your own mistake.If those errors aren’t enough evidence to constitute a philosophy of error, there’s still plenty more. What about the official notice the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent to some Ukrainian refugees in the United States. More than 240,000 Ukrainians have been settled in the United States under a program titled “U4U” that began under Joe Biden’s presidency. On 3 April, some Ukrainians, it’s unclear how many, received a notice telling them: “DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole,” referring to their legal status to stay in the country. “Unless it expires sooner, your parole will terminate 7 days from the date of this notice,” the email said. Then it warned its recipients: “Do not attempt to remain in the United States–the federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.”This would unquestionably be a terrifying communication to receive. When CBS News, which first reported the story, asked DHS about the notice, the government replied: “A message was sent in error to some Ukrainians under the U4U program. The U4U parole program has not been terminated.” Sorry!Or how about the time when Nicole Micheroni, a US-born American citizen and immigration lawyer received an email from the Trump administration telling her to self-deport. “It is time for you to leave the United States,” the email read. “If you do not depart the United States immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States.” Oops! They did it again.Or what about using the messaging app Signal to plan a bombing campaign, and then adding a journalist to this top-secret chat? Who hasn’t made this mistake before! And then done it again!How about the widely accepted fact that the calculation the administration has used to determine their outrageous and misguided tariff policy is just plain wrong. The American Enterprise Institute, a center-right thinktank, looked into Trump math and found that it inflates the tariffs that Trump assumes countries are levying on the US by four times. Then again, who cares!Remember when they told us that the US government was sending $50m of condoms to Gaza? The aid was actually sent to a province in Mozambique named Gaza and was earmarked for HIV and tuberculosis prevention. No condoms were part of the aid. Asked about the error, Elon Musk said: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” but then he repeated part of the lie by saying: “I’m not sure we should be sending $50m worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly.”There are plenty more mistakes (tariffs on penguins, anyone?), but you get the point. Trump constantly complains about the existence of some shadowy “deep state”, when in reality he and his entire administration ought to be in a deep state of shame, considering the constant stream of errors and blunders that constitute their rule. No wonder Trump’s job approval rating at the 100-day mark is at a piddly 42%, the second lowest of any president in the last 80 years, according to a new NPR/PBS/Marist News poll. (The lowest? Trump in his first term, by a single point.)People on the right often view Trump as some sort of political genius. Michael Moore, on the other hand, once labeled Trump an “evil genius”. But all I see is a man and an administration who use mistakes to cover up evil practices and use evil practices to excuse mistakes. That’s not genius. It’s dangerous. And if we don’t understand “rule by error” and how to dismantle it, we will all be doomed to live out its mistakes.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More