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According to President Donald Trump, April 2, 2025—the day he unveiled his executive order implementing global tariffs—will be remembered as a turning point in American history. He might be right. Unfortunately, April 2 is more likely to be remembered as a fiasco—alongside October 24, 1929 (the stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression), and September 15, 2008 (the collapse of Lehman Brothers)—than as the beginning of a new era of American prosperity.
The stated rationale behind Trump’s new “reciprocal tariffs” has a more coherent internal logic than Trump’s previous tariff maneuvers. (Stated, as we will see, is the key word.) The idea is that other countries have unfairly advantaged their own industries at the expense of America’s, both through tariffs and through methods such as currency manipulation and subsidies to domestic firms. To solve the problem, the U.S. will now tax imports from nearly every country on the planet, supposedly in proportion to the barriers that those countries place on American goods.
The goal, according to senior administration officials, is to pressure other countries into removing their trade barriers, at which point the U.S. will drop its own. In his Rose Garden speech announcing the tariff order, Trump demanded that foreign countries “terminate your own tariffs, drop your barriers,” and “don’t manipulate your currencies” if they hoped to get a reprieve from tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has even argued that many of the new tariffs won’t ever need to go into effect, because other countries will be so quick to comply. In this telling, Trump’s reciprocal measures represent the tariff to end all tariffs, paving the road to a system of genuinely free trade and a return to American industrial dominance.
But the logical consistency, such as it is, is only internal. When the new tariffs come into contact with external reality, they are likely to produce the exact opposite of the intended outcome.
Most obviously, the tariffs don’t appear to be based on actual trade barriers, which undermines their entire justification. Contrary to White House messaging, the formula for determining the new rates turns out to have been based simply on the dollar value of goods the U.S. imports from a given country relative to how much it exports. The administration took the difference between the two numbers, divided it by each country’s total exports, then divided that total in half, and slapped an import tax on countries at that rate. The theoretically reciprocal tariffs are not, in fact, reciprocal.
The result is that there is no clear or obvious path that countries could take to get those tariffs removed even if they wanted to. Countries can remove all of their trade restrictions and still run a trade surplus. South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, for example, export more to us than they import from us despite imposing virtually no trade barriers. As The New York Times reported, “Trump’s decision to put a 32 percent tariff on Switzerland stunned politicians and business leaders in the Alpine country. Switzerland has an open trade policy and recently abolished all industrial tariffs, including on goods from the United States, which is also its largest export market.”
Even if other countries did figure out ways to shrink their trade imbalances with the U.S., that still wouldn’t necessarily lead to a reprieve: Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs even on countries, like Brazil, that import more from America than they export to it. The only thing the White House has made clear is that any decision to remove or raise tariffs will be made by Trump himself. “These tariffs will remain in effect until such a time as President Trump determines that the threat posed by the trade deficit and underlying nonreciprocal treatment is satisfied, resolved, or mitigated,” read the White House’s memo on the new order. Translation: The only way you will get a tariff reprieve is by groveling at Trump’s feet.
To see the impossible choices that Trump’s tariffs impose on other countries, consider the trade restrictions that the administration accuses the European Union of maintaining against American products. These include food-safety regulations that ban certain ingredients, digital sales taxes, and the value-added tax—the European equivalent of a national sales tax that funds much of its members’ welfare programs. Calling most of these “trade barriers” in the first place is nonsensical, because they apply equally to foreign and domestic goods. The upshot is that, in order to meet Trump’s demands for tariff removal, Europe would need to overhaul not only its trade practices but much of its tax and regulatory system.
The best way to predict how countries will react to Trump’s newest tariffs is to look at how they responded to earlier ones. China and Europe quickly met past Trump tariffs with steep retaliatory measures of their own. Even in a friendly country as dependent on U.S. trade as Canada, Trump’s threats have generated a surge of anti-American nationalism that has upended the country’s domestic politics. “The idea that foreign leaders are going to commit political suicide to give Trump what he wants is crazy enough,” Scott Lincicome, the director of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute, told me. “The idea that they’d do it with basically no guaranteed upside just completely boggles the mind.”
Trump’s newest tariffs have already sparked widespread outrage among America’s trading partners. The head of the European Union has said that the body has a “strong plan to retaliate” against Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, and multiple individual European countries are considering their own additional retaliatory policies. France has floated the idea of expanding the trade war beyond physical goods by targeting U.S. tech companies. China vowed to take countermeasures against what it described as “self-defeating bullying.” Brazil’s president is considering retaliating, and the country’s National Congress, which includes many vocal right-wing supporters of Trump, recently approved legislation to empower him to do so.
If that pattern holds, Trump’s tariffs are likely to backfire. The result will be a one-way ratcheting up of tariffs across the globe, creating a trade wall between the U.S. and the rest of the world and indefinitely raising the cost of all imports.
Trump seems to welcome that possibility. During his Rose Garden address, which was titled “Make America Wealthy Again,” the president spoke at length about outcomes that are likely to occur only if the U.S. does not lower its tariffs, such as bringing in “trillions and trillions” of dollars of revenue and forcing companies to open factories inside the U.S. to avoid the new barriers. He sounded much more like someone who expected the tariffs to stay in place indefinitely than someone using them as a negotiating tactic.
In theory, the flip side of sustained higher prices would be a boost to American manufacturing, as consumers choose to purchase domestic goods over foreign ones. But here again, reality might laugh at the theory. About half of all U.S. imports are inputs that go into our own manufacturing production, meaning that American companies will suffer from higher prices too, even as retaliatory tariffs make it harder to sell their products abroad.
Perhaps the greatest damage will result from global uncertainty. After weeks of economic chaos, Trump’s big announcement was supposed to finally provide some clarity, allowing businesses to plan for the future. Instead, the future is more cloudy than ever. No one knows which of the tariffs will stick and which will be lifted. Countries will appeal to Trump to get their tariffs removed. Industries will lobby for carve-outs. The White House has announced no clear system for removing or reducing the tariffs, and even if it did, the ultimate choice will lie with the president himself, who is not known as a model of consistent and predictable decision making. These are the makings of an economic slowdown. “I would be shocked if we make it through next year without a recession,” Kimberly Clausing, an economist at the UCLA School of Law, told me.
What makes the new reciprocal tariffs all the more baffling is that a much less risky method exists to get other countries to agree to free trade. It is called a free-trade agreement. Trump ought to know. In his first term, his administration negotiated the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or “New NAFTA,” which lowered trade barriers between America and its neighbors while requiring all parties to abide by higher labor and environmental standards. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration between the U.S. and 11 countries, including Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, would have done something similar if Trump hadn’t pulled the U.S. out of the deal upon entering office in 2017. Those are some of the same countries that he is now trying to tariff into submission. He would have been better off remembering the art of the deal.
The litigation over the government’s summary renditions of foreign nationals to an El Salvador prison, with no due process of law, is now at the Supreme Court’s door. The justices will soon decide whether to relieve the Trump administration from the trial court’s order halting the expulsions. Whether the government has complied with the order isn’t directly before the Supreme Court. But whether the Court can trust the government’s representations during such quickly unfolding litigation is—and the justices have every reason not to.
In this and other cases now being litigated, the government is following a playbook established during the fight over the first Trump administration’s travel ban, which barred entry into the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. From that litigation, the administration learned a strategy for implementing portions of its legally dubious agenda without the Court’s explicit blessing: go fast. Speed facilitates obfuscation. By pushing litigation to a breakneck pace—and changing the underlying details just as quickly—the administration was able to get the Supreme Court’s approval for policies without full legal scrutiny. That same approach is once again under way in the deportations case and in others now before the Court.
The story of the first Trump administration’s travel ban began on Friday, January 27, 2017, when the administration announced a prohibition on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries with no exceptions, including for people with ties to the United States, such as green-card or visa holders. It did so with no advance warning, which meant passengers boarded flights not knowing they wouldn’t be allowed to enter the United States. The policy was sloppy, cruel, and riddled with animus—so blatantly illegal that the Trump administration declined to continue defending it after lower courts invalidated it.
With the slapdash version dead, the administration came up with a (slightly) modified policy that appeared more legitimate, at least on a superficial level. The second ban, unlike the first, did not apply to visa and green-card holders. This one was also purportedly temporary: As written, it was set to last for 90 days, during which time the administration said it would conduct a formal review to determine what kind of permanent travel restrictions were warranted. Despite these nominal changes, it still reeked of illegal animus.
The administration asked the Supreme Court for permission to implement the temporary ban, but it did so in a strategic way that would enable the Court to give its okay without having to decide the substantive question of whether the measure was legal. Here’s how that worked: In spring 2017, the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits blocked the new ban. The government then turned to the Supreme Court, requesting emergency relief from those decisions. Curiously, the government requested expedited briefing (a rush on the papers both sides file in a case), but not expedited oral argument. In fact, it asked the Court to delay hearing the case until the fall, at which point the policy would have expired. By making its request in this way, the government was asking for an up-or-down vote on the lower court’s decision, but not a full consideration of the legal merits.
This gambit paid off. The Court allowed the administration to partially enforce the second travel ban for 90 days. By the end of that period, the administration had rolled out the third and final iteration—so that the third ban went into effect just as the second expired. The Court heard oral argument over whether the third iteration of the policy was invalid in spring 2018, and a few months later, the Court upheld it. In effect, the second version bought the administration time to put together a policy that looked more legitimate while it enforced a less legitimate version. The administration could claim that the third ban emerged from a formal process and had undergone significant revisions, rather than being fired off on a whim and on the basis of animus. But in the meantime, the administration was able to do what it wanted anyway: suspend entry from several majority-Muslim countries into the United States. And that may have made the Court more comfortable with accepting the third version, because a ban was by that point the status quo.
Part of the reason this worked is that the administration managed to get the Court to act quickly, without a careful parsing of the facts. That was a smart move, because actually defending the policy on a factual basis would have been quite a challenge. During the oral arguments over the third ban, the justices asked the Trump administration’s lawyer, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, about the waiver process—the mechanism that might allow people to show, on an individual basis, that they should be allowed to enter the United States. The solicitor general assured the Court that the process was available to people via consular officers. But after the argument, consular officials said that they had no authority or discretion to grant waivers, and that only certain officials in Washington could do so. The problem was that by then, the ban was in effect.
The new Trump administration now appears to be deploying a similar strategy in much of the litigation over its policies. For example, the recent litigation over the attempted shutdown and defunding of USAID confirmed that the administration is still trying to couple speed with factual opacity.
In that litigation, the administration claimed to possess the outlandish authority to cancel spending items that Congress had appropriated and approved—not just for USAID, but for other agencies, grants, and contracts. Numerous federal district judges have found several of the administration’s funding freezes unlawful. The relevant federal law, the Administrative Procedure Act, allows courts to block certain agency actions. That’s just what the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did in the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition v. United States case—block the administration’s implementation of an across-the-board funding freeze at USAID.
The administration rushed to the Supreme Court to free itself from lower-court decisions blocking its initial version of the policies. In particular, the administration requested relief via the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket.” Again, this is right from the travel-ban playbook.
The administration’s lawyers asked the Court to act quickly while insisting that it wasn’t possible to pay out the contracts that had been subject to the initial USAID freeze, which the district court had effectively ordered it to honor. And because the case was developing so rapidly, the government’s timeline did not give the justices much chance to familiarize themselves with the details. As with the travel ban, a rushed job stood to benefit the administration by increasing the odds that the Court would take the government at its word without really looking into things deeply.
In this instance, the administration did not prevail, but it certainly tried. Before the Supreme Court, the government said that it was “not logistically or technically feasible” for it to pay the 2,000 or so invoices ordered by the district court. The justices refused to pause the district court’s ruling, instead allowing the court to determine whether a preliminary injunction was warranted, and directing it to act with “with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.” Left with time to develop and consider more facts, the district court pointed to a declaration by Peter Marocco, the acting director for USAID, acknowledging that prior to January 20, 2025, both USAID and the State Department could process several thousand payments a day. This temporary victory for the rule of law might not last, however; the litigation may yet head back to the Supreme Court, where the administration’s rush strategy could eventually win out.
If the Court accepts what the government is saying now in the summary-expulsion case, it will be risking its own credibility. In that case, the administration is asking the Court to credit, without evidence, several of its assertions. Among them is the unbelievable claim that individuals facing summary expulsion would somehow be able to challenge their prospective expulsion even though they may not know they are about to be sent to a foreign prison.
The Court should reject the government’s request to pause the lower court’s decision and recognize that its rush strategy is designed to make a mockery of the rule of law, not to mention the concept of facts. As they say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice …
A couple of years ago, the conservative writer Christopher Rufo did a fellowship in Budapest, where, upon his arrival, János Csák, Hungary’s then–minister of culture and innovation, “greeted me with a strong handshake,” Rufo later wrote in an essay about the trip. Hungary’s population is not quite 10 million, and the country is among the poorest in the EU, yet Rufo believed that it had something to teach the U.S. The two countries, according to Rufo, were beset by the same diseases: “the fraying of national culture, entrenched left-wing institutions, and the rejection of sexual difference.” But unlike the U.S., Hungary had a plan. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was using “muscular state policy” to turn the culture back around. Among his major targets were Hungarian universities.
In this episode, Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin talks with the education writer Adam Harris, who believes that Rufo’s essay can help explain the Trump administration’s current attack on universities. Since Donald Trump has taken office, he has threatened to take back hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding from universities, and compiled lists of places that might not be in compliance, for various reasons: They failed to protect Jews on campus. They failed to protect women’s sports. They use “racial preferences and stereotypes” in their programs. The administration’s aim, Harris suggests, is much the same as Orbán’s—not just to dismantle the intellectual elite but also to build a new conservative one that better reflects its cultural values.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: Universities are all of a sudden breaking news.
Last week, a video went around showing a man in a navy hoodie approaching a woman in a long, white down coat. It was still pretty cold when the video was shot outside Boston, right near Tufts University. The woman backs away, the guy grabs her hands, and then a few more people approach her from behind.
The woman’s name is Rümeysa Öztürk, and she’s a graduate student at Tufts University. The people approaching her are federal agents. They arrested her after the State Department revoked her student visa.
[Sound of Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest]
Rosin: Just before that, ICE arrested Palestinian activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. He’d been a leader of student protests. The administration said that amounted to supporting Hamas.
News anchor: They claim his student visa was revoked.
Rosin: Other students targeted for deportation: a fellow at Georgetown, also arrested.
News anchor: —detained a grad student from India who was teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa.
Rosin: Columbia was threatened with losing $400 million, and then they agreed to some demands. Harvard is now also under review for roughly $9 billion.
There are dozens more universities on a list, suspected of using racial preferences or of “forcing women to compete with men in sports.”
President Donald Trump: Your population doesn’t want men playing in women’s sports, so you better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding.
Maine Governor Janet Mills: See you in court.
Trump: Every state—good. I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one.
[Music]
Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.
The administration tells one story about its attack on universities: that they’re protecting students against anti-Semitism, protecting traditional women’s sports, going after unfair racial preferences.
But our guest on the show today says that is just what’s on the surface. Adam Harris, who is a senior fellow at New America and who also covered education for The Atlantic, argues that the administration has a much more ambitious, grander plan. And it starts with a pilgrimage to Hungary.
[Music]
Rosin: Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Harris: Thanks for having me.
Rosin: Sure. So Adam, about a year before Trump is elected, a conservative activist named Christopher Rufo decamps to Budapest, writes a dispatch called, “Orbán’s War,” referring, of course, to Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán. And it turns out to be kind of a road map in a surprising way for this moment, what we’re seeing politically and particularly with universities. What is Rufo’s argument in that essay?
Harris: Yeah. He argues, effectively, that one of the more significant things and the thing that wasn’t necessarily understood broadly at the time was the way that Orbán undertook this effort to sort of reshape institutions, both publicly and privately, to create a sort of conservative elite.
Rosin: Okay. And this came, it seems like, as a revelation to conservative intellectuals—like, because Hungary is not an analogous country, but it seemed like a place that you would pilgrimage to learn things. So what was revelatory about this?
Harris: Yeah. Well, Rufo says that they’re facing some of the same issues that conservatives in the United States are, right? The sort of rejection, as he calls it, of sexual difference, the sort of liberal creep into the more general institutions. And Rufo really finds surprising the ways that Orbán was able to successfully combat that in his creation of that new sort of conservative elite in Hungary.
Rosin: It’s interesting because I think of conservatives in this moment of their ascendance as anti-intellectual. This is a slightly different view, where they’re viewing the university as a source of a lot of decline—say, decline of Western civilization. So instead of ignoring it or pushing it away, it sounds like the vision in this essay is, No. Take it back.
Harris: Yeah. It’s sort of: Take it back. Bend it to your own means. Strengthen what they believe are the sort of cultural foundations, right? He talks about family life. He talks about Christian faith. He talks about historical memory. And what a lot of conservatives feel that they’ve lost is that control of historical memory, right? When you think about some of the history curriculums that have been attacked over the last several years, it has been because those curriculums are a sort of fundamental reassessment of the position of some of our most celebrated figures in American public life.
Rosin: So it’s actually incredibly ambitious.
Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. We’re only 60-some odd years into the idea of a multicultural democracy, since the Civil Rights Act. And a lot of people feel that we lost something when we moved into that era. And so effectively, some of this is trying to reclaim that visage of that sort of pastoral past that we lost.
Rosin: Ah. Okay. Okay. I’m starting to understand how this fits more broadly into “Make America Great” and what the attack on universities is actually about. So we haven’t said yet: Who is Christopher Rufo, and how did these ideas start to spread?
Harris: Yeah, so Christopher Rufo is a conservative activist who around 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd, started looking into diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. And he started writing a bunch of blog posts and articles that really examined the DEI in several different areas.
He would pool some of the most jarring examples and sort of use those as a way to indict the entire apparatus that has grown up out of the civil-rights movement. But by September of 2020, some of those articles, some of what he said on TV gets to President Trump during the end of his first term, and that really launches this broader interrogation that we’ve seen since then into diversity principles and sort of these ideas of equity.
Rosin: Okay. So it’s diversity principles, but it’s also diversity principles as filtered through universities.
Harris: Yes.
Rosin: But it’s essentially creating an intellectual road map of all these executive orders, these things that Trump is putting together—there is a grand idea behind them.
Harris: Yes. There’s a grand idea behind them.
Rosin: And as Trump is elected and starting to pick his cabinet, you as an education expert, what did you notice? Like, what did you start to pay attention to in university news?
Harris: Yeah. Well, around December, actually, there was a piece that came out in the Washington Examiner by a conservative education scholar, Max Eden, who argued that Linda McMahon could do a couple of things upon being confirmed as the education secretary in order to overhaul higher education and to ensure that institutions sort of got into line. And one of those things, he argued, was to take a “prize scalp.”
Rosin: A “prize scalp.”
Harris: A “prize scalp,” and that’s a quote-unquote. And he said that institution would be Columbia University, that the administration should go after Columbia as hard as it can. If Columbia did not comply, it should remove its Title IV funds. If Columbia did comply, then they should find another way or they could find another way to remove funding from the institution.
And so when one of the first institutions to receive a big hit on their funding, $400 million, [was] Columbia, the first thing that came to my mind was, Oh, this is a part of the playbook that they talked about in December.
Rosin: So how did Columbia fit into the playbook?
Harris: Yeah. Well, over the last, you know, year and a half, really since October 7, when students started protesting the war in Gaza, Columbia has become the sort of poster child for the ways that higher education is doing things wrong, right?
Rosin:Out of control.
Harris:Out of control. You know, The student protestors are controlling the institution. The leadership doesn’t really have a wrangle on its faculty. There were criticisms of the curriculum—all of these things.
And Columbia and most Ivy League institutions aren’t necessarily places where people are gonna jump to defend them, right? These are places that have multibillion-dollar endowments. When people say that they don’t trust higher education, they don’t mean their local community college. They don’t mean the public regional down the road. They mean Harvard and Columbia because it seems like an unattainable place where the elites are developed anyway.
And so over the last two years, really, you’ve seen these attacks on Columbia and how they’ve handled anti-Semitism on campus. Or you’ve seen attacks on Columbia and what they’re teaching to students. And the imperfect plaintiff nature of Columbia makes it easier to say, Well, everyone has said you’re not handling this well, so let’s go ahead and remove your funding. And it would be one thing if they sort of stopped at Columbia. It would be one thing if they came into office, did a long investigation into what’s going on—because that’s typically what happens, right?
As someone who’s covered the education department for the last, you know, seven, eight years, anytime you have a Title VI investigation in cases of discrimination, those typically take months, if not years, to complete. And upon their completion, the removal of funds has never really been on the table.
Rosin: Okay, so if it didn’t go through the usual process, it didn’t seem to be about what they said it was about. So you, as someone tracking this, what do you think it was about? Like, why remove Columbia’s funding? What was that first move about?
Harris: Yeah. So in that piece that I mentioned from December, the argument was: You remove the funding from Columbia in order to scare other institutions into compliance. And if those institutions don’t immediately comply, then they also know that, Well, I can get my funding taken away too.
We have seen, now, $150 million [taken] away from Penn within days, right—at least paused at Penn within days—of launching or announcing an investigation. And so, really, these timelines just don’t necessarily comport (1) with the way things are done, but they also don’t comport with a proper or legitimate investigation, given the amount of staff they have now at the Department of Education.
Rosin: Okay. So they’re not following the rules of a proper investigation. They’re just trying to get universities to comply. But comply with what?
Harris: Yeah, so there are a couple of various—it was interesting because the administration has gone farther than just saying, Hey. You need to get everything in check. Figure it out, Columbia. They’ve actually given them a list of things that they could do in terms of disciplinary measures for students. They said that one of the academic departments needs to be put under a sort of academic receivership, meaning that someone comes in from outside of the department to serve as the chair and look over their curriculums and things like that.
So there are these sort of very specific guidelines for what can and cannot be said on campuses. And once you start restricting speech in one manner, that sort of means you can restrict speech in a lot of different spaces. So if you say, Well, you can’t have these pro-Palestinian protests in a specific area, and if you do, then we’re going to take your funding away. There are a lot of things there that are reminiscent of the ways that Southern governors used to say that students at Alabama State couldn’t have sit-ins, otherwise they were going to remove the funding from Alabama State College.
It’s adjudicating specific behaviors and speech that students are making, which is really a threat to all of the principles of an institution. When an administration can come into an institution and say, You have to do this very specific thing. These are the policies that you have to implement, the principles of shared governance, the principles of academic freedom, the principles of a sort of free system of higher education really go away—and those same principles that are sort of the bedrocks of our democracy, right? The First Amendment is literally about free speech. When those sorts of things go away, it becomes a very dangerous environment that limits what people can say and do.
[Music]
Rosin: After the break: the narrowing of the American higher-education system—and who will get left out.
[Break]
Rosin: You started out by saying the ultimate vision was building a conservative elite. So is the way you put this entire picture together, is that essentially: You break down, you take away their funding? I mean, now I just sound kind of paranoid and conspiratorial, but maybe this is the plan. Like, you take away funding—in this way, it’s a little confusing, because some of the funding is for science so, you know, it’s not all completely directed. But you take away the funding. You therefore shock the university into stopping behaving the way it has, and then what? What’s the ultimate—I don’t know what happened in Hungary, so—
Harris: Yeah. So that vision that Rufo discussed sort of happened in Hungary, where they’re trying to get back to the cultural traditions, the cultural values that the nation had—those sort of ideas of Christian faith, the ideas of family life. In the same way, it sort of embodies that notion of “Make America Great Again.” And so the question has always been, Well, when exactly was America great?
And over the last several years, there has been an argument that has built up in conservative circles that America was better off in terms of these ideas of personal liberty and the freedom of association before the Civil Rights Act was signed, that this sort of administrative state that has built up to enforce the rules of the Civil Rights Act—so you think about things like race-conscious admissions, which was just voted down at the Supreme Court. You think about these reassessments of curriculums, which prior to the 1960s were legally allowed to obscure and/or omit the contributions of African Americans, of Natives, of Mexican Americans.
You consider the programs that were meant to diversify the workforce more generally—those are some of the programs and things that conservatives are trying to attack in certain ways by saying that they basically discriminate against white people, that it’s reverse discrimination to include those policies, which is why you see a part of this, alongside that $400 million from Columbia, was that broader letter, that “Dear Colleague” letter that said, Hey—if you use race in scholarships, in hiring, in your sort of faculty committees, in your student groups, in any of these things, then we are going to investigate you, and you are going to be in violation of Title VI. And when an institution hears you’re going to be in violation of Title VI, they will start thinking, We’re going to get our funding taken away in the same way that Columbia did.
And so this push to eliminate the Department of Education runs alongside this broader push to get higher education under control, right? These are sort of parallel tracks that end up forming a double helix, right? They go right together. It’s like if you’re going to say that you’re going to investigate anti-Semitism with a vigor that no one has ever investigated it with before, and you remove half of the staff at the Office for Civil Rights that actually investigates anti-Semitism, the thing to do wouldn’t be to remove people who are investigating those complaints. The thing would be to beef up that staff so that they didn’t have 20 to 25 cases on their load, so that they could have those five to 10 complaints they were really focusing on.
Rosin: Right, because they could find examples of anti-Semitism. They could find examples of other kinds of discrimination. But it’s obviously not what you’re actually after if you’re eliminating the office.
Harris: Exactly.
Rosin: You know, as you’re talking, what’s chilling about this is that I do, in fact, associate higher education with the opening of the mind and the broadening of the views. Like, that is what I think university is for. I mean, that is what education in the U.S. does. So it would be a profound shift to think of education as inculcating a very narrow or particular set of content, you know?
Harris: Yes. And you know, it’s interesting. Over the last several years, right, the last couple of decades, actually, there’s been this argument that institutions don’t teach students how to think; they teach students what to think.
Rosin: That’s what conservatives say.
Harris: That’s what conservatives say, yeah. It was one of the first things that Betsy DeVos said when she became the education secretary, was that colleges are teaching students what to think as opposed to how to think. And in some ways, this effort is actually trying to do that. It is trying to teach students, This other stuff is out of bounds, right? But this is the acceptable sort of curriculum for your class. These are the acceptable things that you can say. And even if they’re not saying it explicitly, institutions are taking it as such.
We’ve already seen some colleges, such as High Point University, when that Dear Colleague letter came out that said, Make sure you’re not using race or using discriminatory language in any of these things, they sent out a letter to their faculty, to their staff and said, Remove all of these. They gave them more than 40 words and said, Remove them from everything. Get rid of them in your PowerPoint presentations. Get rid of them in your curriculums. They ended up walking that back. But you see the sort of chill that that already starts to have when administrators are thinking, I don’t want to lose my funding, and so I’m going to go ahead and say, “Let’s just get rid of all of that in our curriculum.”
Rosin: Now, the administration created a task force, and there is this growing list of universities that are up for investigation. Is there any criteria? Do you see any pattern in the universities? Because it does seem to include both elite and less elite. You know, big-city schools, small schools. Like, can you detect anything in what they’re looking for?
Harris: So it’s difficult to detect a trend there. There is a way that you can sort of have a veil of legitimacy on any investigation. And so if you have received a complaint from a school of anti-Semitism, you can say that, Okay. That’s going to be the school that we are going to investigate. And knowing that all it took was 14, you know, 15 days for the administration to go ahead and remove all of $400 million of Columbia’s funding, those institutions may be more likely to say, Whoa. Whatever they’re saying for Columbia to do, let’s go ahead and do that—
Rosin:So that they won’t come after us.
Harris: —so that they won’t come after us.
Rosin: So merely putting a university on the list—and actually, maybe even the arbitrary nature of the list—actually spreads the fear more widely. Maybe this is what I’m realizing now. It’s a very common tactic.
Harris: Exactly.
Rosin: If you just put Harvard and Columbia on the list, then other places wouldn’t have to worry about it. But if you spread it far and wide, then everybody follows your orders. Okay. That’s obvious. So I see now very clearly putting the pieces together, putting the bigger picture together of how they’re scaring universities.
I want to know what’s happening inside the universities and how they’re responding. As someone who doesn’t follow higher education as closely, it’s not that clear to me how important this funding is or how reliant universities are on federal funding.
Harris: Yeah. So for an institution that is, say, more tuition dependent, they rely on the students paying their tuition and that tuition helping them to meet payroll. Title IV funding is incredibly important because if you are not allowed to take loans from students, if you’re not allowed to get Pell Grants from students, then a tuition-dependent institution is going to go out of business. For bigger institutions like Columbia, these are institutions that have federal grants from, you know, the NIH, that have federal grants from the Defense Department, that have USDA grants, that have grants from the, you know, Education Department, right? So it’s very varied, and their tentacles are all through the federal government.
There’s this idea that’s sort of been bubbling up that, Well, these institutions have big endowments. Why don’t you just start using that? There’s a fundamental misunderstanding about endowments. That’s not just, like, fungible money that you can say, Oh, well, that’s $50 billion. We can spend $10 billion and make up for it tomorrow, because most of that money is tied to very specific things. Say a donor made a $400 million donation to the School of Fine Arts: If you start using that for payroll generally, you can guarantee you’re never gonna receive a single dollar ever again, because people can’t trust you to be good stewards or faithful stewards of that money. They can also sue you.
And so there are some colleges that, you know, from 30 to 40 percent of their budgets really kind of come from the federal government, but that’s not to say that this is a completely foreign system. There is not a successful higher-education system in the world, really, that is not sort of subsidy driven, that doesn’t receive significant government subsidies.
Rosin: That’s interesting. I think of the United States as having a largely private university system and that other, you know—I am always jealous of overseas, how they have more public universities. But I never quite put together that, in fact, there is a strong interdependence between public institutions and universities of all kinds. So now I see why that makes them extremely vulnerable.
I’ve watched university presidents—I mean, it mostly feels like they’re scrambling. You know, Columbia was a probably terrifying example for a lot of college presidents because it does seem that even when university presidents comply or try to comply with Trump orders, they still get punished. Do you see any responses now, like, as you’ve watched, maybe since October 7 and then through Trump’s election? What kinds of discussions are they having about how to handle this situation?
Harris: So there’s been a lot of sort of internal back-and-forth at institutions. You haven’t really seen many public responses, in part because there’s a sort of “keep your head down and hope that it’s not you,” you know, some of the smaller institutions, maybe public institutions. For some of the public state institutions, they’re trying to fight things that are going on in their own states, right?
Consider a place like Ohio, where they have a bill that’s supposed to reform higher education. Florida, Texas, North Carolina, all of these states: There’s this big federal thing that’s going on, but you also have these state reforms, whether that’s to tenure, whether that’s to establish a conservative center on campus, whatever it may be. They’re also thinking about those issues, as well. And so a lot of presidents are in sort of a, Keep your head down. Try to avoid being noticed. And if it’s happening over there, then it’s not happening to us, and we’re already thinking about our budget for the next year, as opposed to a cohesive pushback to say, This is an attack on higher education more broadly rather than these singular institutions.
Rosin: And do you think that’s a realistic thing to ask of university presidents? Because it is disheartening to see them fall, one after the other—I mean, both in congressional hearings, in all sorts of ways. And then there’d just be deadly silence. But there’s also silence on the streets. There’s silence in a lot of places. And so I just wonder: Is that a realistic hope?
Harris: It should be.
Rosin: You want to hold onto it?
Harris: I do, because we’ve seen institutions in the last few years be pushed into these policies that say they won’t make public statements about political events, right? In Ohio, in that bill, it said that public colleges can’t make statements about partisan or ideological statements outside of celebrations of the United States and the flag—like, really sort of jingoistic, patriotic statements. And pushing back doesn’t have to look like a president being out in the streets, but it does look like reaffirming your institutional principles and living up to your institutional principles, right? Because a principle’s only a principle when it’s tested.
Rosin: Right.
Harris: And a belief is only, like—you only actually have a value and make public that value when that value is under attack. And so if higher education doesn’t believe in the principles that it was founded on, then institutional leaders should remain silent. But if they do, then there’s a kind of obligation there. It’s one of the reasons why they get paid so much.
Rosin: Whoa. Okay.
Harris: (Laughs.)
Rosin: No. I mean, you’re clear. I appreciate it.
Just one final thing: We started by talking about the ultimate goal of this to be the creation of a different kind of elite in the U.S. I wonder if they have a fully fleshed imagination of what a conservative elite would look like and act like and believe. Like, is the end of the vision real?
Harris: I don’t know if it’s a fully fleshed-out view, but they have pointed to certain institutions and said, This is what it could look like. Those institutions are Hillsdale College, the College of the Ozarks.
I actually went to the College of the Ozarks when Pete Hegseth was speaking, and there was this really, you know, sort of telling quote that he gave during his speech that was just like, I went to Harvard. I went to, you know, the Ivy League institution. Those places have lost their way. This is the sort of place that’s doing it right. This is the future. And you look across the student body—it’s majority white and not even, like, a slim majority. It’s students who, when I spoke to them, talked more about the idea of it being a place where they could go and not have to have a ton of loans on the back end of going to college.
But it was also a place that has—it’s the only college in the country with a vice president of patriotic activities. Every student is required to take a patriotic-education course, where it’s a mix of current events and the founding documents alongside, like, military training. And it’s not a military school. So I don’t know that there’s a fully fleshed-out idea, but I know that there are institutions that they point to as examples of what a college should be, and there are also places that they can point to, like a new college now, and how to make that happen.
Rosin: What ended up happening in Hungary, by the way? Has it broadened into a vision beyond that individual college? Do they have a conservative elite?
Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. And if it’s not a sort of fully fleshed-out one to this point, it is much further along than it was when Orbán launched his assault. I think one of the other things that was really interesting about that piece that Rufo wrote was that he talks about the ways that things seemed normal—
Rosin: And what did he mean by “normal”?
Harris: By “normal,” he talks about, Oh, people talk about it as if it’s, like, an economic backwater, but, you know, business goes on as usual. But there’s this quiet administrative, instructional war that’s going on in education, sort of reshaping things. And so it’s like, Make everything seem as normal as possible while also launching this assault that transforms the way that a country fundamentally operates.
Rosin: And feels and what young minds accept as excellence, basically.
Harris: Exactly.
Rosin: Right. Well, Adam, I think the only option after this conversation is to join you in holding out hope that some group of university presidents stand up for what a university is. Thank you so much for helping us understand that.
Harris: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at theatlantic.com/podsub. That’s theatlantic.com/podsub.
This is the living room of the 800-square-foot house in Denver that held our family of five in the mid-1960s. Every night, my father turned that tiny space into an office, sitting cross-legged in a wide armchair, hunched over the coffee table that held our most valuable possession, a new IBM Selectric typewriter. In the morning, my mom stacked paper and put things away, trying to make the living room livable again.
In 1968, the writer Stan Steiner published a book about a cohort of young Native American activists he called the “new Indians.” My dad, Vine Deloria Jr., was one of them. When he met Steiner, he was the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944 to organize across tribal lines, coordinate political strategy, and lobby Washington. “Ten years ago, you could have tromped on the Indians and they would have said, ‘Okay, kick me again. I’m just an Indian,’ ” he told Steiner. Those days of acquiescence were over: My father demanded instead that Americans honor their treaties and recognize the political sovereignty of tribal governments.
Steiner’s book sent New York publishers chasing after the new Indians he’d identified, hoping to find the voice of this activist generation. My father was one of the few able to get a manuscript between covers, the 1969 best seller Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.
As he transformed our living room, my father transformed his life, bringing it into line with what he imagined a writer’s looked like. The transformation wasn’t entirely smooth. At one point, my father lost confidence in the project, and tried to return his advance to his publisher. His editor waved a marked-up page of manuscript at him—Norman Mailer’s, as he recalled—and my dad realized he wasn’t in it alone. He soldiered on.
This portrait, by the Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson, accompanied an excerpt from Steiner’s book published in Vogue. The image captures the writer’s infrastructure our home hosted each night: chair, table, typewriter, scattered books and newspapers, a ream of fresh paper. And, of course, the stimulants: a cup of cold coffee, a sugar bowl, and a cigarette to keep him going.
My father is wearing a new pair of Justin boots, stirrup-friendly, with the sharp toe pointing in your face. He was about a decade removed from the Marines, and a new regime of travel food and chair time is visibly filling out his frame. He’s holding forth, because my father spoke his book before he wrote it, practicing his words in meetings and interviews. My father is in the room’s corner, but not at all cornered; you can see in his face the new force of Indian Country that exploded in those years. My mom was there too, likely asking him to clean things up before the shutter clicked.
This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “A New Force of Indian Country.”
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In America, the chaotic first few months of Donald Trump’s term have featured roiling stock markets, mass deportations, and a Tesla showroom on the White House lawn. But if you look north, it has unified Canadians against a common threat: a country once considered a friend.
In a bewildering reversal of a close allyship that’s lasted for more than a century, Trump recently started a hot-and-cold trade war that has so far produced 25 percent tariffs on many of Canada’s goods. Canada has imposed retaliatory tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. imports, and announced yesterday that more are set to go in effect in response to Trump’s latest auto levy. In the meantime, Trump keeps waving around the threat of annexation. He has repeatedly suggested that Canada become America’s “51st state” and, according to The New York Times, told then–Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in early February that he considers the 1908 treaty delineating the Canada-U.S. border to be invalid. Many Canadians have responded in kind, sending a clear message to the Trump administration by hitting America where it hurts: the economy.
Now is “the time to choose Canada,” Trudeau said in February. “It might mean opting for Canadian rye over Kentucky bourbon, or forgoing Florida orange juice altogether.” The “Buy Canadian” movement is gaining ground; Canada is America’s top export market, and 63 percent of Canadians are actively looking for Canadian-made products when they shop, according to a poll from February (though enthusiasm for the movement varies based on class and age). Some stores are adding “Made in Canada” labels to products—one liquor store in Vancouver posted “Buy Canadian Instead” signs on empty American-whiskey shelves—and Canadian grocers are reporting that domestic-product sales have recently increased by up to 10 percent. Canadians make up the largest group of international visitors to the U.S., but Canadian airline bookings for U.S. destinations have reportedly dropped more than 70 percent for the spring and summer, according to one industry monitor. The U.S. Travel Association calculates that a 10 percent annual decline in Canadian travelers could amount to more than $2.1 billion in spending losses for America.
Figuring out how to deal with Trump’s recent attacks is the top issue for some Canadian voters ahead of the April 28 federal election, ranking even higher than the economy. Conservative and Liberal party platforms prominently feature their plans for how to rebuild Canada with reduced dependence on America. “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said last week. Across party and provincial lines, the path is clear: Canada wants to Trump-proof itself and America-proof the future.
On the other side of the border, Americans who oppose Trump have struggled to come up with a unified response to his presidency. In part because of the speed and scale of his directives, it’s been hard to develop a protest message or strategy that is as ubiquitous as the “Buy Canadian” movement. Since January 22, the number of street protests in the U.S. has more than doubled compared with the same period at the start of Trump’s first presidency—but they also tend to be smaller in scale, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium. Jeremy Pressman, a co-director of the organization, told me that disorientation could be a factor affecting protests. Since taking office, Trump has signed off on a flurry of actions that empower ICE to detain and deport peoplewithout due process, pave the way for Elon Musk’s shadow presidency, gut the federal government, and grant mass pardons for January 6ers (while also floating the idea of compensating them for their prison time). What should the next protest focus on when so much of American life is under attack?
That’s not to say that larger-scale action has been absent in America. The People’s March took place in D.C., two days before Trump’s second inauguration, to “help participants find a political home.” Thousands joined, but it ultimately saw far fewer people than the Women’s March, eight years prior. Pressman noted that lately, more people have shown interest in economic boycotts of companies that support Trump or the administration’s anti-DEI agenda, including Amazon, Target, and Tesla. Republican representatives are getting shouted down in local town halls (Democrats, too, for their inaction), and protesters are demonstrating at Tesla facilities across the country. A bright spot has been the national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, headlined by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which has drawn more than 100,000 attendees over the past month.
Protesters also face an environment especially hostile to dissent. When Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist on a green card, was arrested in New York last month, the government did not provide evidence of illegal activity. And when Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student who co-authored an op-ed urging her university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” had her visa revoked without her knowledge and was confronted by six masked federal agents last week, the Department of Homeland Security stated vaguely that she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Their stories are a warning from the Trump administration: Defiance can come at a steep price.
Of course, protests outside the U.S. are bound to look much different from those in a country contending with its own leadership. But Canada’s situation is a notable point of contrast, because the sentiment of citizens is being echoed and acted on by their representatives. Even if America’s anti-Trump protests pick up more speed, a successful movement requires those in power to be willing and able to harness that energy. Traditionally, two important avenues for such action run through Congress and the courts. When Trump signed an executive order in 2017 banning travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries, thousands of people flooded airport terminals in protest. Civil-liberties groups took notice and filed suits in quick succession to block the order; the watered-down version of the ban, upheld by the Supreme Court more than a year later, was a pale imitation of the original.
Things are different this time. “Two months into Trump’s second term, fear is taking hold across broad cross sections of American society,” my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker wrote last week. Trump and his allies are openly calling for the impeachment of federal judges who push back on his orders, and high-powered law firms are falling like dominoes as they capitulate to the administration’s demands. Half of Congress is beholden to the president; the other half is dogged by historically low favorability polling. Whereas Canadian leaders of all political stripes are calling for their constituents to boycott American goods, America’s only opposition party is scrambling to cobble together a coherent strategy. Democratic Senator Cory Booker, who delivered a record-breaking 25-hour speech on the Senate floor this week, issued a wake-up call to his fellow senators: “Generations from now will look back at this moment and have a single question: Where were you?”
Winning more blue congressional seats in the 2026 midterms is one way to loosen Trump’s grip on the federal government, but those are more than a year away. “The only way to win is people power,” Jonathan V. Last, the editor of The Bulwark, wrote last week; the Democratic Party “will have to be pushed into fighting by a mass popular movement.” “Hands Off!” protests against Trump and DOGE will take place around the country tomorrow, with a large march planned in Washington. Thousands have rallied to oppose the detainment of Öztürk and Khalil. And the sweeping “Liberation Day” tariff announcements have already ramped up outrage over potentially devastating price increases. Many Americans still have an appetite for dissent. But whereas the Trump presidency has cast into sharp relief Canada’s national identity, it has had the opposite effect domestically. The challenge for Trump’s detractors will be figuring out how to take a fractured coalition and rebuild.
Over the past decade or so, an influential set of female novelists has been circling a shared question: Given how often women are forced to understand themselves as fundamentally in relation to others (most commonly a child and/or a partner, but also parents, extended family, friends), is it possible for a woman to have an authentic, independent self? If a female narrator is extracted from her core relational ties, what kind of consciousness is left?
