Through the fog of norm-defying news, at least one pattern is clear: President Donald Trump is targeting three bulwarks of democracy and the rule of law: lawyers (law firms and legal service organizations), academics (universities), and journalists (independent news media). His emerging playbook is to bully some of the most privileged institutions in these fields to publicly submit to his agenda. Law firms including Covington and Burling, Paul Weiss, and Perkins Coie; universities like Columbia; and media outlets like the Associated Press have been the first targets of Trump’s spectacle of attempted subordination. They will not be the last.
There are lessons to be learned from resistance work by targeted communities in the U.S. and abroad on how to respond to such assaults.
Defining the Problem
Each time Trump succeeds in subordinating his target, his power ricochets far beyond the particular organization in question, affecting the risk-taking calculus of those who fear they might be added to his list. Acting in isolation, it is hard for a single news outlet, firm, or university to withstand an attack backed by the power of the state. Collectively, though, their extraordinary human, political, and financial resources are a force to be reckoned with. Trump currently seems to understand this better than they do.
Some of these targeted institutions are using the courts to push back against Trump’s encroachments on their constitutional rights. The Associated Press has brought suit against Trump administration officials for barring it from the White House press pool in retaliation for its editorial decision over how to describe the Gulf of Mexico. That case is currently playing out in D.C District Court. Perkins Coie is likewise turning to the courts to challenge Trump’s Executive Order targeting them in violation of their claimed constitutional rights.
Others have capitulated without a fight. In the media, this response began even in advance of Trump’s inauguration with outlets like the ABC providing a $15 million settlement to Trump in a defamation case that most experts believe they could readily have won in court. In another preemptive move, The Washington Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, has started to censor his paper’s editorial staff in an effort to bring their work into line with Trump’s views. There’s a longer list of such examples that are now well known.
In terms of law firms, Paul Weiss entered into an agreement with Trump in order to secure his rescission of the March 14 Executive Order targeting them. The exact terms of the agreement are disputed. In particular, the version of the agreement posted by Trump says that the firm “will not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies” in its hiring, promotion and retention practices, and that it will commit $40 million in pro bono legal services to “the Administration’s initiatives” in relation to veterans, fairness in the justice system, and the President’s Taskforce to Combat Antisemitism. The law firm’s version of the agreement does not include the quoted language. It simply states its commitment to “merits based hiring, promotion and retention” and dedicates its $40 million in pro bono services to the listed initiatives, without characterizing them as “the Administration initiatives.”
On Sunday afternoon, Paul Weiss Chair, Brad Karp, sent a firmwide email sharing his disappointment that far from responding with solidarity to the Mar. 14 Executive Order targeting his firm, “certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.” He explained that the brokered agreement asks Paul Weiss to do nothing but what they already do in relation to merit-based hiring, and that the dedicated pro bono services in the agreement are “areas of shared interest.” In other words, the deal is a calculated win for the firm and its clients; it enables them to keep the lights on without compromising their core principles. Others strongly disagree. Either way, if one shifts perspective from the individual firm’s interests to look at the picture holistically, any purported victory by Paul Weiss here feels decidedly pyrrhic.
Trump has demonstrated he can use the power of an Executive Order to get a well-heeled firm that employs, of all things, lawyers, to make a deal with him, instead of pursuing a legal challenge against the unconstitutional threat. As Karp himself laid out in his email, Paul Weiss concluded that even a victory in litigation against the Trump administration would not have protected “our client’s interests … because our firm would still be perceived as persona non grata with the Administration.” What Karp failed to add was that a victory in litigation could have dissuaded Trump from pursuing the same action against others. Instead, Trump now knows that using the power of the presidency to bully a law firm can be successful. And if he has done it once, he can do it again (including, by the way, to Paul Weiss). Indeed, less than 48 hours after the agreement, the White House issued a sweeping new memorandum designed to chill, among others, “powerful Big Law pro bono practices” from taking actions that would challenge Trump’s agenda in the relation to “national security, homeland security, public safety, or election integrity.”
In the sphere of higher education, Columbia University agreed last week to essentially all of the conditions the Trump administration demanded as a prerequisite to negotiate resuming the $400 million in federal funding to the university that the administration canceled in early March. Among the demands, predicated on the alleged failure of Columbia to protect its students and faculty from antisemitism, was to place the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department into “academic receivership” – an extraordinary encroachment on academic freedom.
In a letter published on Friday, titled “Advancing Our Work to Combat Discrimination, Harassment, and Antisemitism at Columbia,” the university stated it would, among other actions, appoint a new Senior Vice Provost to review its Middle East programs, hire new officers empowered to remove and/or arrest individuals on campus, and prohibit protests in places where academic activities take place. The letter claimed that agreeing to the Trump administration’s demands was consistent with its mission “to provide a safe and thriving environment for research and education, while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.”
Much like the decision made by Paul Weiss, one might argue that Columbia is taking steps that it would or should have already been taking in relation to refuting charges of antisemitism. Yet, over 500 Jewish professors across the United States, including at Columbia University itself, wrote a nuanced letter discrediting this claim: “Let us be clear: These actions do not protect us.”
The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news of the agreement, reported that a “Columbia senior administrator said the school considered legal options to challenge the Trump team but ultimately determined the federal government has so many available levers to claw back money, it would be a difficult fight.”
By making the call to save itself from a difficult fight now, Columbia University, which has an endowment of $14.8 billion, has skewed the playing field for other universities that the Trump administration is threatening. (What’s more, since the actions Columbia has taken secure only a starting point for negotiations, there is no guarantee that the Trump administration will not halt its federal funding now or in the future, regardless.) Once again, no matter what the ultimate result is for Columbia, Trump has successfully demonstrated that he can use state power to get one of the wealthiest institutions in higher education to contort itself away from its own mission. When a university like Columbia agrees to Trump’s terms, every other institution of higher education questions their own ability to resist when their turn comes.
Identifying Meaningful Responses
Across each of these spheres, the one thing that Trump has not yet encountered is a unified resistance. There have been a handful of commendable efforts, especially from journalists; the White House Correspondents Association is supporting the Associated Press, and many other media outlets are also signaling that they stand with the AP. The American Bar Association has made a public statement in support of the legal profession. Princeton University President, Christopher Eisgruber, spoke out forcefully on behalf of Columbia. Such public signaling is important, but it is still a thin version of solidarity.
Nowhere yet have we seen true efforts at burden-sharing between those targeted and those not (yet) in the line of fire. Perhaps this is precisely because the types of institutions that Trump is going after have long thought of themselves as autonomous entities whose mission is to take care of themselves and their own. There are some small signs of promise beginning to bubble up, like the law firms looking to file an amicus brief in support of Perkins Coie’s lawsuit against the Trump administration. But there is scope for so much more.
If journalists, lawyers, and academics are going to be able to play the role that they need to perform as bulwarks of democracy and the rule of law, they and their employers must begin to think and act in collective terms. One source of expertise lies in the people and institutions in marginalized communities throughout this country and around the globe who have had decades of experience in navigating a world where simply looking out for one’s own best interests is insufficient for individual or collective survival.
Examples across time and place are endless: resistance work by Black communities in the United States from the slave-era through to today, coordination across ethnic lines to succeed in the Delano Grape Strike, or to run Sudanese Emergency Response Rooms. In these examples and untold more, different groups have worked to build trust and develop a collective reflex such that when one group is targeted others ask: How can we help you? Now is the time to learn from them.
Not every institution threatened with unlawful state power can fight back. Sometimes there are good reasons not to. Not every form of resistance can or should be public. Each institution targeted – now, or in the future, must go through a painful process of figuring out why, where, and how to draw their red lines. But for institutions to cede so quickly sends the message Trump intended, whether or not those institutions survive: Trump controls; resistance is futile. The time to change that message is now, and collective action is the only way to get there.
– Rebecca Hamilton (Bluesky – LinkedIn – X) is an Executive Editor of Just Security and Professor of Law at American University, Washington College of Law.
