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      Trump ally pushes DoJ unit to shift civil rights focus, new messages show

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      The justice department’s civil rights division is shifting its focus away from its longstanding work protecting the rights of marginalized groups and will instead pivot towards Donald Trump’s priorities including hunting for noncitizen voters and protecting white people from discrimination, according to new internal mission statements seen by the Guardian.The new priorities were sent to several sections of the civil rights division this week by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who was confirmed a little more than two weeks ago to lead the division. Several of them only give glancing mention to the statutes and kinds of discrimination that have long been the focus of the division, which dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Several of the mission statements point to Trump’s executive orders as priorities for the section.The mission statement for the voting section, for example, barely mentions the Voting Rights Act and instead says the section will focus on preventing voter fraud – which is exceedingly rare – and helping states find for noncitizens on their voter rolls (non-citizen voting is also exceedingly rare). The guidance for the Housing and Civil Enforcement section does not make a single mention of the Fair Housing Act, the landmark 1968 civil rights law that has long been a central part of the department’s work.“It’s absolutely astonishing,” said Sasha Samberg-Champion, a former appellate lawyer in the justice department’s civil rights division. “This reflects the complete abdication of the core responsibilities of each of these sections.”The justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The decision to send new mission statements to the sections is itself unusual. While the priorities of the sections often change from administration to administration, the core work often remains the same and the department’s career attorneys are expected to be apolitical. Trump has moved to end the independence of the justice department and use it as a tool to further his political goals and punish rivals.“To me, these new mission statements signal a significant change in the priorities that each of these sections will be expected to pursue,” said Jocelyn Samuels, who led the civil rights division from 2013 to 2014. “Some of this is explicit – where, for example, the new statements specifically call out enforcement of some of the president’s executive orders as the guide for the section’s work. Some of it is a matter of omission.“I suspect that the descriptions don’t themselves dictate what the sections will do, but they certainly manifest the expectations that leadership of the division will impose,” added Samuels, who is currently suing the Trump administration for firing her from her position on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.The justice department has already begun to pull back on its civil rights cases. It has withdrawn from several of the voting cases filed under Joe Biden’s administration, terminated an environmental justice settlement on behalf of Black residents in Alabama, and dropped a pay discrimination lawsuit on behalf of a Black lawyer against the Mississippi senate.The primary focus of the department’s voting section has long been ensuring that voting laws and practices aren’t tainted with discrimination. The new guidance this week shifts that focus and echoes Trump’s rhetoric around fraud.“The mission of the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ Civil Rights Division is to ensure free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion,” the new mission statement says. “The Section will work to ensure that only American citizens vote in US federal elections and do so securely. Other section priorities include preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error. All attorneys within the Voting Section will advocate with zeal on behalf of the United States of America in furtherance of all objectives as tasked.”It also says the voting section will work with the Department of Homeland Security to help states access citizenship data so that they can remove noncitizens from their voter rolls. The section will also “vigorously enforce the statutes, orders, and priorities” in a recent Trump executive order that requires states to require proof of citizenship to vote and to decertify voting machines. Several civil rights groups are already challenging that order in court and say it is illegal.“What’s missing from here is the idea that we’re going to protect the right to vote on a nondiscriminatory basis,” Samberg-Champion said. “Silly me, I always thought was the core purpose of the voting section and the core purpose of the Voting Rights Act.”Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and a top official in the civil rights division during the Obama administration, noted that federal law puts certain restrictions in place “before anybody in the federal government, civil rights division included, can lawfully touch state database information”.Noting that much of the language in the mission statement was broad, Levitt said he would be watching to see how it was implemented.“Read through the lens of all of the rest that the administration is doing, this is a further example of how off-course the administration is. This isn’t the statement that any administration in the last 68 years would have written,” he said in an email. “But the way this gets cashed out is far more important.”The new mission statement for the Housing and Civil Enforcement section says the section will focus on protecting the rights of members of the military and enforcing the Religious Land Use And Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which prevents zoning discrimination. “The aggressive and even-handed deployment of RLUIPA to restore religious liberty will be a top priority,” the document says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe guidance also says the section will “focus on challenges to racially discriminatory lending programs”. Samberg-Champion said that was a “code red”.“They’re going to look for opportunities to challenge special purpose credit programs and other lending programs that are meant to enhance credit opportunities for people who have been starved of credit historically,” said Samberg-Champion, who served as deputy general counsel for enforcement and fair housing during the Biden administration. “It’s just astonishing that what they’re trying to do is actually diminish the availability of credit for people and go after banks, go after lenders who presumably are trying to make their credit availability fairer.”Guidance for the educational opportunities section focuses on preventing discrimination against white applicants and cites the supreme court’s 2023 ruling saying that affirmative action programs are unconstitutional. It also says the department will focus on anti-transgender issues.“This mandate includes protecting the rights of women and girls to unfettered access to programs, facilities, extracurricular activities, and sports or athletic opportunities that exclude males from presence or participation,” the statement reads. “The mandate also includes preventing racial discrimination in school admissions policies and preventing antisemitism in education wherever it is found.”The new mission statement for the disability rights section appears to have nothing to do with disability. “The zealous and faithful pursuit of this section’s mission requires dedication of the section’s resources, actions, attention, and energy to the priorities and objectives of the President,” the guidance says. It then goes on to list a series of executive orders that target transgender Americans.Eve Hill, who served as a top lawyer in the civil rights division under the Obama administration, said she wasn’t “overly alarmed” by the message to the disability rights section.“It’s hard to tell what effect it will have other than preventing [the disability rights section] from working for people with the disability of gender dysphoria. Which is important, but they hadn’t done much work in that space anyway,” she said.Several of the mission statements include a similar line that says attorneys are expected to enforce the law “faithfully and zealously”.That language is significant, Samberg-Champion said.“They’re anticipating – and I think correctly – that they’re going to get considerable pushback from the career staff as to what they’re being asked to do,” he said. “This reflects their understanding that they are radically changing what each of these sections historically has understood its mission to be. And that this is not going to go over well with the people who have made it their life’s work to enforce these important laws.” More

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      What would it mean for Trump to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status?

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      Harvard University is in a standoff with Donald Trump after rejecting a series of demands from the president’s administration, which critics view as an attack on the elite college for its reputation among conservatives as a bastion of liberal thought.After cutting off its funding, Trump has reportedly given the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) a potentially illegal order to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. Such a decision would mark an escalation in the Republican president’s weaponization of federal government agencies against the people and institutions that defy it.Here’s more about the battle between Trump and Harvard and how the president might try to use the IRS:How did the standoff begin?The Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce this month sent the university a letter saying it had “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”. It listed demands, including banning face masks, closing its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and cooperating with immigration authorities.How did Harvard react?Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, refused to yield, saying: “[T]he university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” It has retained attorneys William Burck and Robert Hur, both veterans of Republican administrations, who say Trump’s demands are “in contravention of the first amendment”. Harvard’s stand is in contrast to the situation at Columbia University, which acceded to similar demands from the Trump administration in exchange for the restoration of $400m in federal funding that was revoked.How did Trump retaliate?The Trump administration quickly froze $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multiyear contracts to Harvard. A member of the president’s antisemitism taskforce attacked the school’s stance, saying it “reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws”. Trump then called for Harvard to lose its tax-exempt status, and the Washington Post reported that the administration had asked the IRS’s top attorney to revoke it.What is tax-exempt status?If the IRS grants an organization tax-exempt status, they can avoid paying federal income tax, but must follow certain rules. These include refraining from campaign activity or attempting to influence legislation, while no individuals or shareholders are allowed to receive their earnings. According to the IRS, the status is available to charitable, religious, scientific and literary organizations, as well as those involved in preventing cruelty to children or animals, organizing amateur sports competitions or conducting testing for public safety reasons.Can Trump legally ask the IRS to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status?Federal law prohibits the president from directing the IRS to conduct an investigation or audit, and no evidence has yet emerged that the university has done anything to lose its tax-exempt status. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told US media “any forthcoming actions by the IRS are conducted independently of the President, and investigations into any institution’s violations of their tax status were initiated prior to” Trump’s public call for the status to be revoked.Has something like this happened under Trump before?In 2022, after Trump’s first term concluded, the New York Times reported that the former FBI director James Comey and his ex-deputy, Andrew McCabe, had been selected in 2019 for the IRS’s most invasive form of random tax audit. Trump had fired both Comey and McCabe during his term, and tax experts said both of them being selected for the audits was unusual. Trump, who had attacked Comey and McCabe by name even after their dismissals, denied any involvement. More

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      Stephen Colbert on potential alien life: ‘Take us to your leader, we don’t have one anymore’

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      Late-night hosts spoke about the Easter weekend, potential alien life and Donald Trump’s recent meeting with the Italian prime minister.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert pointed out that this year’s Easter Sunday also falls on 4/20, the unofficial holiday for weed enthusiasts.He joked that it would be “the Sunday he is risen and you is high”.This week saw Trump meet with the rightwing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. Some had hoped she might “ease the tariff tension” as she is often referred to as a “Trump whisperer”.He then played footage of Meloni speaking in Italian to Trump who complimented her directly after. “I’ll have the same thing she ordered but double meatball, double parm,” Colbert joked.Meloni has now made an offer to Trump to make an official visit to Italy, a place Colbert said he would feel at home as he “looks like a pile of prosciutto with a little spaghetti on top”.Due to massive cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA might have to stop inspections at food facilities. Colbert joked that we would know get to enjoy Tyson’s tangy buffalo beaks and thumbs.The administration is “actively trying to make health officials dumber” with halted efforts to collect data on many issues. It will now lead to “TLC’s sexy new reality show Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea Island”.This is all “just the tip of the cutberg” with the weather service also in trouble, seeing 300 employees let go as severe storm season ramps up, “when we need the weather people the most”.Colbert said that Twisters “will soon be the only programming on the weather channel”.He said that some are scrambling to make major discoveries “before science ends forever” such as this week’s reveal that there is possible signature of life on a distant planet.Officials have said that further studies are needed but Colbert expressed excitement, saying: “Please aliens take us to your leader, we don’t have one anymore.”Conspiracy theorists have also claimed that this week’s controversial all-female Blue Origin space stunt was faked. “Oh, I don’t know if I believe that,” he said. “Maybe Kubrick could fake the moon landing but you could never fake Gayle King’s sheer terror.”Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host also spoke about Easter. “If Jesus comes back and sees what’s going on, we are in deep trouble,” he said.Kimmel noted that he was “not sensing a lot of Easter spirit this year” and that Easter Sunday falling on 4/20 will lead to “some very long and confusing egg hunts”.Egg prices remain high, which has seen an “outpouring of tips for other stuff you can colour instead” such as potatoes and marshmallows, but Kimmel said Jesus would only come back for “boiled eggs”.In response to the sky-high prices, he asked: “Is anyone else tired of all the winning yet?”Meanwhile, Trump has given the White House an “extreme makeover” with plenty of gold added. His press secretary called it “the golden office for the golden age”, which Kimmel called “quite the spin”.He joked that for someone anti-DEI, he has the “same taste as Liberace” before asking: “Do you think Donald Trump understands that the story of King Midas is a cautionary tale?”He also spoke about the Meloni visit, joking that Trump probably took her to an Olive Garden to “make her feel at home” before airing a clip of him showing off “his vast knowledge of other lands”.Trump referred to the Congo and said: “I don’t know what that is.” Kimmel asked: “When is someone gonna show that man a map?”He said the government is running like a “well-soiled machine” before moving on to the alien planet news, detailing that researchers have found an equivalent of sea scum. Kimmel joked that we “may have found a new home for Ted Cruz”.The planet is 120 light years away, so Kimmel said “off you go Elon and Jeff, time to climb into those space dildos and boldly go away”.He also joked that we have a “better chance of being visited by aliens than Canadians” with tourism rates down post-tariffs. More

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      Why do Trump voters have no regrets? Because the people they hate are getting hurt more | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The stock market is plunging, prices are rising, federal workers are getting laid off, students are being snatched off the street by immigration agents. The US is many things at the moment, but stable is not one of them. So, amid all this turmoil, how are all the Donald Trump voters feeling? Has buyer’s remorse set in? Are they starting to wonder whether voting in a convicted felon as president – a man who has declared bankruptcy six times – might not have been the wisest move?Not according to the polls. Rather, the US appears to be a nation of Édith Piafs: they regret rien. I’m not saying that disillusioned Republicans don’t exist; do enough digging and you can certainly find a few. And journalists have been doing a lot of digging. During Trump’s first term, there was a steady stream of media pieces profiling the regretful Trump voter. The genre has remained popular through the first few months of Trump 2.0. But, according to a much-discussed segment by CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten this week, polling proves that the idea of “regretful” Trump voters is “more of a media creation than anything else”.“I hear all these stories, all these articles, all the Trump voters, they regret what they did back in 2024. I’m here to tell you, uh-uh. Very few of them regret what they did back in 2024,” Enten said on Wednesday.Enten was referencing a new poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst which found that just 2% of Trump voters agreed with the statement “I regret my [2024] vote and would vote differently if I could”. That’s almost half the number (3.5%) of Trump voters who said the same thing in February 2017. Meanwhile, 74% of Trump voters said they feel very confident that they made the right choice.Of course, polls aren’t always reliable. Indeed, I’m going to be a little cruel and refer you back to an Enten segment from five days before the election, where the data guru looked at three 2024 polling trends that pointed to a potential victory for vice-president Kamala Harris. “If Harris wins the signs were clear as day,” he declared. In short: Mark Twain had the measure of polling when he said “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.Asking people whether they regret an important choice they just made is also a loaded question. It’s akin to asking them “are you a complete idiot?” So I would treat these particular polls with a dose of caution: just because people don’t actively admit to regretting their vote, it doesn’t mean that they’re not worried about the direction the country is headed in, or that they’re thrilled about Trump’s performance as president. On the contrary, Trump’s approval rating is dropping and a lot of people are worried about inflation and higher prices. Everyone is feeling some pain right now.In a hyper-polarised country, however, what seems to really matter to many voters isn’t how much pain they’re feeling themselves, but whether the other side is suffering more. I could cite various academic papers on the politics of resentment; I could surface endless statistics on the subject. But I think the best summation of Trumpism is a quote from a woman called Crystal Minton from back in 2019, which went viral after being included in a New York Times report. Minton lived in a Florida town that had been ravaged by the double whammy of a hurricane and a Trump administration-instigated government shutdown, and was suffering. “I voted for [Trump], and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton complained. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”Right now, however, Trump is hurting the sort of people many of his voters seem to be interested in seeing get hurt. He’s an avenging angel, wreaking vengeance on the elite institutions, scapegoats and bogeymen that the Republican party has spent years blaming for the state of the US. He’s cut funding to all the Ivy League universities he’s called “woke” and declared out of touch with American values. He’s gone after transgender people. And he has rounded up immigrants and protesters, just as he promised he would do.Trump isn’t just doing every vindictive thing he told his supporters he was going to do: he’s trolling his detractors via nasty memes. He’s rubbing salt in their wounds. There has been what Marcus Maloney, a sociology professor at Coventry University in the UK, called a “4Chanification of American politics”. The White House Valentine’s Day post, for example, was a poem: “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you”. Cutesy font appeared above the floating heads of Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan. And a video last month posted by the White House showed a man being deported while Semisonic’s famous lyrics played in the background: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” The cruelty is very much the point.While Trump may be hurting all the people he said he’d be hurting, there’s plenty of pain to go around. There has been a lot of anger from some of Trump’s backers in Wall Street over the volatility that the president’s tariff policy has injected into the stock market. Some of his billionaire backers, such as the investor Bill Ackman, have been screaming bloody murder. But for a lot of Trump’s backers, the fluctuations of the stock market have no immediate effect on their lives. The top 10% of Americans hold 93% of all stocks. This is what happens when inequality reaches record levels: you get a group of people with nothing to lose, which means they have little to regret. You get people happy to burn the whole system down.None of this is to say that Trump voters are immune to remorse. With his tariff plan, he is just getting started. The president may be good at bluster, but even his most diehard supporter are going to realise quite quickly that food prices – which Trump promised to lower on the campaign trail – are not, in fact, going down. When the price of basic goods keep rising, there’s only so long you can keep feeding people obvious lies. Perhaps the Trumpers won’t get quite so much of a dopamine rush from “owning the libs” when they can’t afford to own anything else.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump is creating a selfish, miserable world. Here’s what we can do | Michael Plant

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      In case you hadn’t noticed, things have not been going well for the west.In just three months, Donald Trump has started trade wars, crippled Nato, dismantled USAID and humiliated an invaded democracy while praising its aggressor, among other things. We still have 45 months to go. Through his antics, the US president is normalizing, even encouraging, intense selfishness and disregard for others. The clearest example is USAID: if the richest, most powerful country in the world thinks it’s a waste to give a tiny fraction of its income to the poorest, worst off people in the world, you must be a real sucker if you care for others.This comes on top of a longer trend of declining western happiness and disconnection. In 2012, the United States ranked 11th in the World Happiness Report. This year, it was 24th. In 2023, one in four Americans reported eating all their meals alone. That figure has risen 53% in just two decades.These short- and long-term trends are no coincidence. New research shows that unhappy people vote for populists, those who promise to rip the system apart. Importantly, it also finds that trust explains which type of populists unhappy people support: low-trust people vote for far-right parties, whereas high-trust people go far left. Therefore, we should see Trumpism as both a symptom of a lower-trust, lower-happiness society and a cause of further misery and mistrust.But what should you do if you don’t like the way the world is going? Is there anything you can do?The obvious answer is to rage, doomscroll and hope for the next election. But the obvious answer is no longer an option once we realize the antidote to Trump is to build a happier, higher trust society. Drawing on my dual experience as a moral philosopher and happiness researcher, I’d like to suggest some alternative ways you can fight back.Trumpism is built on pettiness and self-interest, so resisting means embodying the opposite virtues. To paraphrase a much better president: do not ask what the world can do for your happiness – ask what you can do for the happiness of the world. You commit yourself to making the biggest difference you can – even when others do not.It starts internally. Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher born a Roman slave, wrote: “We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.” That idea, now a pillar of modern psychotherapy, is especially relevant in moments like this. Trump and co want to make you feel helpless and furious. Keeping your composure and finding joy are acts of resistance.It continues locally. Make an effort to build social connections where you live. Research shows when we share meals with others, volunteer or strike up friendly conversations with strangers, we’re not just making ourselves and others happier. We’re rebuilding the social fabric that authoritarian politics tears apart and reducing the distrust that fuels politicians like Trump. Higher trust and happiness make us less susceptible to the politics of fear and resentment; the data backs this up.Some good news is that our perceptions of mistrust are misplaced. There have been global studies in which researchers drop wallets to see what percentage is returned. A 40-country study found actual wallet return rates are about twice as high as people expected. In the US, two-thirds were returned – against the view that one-third would be. Simply recognizing we can trust others more than we thought is a helpful step forward. You could join a local Action for Happiness group. Recent research even shows prosocial activity is reliably linked to fewer “deaths of despair”. Your kindness could save lives.At the national level, we need to see politicians taking social connection – not just the economy – more seriously. If it seems fluffy or unimportant, look at where ignoring them has got us: he’s in the Oval Office. Academics are starting to assess policies by their “bang for buck” at improving wellbeing: economists at the London School of Economics published a first, milestone review in 2024. Policy nerds should take notice.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt ends globally. My colleagues and I at the Happier Lives Institute recently published the first global analysis of how much happiness different charities produce per dollar. We found a striking result. The most effective charities – often tackling issues such as depression or malnutrition in low-income countries – have about 150 times the impact of the average rich-country charity. If someone gave $150,000 to charity, you would consider them a hero. It turns out you can do as much good by giving $1,000 – if you follow the evidence and pick wisely. Giving 1% of your income to these organizations is a quiet act of moral clarity in a noisy, self-interested world.Fighting back doesn’t have to mean shouting louder. Another option is gracious, determined decency. Choose kindness over cruelty, generosity over selfishness, and evidence over bluster. Today, these quiet choices are acts of radical courage – ones that help build a better tomorrow. They might even make you happier, too.What’s giving me hopeTrumpism is the symptom of a less happy, less trusting society. But we are far from powerless to change this. There are several ways we can each make a difference – starting with our own minds and local communities and finishing with helping others around the world. What gives me hope is realizing we have the potential to understand what’s going wrong in our society and do our part to improve it.

      Michael Plant is the founder and research director of the Happier Lives Institute. He is a global happiness researcher and post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, which publishes the annual World Happiness Report More

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      ‘I don’t want to give money to this America’: tourists’ fears of US travel under Trump

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      Last year, while Joe Biden was US president, Jenny and her husband booked a trip to Boston for June 2025.The British couple had been to New York before and wanted to see more of the country. But after Donald Trump’s re-election in November, Jenny said a “shadow” began to fall on their travel plans.Since Trump took office, reports have emerged from US border points of tourists being detained and interrogated, people with work permits sent to Ice detention centres and even a US citizen seemingly told to leave the country – as well as people being wrongly deported.Overseas visits to the US were down 11.6% in March compared with the same month last year, according to the US National Travel and Tourism Office.“I had a growing feeling that I really didn’t want to give this new America our money,” said Jenny, a 54-year-old former librarian from Northamptonshire. “But it took the news of the detainments at airports and borders to really crystallise our concerns into action.”The pair decided to cancel the trip.Dozens of people responded to an online callout to share their views about travelling to the US in light of the Trump administration’s policies. While several people reported no problems entering and leaving the US, others spoke of anxiety at the border and unpleasant interactions with officials – although many people raised it as being a longstanding problem.Jenny said it was frightening to see the reports of detainments and deportations in the supposed “land of the free”.After deciding not to travel, “we just feel so relieved,” she said. “We’ve now cancelled the flights and hotel and are heading to Crete for a week instead. We’ll visit Boston when Trump is long gone.”Several people who got in touch after travelling to the US recently reported no problem at the border. Sarah, a 39-year-old who works in financial services and lives in Hertfordshire, took her seven-year-old daughter to Miami, the Everglades and the Disney and Universal parks in Orlando this spring.“We were a little nervous about going, given recent coverage,” she said. “Amusingly, our seven-year-old asked earlier this year: ‘Are we still going to America now that man is back?’”Gruff border officials aside, at the airport they found everything was fine. “My husband and I had a conversation about how we’re probably quite privileged at the border, compared to some other families,” Sarah said.“It did make me think, am I being disproportionately frightened of something because of hearing coverage about rare or edge-cases? I tend to be quite data-driven, so hearing these stories in the news, we tried not to worry and just thought that we’ve done everything we need to do with visas and paperwork.”Sarah said her daughter had a great time in Florida and at the parks. “When we got out the airport in Miami, she said: ‘The cars are massive!’”But for some foreign citizens with partners from the US, travelling there feels particularly anxiety-inducing. Paul*, a 44-year-old French citizen living close to the Swiss border, is in a long-distance relationship with his fiancee, who lives in Detroit. He plans to fly from Paris to Chicago in June.“I am very uneasy about travelling because I fear being denied entry – or worse, being detained for whatever reason – and never being able to set foot in the US again,” he said. “As my fiancee and I are planning on getting married in the US in the autumn, this would seriously jeopardise our plans.” For now, he plans to fly.One silver lining of the heightened attention on the US border, he said, could be the exposure of longstanding unsavoury practices.“Rightfully, we’re all appalled at these recent stories,” Paul said, adding that he hoped these incidents would allow westerners to reflect on how border authorities had long treated certain groups.Alex, 39, a Dutch civil servant with a Peruvian background, said when he was flying to Peru to see family in 2017 he was subjected to a “very angry” interrogation by a border official during a layover in Miami. He said they examined his computer and books and asked if he was a communist.“I think it was intimidation for its own sake,” Alex said. “In all honesty I’m quite scared to travel to the US, but at the same time I can’t help but have this strong feeling of irony about this whole situation. Europeans now can face a treatment by the US that was previously reserved for folks from developing countries.”*Some names have been changed. More

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      Harvard shows resistance is possible. But universities must join forces | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Harvard is refusing the plainly illegal demands by the Trump administration. That sends an important signal: resistance is possible.But universities must realize that the government is adopting a divide-and-rule tactic: they should collaborate on a shared litigation strategy, take a common approach in getting the public on their side, and do everything possible to have Congress push back against Trump treating money allocated by the legislature as if it were a private slush fund to be used for political blackmail. Some faculty have already begun to unite. In principle, not just progressives, but self-respecting conservatives – if any remain – should be responsive to such a three-pronged strategy.It has become abundantly clear that Trump 2.0 is using a moral panic about “woke” and pro-Palestinian protests as pretexts to subjugate institutions posing multiple threats to aspiring autocrats: universities constitute an independent source of information; they encourage critical thinking; they gather in one spot young people easily outraged by injustices. Of course, like all institutions, they have flaws; but, unlike, let’s say, businesses, they give wide latitude to criticism and position-taking (if you think colleges are censoring speech, try some political oratory on the factory floor or in the boardroom).Some academic leaders think they might mollify the Trumpists, or at least get a better deal, if they concede points about allegedly widespread antisemitism, as well as supposed indoctrination and discrimination. Self-criticism should of course be part of university life, but trumpeting on page-one op-eds that there are deep structural problems with higher education is naive at best. For one thing, there are no simple generalizations about the roughly 4,000 colleges and universities in the US; even what are usually called “elite universities” are hardly all the same.Yet far too many academics are uncritically repeating the right’s propaganda about a “free speech crisis” and conservatives feeling marginalized. Is it perhaps relevant that the most popular majors remain business and health sciences – subjects hardly taught by dogmatic lefties hell-bent on silencing dissent? Is it just about possible that some much-cited statistics – that many more professors vote for the Democrats – have more to do with the GOP having turned itself into the anti-science party, rather than professors all wanting to corrupt the youth with socialist nonsense?Even those worried about what the government’s letter to Harvard called “ideological capture” might balk at the proposed remedy: what can only be called totalitarian social engineering in the name of assuring “viewpoint diversity”. The government seeks to subject an entire university to an ideology audit: both faculty and students would have to be tested for “viewpoints” – whatever that means exactly. If an imbalance were to be found, departments would have to bring in what the Trumpist education commissars call a “critical mass” of faculty and students with viewpoints deemed politically correct by the commissars.This is not just an attack on academic freedom; it is a license to investigate individuals’ minds and consciences (could a student be hiding a secret interest in Judith Butler? Only extensive interrogations would reveal the truth!). Might students be encouraged to denounce their professors, in ways already popular on rightwing websites? Might professors in turn be encouraged to tell on their charges (he looks preppy, but he once wrote an essay on gender ideology)?Besides the obvious contradiction of violating freedoms in the name of freedom, there is the rank hypocrisy of demanding “viewpoint diversity” while seeking to outlaw any diversity initiatives not based on political ideology. And the practical enforcement of viewpoint diversity would probably also be a tad uneven: no economics department would be forced to hire Marxists; evangelical colleges are unlikely to be led towards balance by having to bring in a “critical mass” of faculty promoting atheism.Trumpists are trying hard to frame university leaders as feeling “entitled” – one small step from calling them welfare queens and kings parasitic to the taxpayer. Education, they insinuate, is a luxury for spoilt kids, research a pretext for faculty to impose loony personal beliefs. If one accepts this framing, an otherwise inexplicable idea starts to make sense: Christopher Rufo, the much-platformed strategist of the attacks on academic freedom, wants to “reduce the size of the sector itself”.Why would one want to deny opportunities for kids to learn and for research to advance, unless one fears critical thinking? Or unless one has a completely warped view – Musk-style – of how science actually works? Or unless one exhibits willful ignorance of the fact that the government does not just shovel cash to universities so they can organize more pride parades, but that it concludes contracts for research after highly competitive selection processes?Clearly, the Trump administration is in the business of unprecedented national self-harm. Those who think of themselves as “conserving” must ask whether they really want to be part of an orgy of destruction. Those who say they worship the founders must wonder whether they can tolerate daily violations of the constitution, as Trump works to impound funds approved by Congress (for research, among other things).Self-declared free speech defenders must question why they would support an administration inspired more by Mao than by Madison. And those who just want to hold on to basic decency must ask whether they can accept a proposition along the lines of: “We’ll prevent cures for cancer, as long as Harvard doesn’t hire mediocre conservatives.” As my colleague David Bell has recently put it, if this proposition becomes acceptable, it will be the triumph of malignancy in more than one sense.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University. More