The Trump administration, it seems, isn’t happy “just” to cut Harvard University off from federal grants for declining a functional federal takeover at the private institution. Per CNN, they’re preparing to try to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status, too:
The Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which would be an extraordinary step of retaliation as the Trump administration seeks to turn up pressure on the university that has defied its demands to change its hiring and other practices.
Happy Thursday.
(Photo by Omar Rawlings/picture alliance via Getty Images)
by William Kristol
On Friday, the Trump administration moved to cut off federal funding for programs at Harvard University.
On Monday, Harvard fought back, rejecting the administration’s demands to intrude in unprecedented ways in the operations of the university, and going to court to stop the administration’s efforts.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump suggested, “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”
On Wednesday, CNN reported that the Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind Harvard’s tax-exempt status, per Trump’s instruction.
Also on Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security sent Harvard a letter threatening to block foreign students who might wish to attend Harvard from obtaining student visas, unless Harvard submits information on all of its international students’ disciplinary records and possible participation in political protests.
So the Trump administration’s attack against Harvard continues and intensifies. Its assault on private institutions that remain beyond their control, on the institutions of civil society that retain their independence, continues and intensifies.
And, of course, this is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, of the Trump administration’s attack on the private sector, on civil society, on a free society. I’ve heard from reliable sources that the administration is planning to launch next week a first wave of attacks on think tanks and philanthropies it dislikes by moving to revoke their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.
In recent years, leading political figures have eloquently sounded the alarm in response to far more limited encroachments on our freedoms. They’ve said this:
“If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we no longer live in a free society. That’s what this is all about.”
“If we are going to respect rule of law, the apparatus of the federal government cannot and should not be used as a partisan tool to bludgeon your enemies.”
“What’s become fully apparent is a culture throughout the federal government . . . that basically use the government as an instrument of political activity, to target your political opponents, to make life difficult for people saying things you don’t like . . . I believe that all that comes from the top . . . These are things you typically see in the third world.”
These remarks were made, respectively, by then-Sens. JD Vance, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. Needless to say, they come from the Before Times—from what now seems a very distant past, the lost world of the Republican party before Trump. They come from a world where Republicans believed in, or at least professed to believe in, limited government and the rule of law. They come from a time when some Republicans really did cherish the fact that we lived under a free government in a free society.
That Republican party isn’t returning anytime soon. The Trump administration controls the executive branch and, for now, the Republican party in Congress. And we don’t have time for nostalgia for bygone times.
What these quotations can do, though, is remind us of the urgency of creating and strengthening the broadest possible coalition in defense of freedom.
It will be a coalition in defense of freedom. But to succeed it can’t only play defense. It’s of course very important to defend the guardrails that still exist. But it’s just as urgent to go on the counter-offensive against freedom’s enemies.
So: Containment, yes. But containment in the service of rollback. Resistance, yes. But resistance that opens a path to a broad political offensive against the authoritarians, that opens a path to victory over the enemies of a free society.
Harvard’s official motto is the Latin word veritas, or truth. It’s a good motto. But perhaps just as relevant today is one of Harvard’s unofficial mottos. It’s a mock-Latin aphorism, “Illegitimi non carborundum.” It means “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
Good advice for these times.
- The President’s Propagandists… Trump’s top officials lied through their teeth about his trade war. WILL SALETAN asks: Why? Because that’s what he hired them to do.
- Elon Musk’s Sick Breeding Plan… On Bulwark+ Takes, JVL and ANDREW EGGER break down in detail the insane WSJ article on Musk’s plans to create a “legion” of children, with 14 publicly known children so far and counting.
- How Far Will Trump Go in Attacking the Press? The feared media cave-in hasn’t materialized yet, CATHY YOUNG observes, but stay tuned…
- Trump’s Economic Calamity Is a Political Opportunity… Americans’ displeasure is already showing up in polls, writes MATT JOHNSON.
- We’re hitting the road… again! Save these dates folks, and join us on May 28 in Chicago, Illinois, and May 29 in Nashville, Tennessee.
CONTEMPT PROCEEDINGS BEGIN: After weeks of increasingly open defiance of courts by the White House, we’ve finally arrived at the inevitable next phase: A federal judge is moving to hold the administration in contempt.
Judge James Boasberg, the D.C. judge whose emergency order the Trump administration ignored when it shipped several planes of Venezuelans to an El Salvador prison in March, announced yesterday that the government’s actions that day and since had demonstrated a “willful disregard” for his order. “The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily,” Boasberg wrote. “Indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”
The order came one day after Judge Paula Xinis, who is overseeing the legal wrangling around deported migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, set a two-week timetable for establishing whether the administration was deliberately spurning her orders by failing to take steps to facilitate his return.
COMPLICATING THE PICTURE: As Abrego Garcia has become a central figure in the controversy over zero-process deportations to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, press reports and his lawyers have characterized him as an upstanding family man—gainfully employed, married to a U.S. citizen, with U.S. citizen children, including two autistic sons. But documents reported by Fox News yesterday seriously complicate that picture, showing that Abrego Garcia’s wife—who has been vigorously defending him in public and calling for his release—made multiple allegations of domestic violence against him while petitioning a court for a protective order in 2021. “I am afraid to be close to him,” she wrote. “I have multiple photos/videos of how violent he can be and all the bruises he has left me.”
While the fact remains that he was never charged with a crime, these filings obviously complicate the portrait of Abrego Garcia, the man. Judging by their online crowing over the revelation, Republicans plainly think it goes a long way to defang the political case against his summary deportation to an El Salvador gulag.
But it should have zero effect on the moral and legal case at the center of which Abrego Garcia finds himself. The administration wants to be able to yeet people at will to foreign concentration camps, then hold them there until it can find a reason to convince people they deserve to be exiled, imprisoned, and possibly tortured and murdered. There’s no limiting principle to that line. Either Kilmar Abrego Garcia gets the due process the law demands, or none of us can be assured we would get it.
SHINING THE SPOTLIGHT: Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen was able to meet with Salvadoran Vice President Felix Ulloa Wednesday, but he was denied the opportunity to meet with or speak with Abrego Garcia. Politico reports:
In a press conference on Wednesday, Van Hollen said that he asked Ulloa for a meeting with Abrego Garcia. Ulloa said he would have needed to “make earlier provisions” to visit, according to the senator, and also added he would be unable to arrange a phone call.
“I asked the vice president—if Abrego Garcia has not committed a crime, and if courts found that he was illegally taken, and the government of El Salvador has found no evidence he was part of MS-13—then why is El Salvador continuing to hold him?” Van Hollen said.
