The great institutions of liberal America are falling to Trump like dominoes, one by one

Canadian Dimension Derek Sayer / April 7, 2025 / 20 min read

Republished in Monthly Review Online, April 9, 2025.

A non-political civil service, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, USAID, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Scholarships, federal funding for scientific and medical research—the Washington Post, the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Ivy League universities, “big law”—the great institutions of liberal America are falling to Trump like dominoes, one by one. Those with the biggest reputations have all too often capitulated, starting with the Fourth Estate.

Anticipatory obedience

Obeying in advance began well before Trump’s inauguration on January 15. Last October Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder and ex-CEO of Amazon, sniffed the way the wind was blowing and intervened to cancel the editorial board’s proposed endorsement of Kamala Harris in the upcoming presidential election.

The owner’s interference in the editorial independence of the storied paper whose journalists ended Richard Nixon’s presidency provoked the resignation of Editor-at-Large Robert Kagan and the loss of over 250,000 subscribers. Editorial board members David Hoffman and Molly Roberts and columnist Michele Norris, the first Black female host for National Public Radio (NPR), followed Kagan out the door.

The Los Angeles Times also backed out of endorsing any candidate on the orders of billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, which led Editorials Editor Mariel Garza to quit, together with editorial board members Karin Klein and Robert Greene. When Soon-Shiong’s 31-year-old daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, claimed that the family declined to endorse Harris “to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children” in Gaza, her father hastened to deny any such suggestion.

Early in January, the Washington Post refused to publish a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ann Telnaes that depicted Bezos, Soon-Shiong, and tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg (founder and CEO of Meta) and Sam Altman (co-founder and CEO of OpenAI) offering “bags of money to a larger-than-life Trump statue standing on a decorated pedestal with its head just out of view.” Telneis resigned from the Post, where she had worked since 2008, in protest at this blatant act of political censorship.

Zuckerberg and Bezos have had their disagreements with Trump in the past. But along with other billionaires, both were a prominent presence at his inauguration. So was Elon Musk. Well before their current bromance bloomed, Musk had tried to ingratiate himself with Trump by reinstating his account on X (formerly Twitter). His Latin comment “Vox populi, vox dei” (the voice of the people is the voice of God) reads ominously in retrospect.

Meta hastened to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed after his banning from Facebook following the January 6, 2020 assault on the Capitol, and obligingly replaced independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram with X-style user-generated “community notes.” Independent fact-checkers were “too politically biased,” explained Zuckerberg, and it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression.”

On February 26 Bezos instructed Washington Post editorial staff that from now on only opinions supportive of “personal liberties” and “free markets” would be accepted for the opinion pages of the paper, and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, promptly resigned. Bezos says he asked Shipley whether he wanted to stay on, suggesting “if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’” Ain’t free expression great?

Billionaires have much to gain from cozying up to Trump—like a $4.5 trillion tax cut and a bonfire of environmental and other regulations—and even more to lose if they don’t. For those less willing to kiss the ring, the administration has other means of persuasion.

Muzzling the media

Speaking at the Conservative Policy Action Conference (CPAC) on February 23, 2024, MAGA cheerleader Kash Patel urged:

We [must] collectively join forces to take on the most powerful enemy that the United States has ever seen, and no it’s not Washington, DC, it’s the mainstream media and these people out there in the fake news. That is our mission!

A year later, MAGA’s war against the media is raging on all fronts.

Among other “intimidation tactics” (as the New York Times rightly describes them) designed to control the news, the Trump administration has removed Associated Press reporters from the White House press pool; stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association of its historic role in deciding which journalists have access to the president; and attempted to dismantle Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, which Trump accuses of a “leftist bias” and failing to project “pro-American” values.

The New York Times may complain about Trump vilifying its star correspondents, but it is not above self-censorship when it matters. Per CNN, on April 5, “1,400 “Hands Off!” mass-action protests were held at state capitols, federal buildings, congressional offices, Social Security’s headquarters, parks and city halls throughout the entire country,” and involved “millions of people.” One of the largest marches stretched for 20 city blocks on New York’s Fifth Avenue. The Times reported it on page 18 of its Sunday print edition.

The DOGE Subcommittee of Congress, headed by Trump’s ally Marjorie Taylor Greene, has threatened the public broadcast networks NPR and PBS, whose CEOs it summoned on March 26 “to explain why the demonstrably biased news coverage they produce for an increasingly narrow and elitist audience should continue to be funded by the broad taxpaying public.”

Trump has meanwhile extorted $15 million from ABC News in an out-of-court settlement of a defamation case over its reporting of the E. Jean Carroll trials, and his campaign is suing the Daily Beast for defamation in “a transparent attempt to intimidate The Beast and silence the independent press.” Other intimidatory litigation is ongoing against CBS News, the Des Moines Register, and the Pulitzer Board.

Mugging the lawyers

Trump has used executive orders to go after several top law firms who have taken cases and represented clients he doesn’t like. An order against the law firm Jenner & Block, for example, punished it for pro bono representation of transgender people and immigrants. The sanctions imposed on this and other practices include removing their lawyers’ security clearances, barring federal agencies from doing business with them, and excluding them from federal government buildings—including the courts.

An executive memorandum of March 22, aimed at immigration lawyers in particular, directs “the Attorney General to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States,” rendering pursuit of any lawsuit against any government agency a risky proposition.

While Jenner & Block and two other firms are challenging these orders in court, four other “big law” outfits—Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps, Milbank, and Willkie Farr—have not only caved to Trump’s demands, but agreed to commit millions of dollars in pro bono legal work to causes that Trump supports in order to avoid being sanctioned. Best keep on the right side of the boss, even if the boss is clearly on the wrong side of the law.

Defending “all firms and lawyers who fight against this president’s lawless executive actions,” senior partners of the law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters wrote:

We sympathize. We take seriously our obligations to our clients, our associates, our staff and their families. But at this crucial moment, clients need to find their courage, too. And partners at big firms—who often earn millions a year—must be willing to take financial risks when the fate of our nation, the future of our profession and the rule of law itself are at stake.

You can support a lawyer’s right to represent unpopular clients and causes against powerful forces—essentially the oath we all took when becoming members of the bar. Or you can sit back, check your bank balance and watch your freedoms, along with the legal system and the tripartite system of government we should not take for granted, swirl down the drain.

Playing the terrorism card

Citing a provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act that empowers the government to deport people if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe their presence in the country “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,” ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident and recent graduate student at Columbia University, in front of his eight-months pregnant wife—who is an American citizen—and have since detained him first in New Jersey, then in Louisiana. The only thing preventing him from being deported is a court challenge.

Khalil’s offense is the leading role he played in last year’s protests at Columbia University against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. However, as his lawyers emphasize:

Mr. Khalil has never been accused, charged or convicted of any crime. He was ripped from his home, detained and threatened with deportation in retaliation for his political beliefs. His case represents a clear attempt by the Trump administration to silence dissent, intimidate our universities and attack our freedom.

Khalil’s case is the first of many. Others (we know of) include Badar Khan Suri, Yunseo Chung, Ranjani Srinivasan, Alireza Doroudi, and Momodou Taal.

Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk, who is in the US on an F-1 visa, was snatched off the street by masked and anonymous ICE agents, transferred to a detention facility 1,500 miles away with no access to a lawyer, and threatened with deportation for no other “crime” than that she coauthored an op-ed for the school’s student newspaper whose contents Secretary of State Marco Rubio doesn’t like.

According to his own testimony, Rubio has since retrospectively revoked the visas of hundreds other foreign student “lunatics” on grounds that their social media posts show them to be a threat to national security, leaving them liable to deportation without due process, “potentially to countries other than a student’s homeland” (my emphasis).

This is exactly what happened to 238 Venezuelan migrants, who have been deported to El Salvador and imprisoned without trial in the notoriously brutal Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca. They were alleged members of the “terrorist” criminal gang Tren de Aragua, but this has never been established in court. In this case Trump has perverted the 1798 Enemies Alien Act to define Tren de Aragua as “invaders” of the United States. The sole “evidence” connecting the gay makeup artist Andry José Hernández Romero with the gang was his crown tattoos—which are traditional in his Venezuelan hometown.

The message is: keep your head down, your nose clean, and your mouth shut and you’ll be OK. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s appointment of Kash Patel as FBI director has set many alarm bells ringing. Patel’s resumé is long on “counter-terrorism,” and boasts of “working with our nation’s tier one special forces units to conduct collaborative global targeting operations in almost every theater of war worldwide.” Now he’s bringing it all back home. Specious associations of “terrorism” are being used to launch a real reign of terror.

The Trump Kennedy Center

On February 7, Trump posted a surprise announcement on Truth Social regarding the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, whose annual awards ceremony he had ostentatiously shunned during his first term in the White House:

At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN. I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture. We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!

Trump went on to fire two dozen members of the traditionally bipartisan board and replaced them with MAGA loyalists, including the wives of Vice President J.D. Vance and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (and her mother Cheri Summerall), mega-donor Patricia Duggan, Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartilomo, and the spouses of several business allies.

Trump then had the trustees elect him chairman in place of billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein; ousted the center’s long-serving director Deborah Sutter and other senior staff members; and installed Richard Grenell, a former acting director of national intelligence, as interim president. Grenell told CPAC that his vision for the center was “to make art great again,” with “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”

Trump promised his supporters that “Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth—THIS WILL STOP.” Instead, he wants the center to stage Camelot, Hello Dolly!, Fiddler on the Roof, Cats, and The Phantom of the Opera. The fact that only Phantom is currently playing in North America—these respectively premiered in 1960, 1963, 1964, 1981, and 1986—seems not to have deterred him.

Meantime, in one of those richly symbolic details where the devil likes to lurk, records of the 2023 production of 1776, in which a multiracial cast of female, trans, and non-binary performers donned breeches, buckle shoes, and wigs to impersonate America’s all-white Founding Fathers, have been disappeared from the center’s website.

A dozen center staff, including Ellen Palmer, vice president of corporate engagement, and Leslie Miller, the senior vice president of development, quit over the MAGA takeover. Actor Issa Rae, TV producer (of Scandal and Bridgerton fame) Shonda Rhimes, opera singer Renée Fleming, and musicians Rhiannon Giddens and Ben Folds and other artists cut ties with the center or canceled upcoming performances.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, which had been scheduled to run for several weeks in 2026—and would likely have been the highest-grossing event of the season—was pulled by its producer. Miranda explained: “The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center.”

Donations are drying up, ticket sales have plummeted, and revenues have tanked. No matter. The Great American Cultural Revolution must go on.

Inside the museums diversity goes up on trial

Back in 2021, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC announced that its “strategic priority” was to “focus on diversity, equity, access and inclusion throughout our work to diversify the stories we tell, the ways in which we tell them, and our staff.”

Metrics for measuring the plan’s success included increasing gender, racial, and ethnic diversity in acquisitions, as well as “progress toward special exhibitions and installations of the permanent collection … that tell non-Euro-centric art stories … [and] include a significant percentage of non-white artists and women artists.”

Over the next three years the museum “hired its first curator of African American art, recruited trustees of color to the board and began mounting more shows by women and artists of color.” That process of liberal enlightenment has now come to an abrupt halt.

In response to Trump’s executive order of January 20 banning “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI)” in all agencies and entities of the federal government, the NGA announced that it had “closed its office of belonging and inclusion and removed related language from our website.”

The NGA is not an agency or entity of the federal government, and the US is not the Soviet Union or North Korea. The president cannot (yet) simply decree what the NGA and other museums are permitted to exhibit. But the NGA receives 80 percent of its operating budget from the federal government and was hardly in a position to argue.

Fears of losing federal funding likely also explain why the National Endowment for the Arts has eliminated Challenge America grants designed to “extend the reach of the arts to underserved groups/communities,” instead prioritizing “projects that celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America (America250).” Discretion is the better part of valour.

Whitewashing the past

Perhaps the most ominous piece of MAGA cultural regulation to date is Trump’s March 27 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Trump begins:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.

Remembering, perhaps, the widespread interrogation of exactly whose histories were being commemorated in public spaces that followed the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the order directs the secretary of the interior to:

take action … to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.

Trump reserves his fiercest fire for the Smithsonian Institution—whose 21 museums, 21 libraries, and 14 education and research centres in Washington, DC make it one of the largest and most influential knowledge complexes on the planet. He is appalled that:

the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”

The clear implication is that if white people dominate American society, the reasons must lie in the biological superiority of the white “race,” not in a history built on the twin pillars of genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of millions of Africans. The undisguised fascist roots of Trump’s worldview are on display here for all to see.

The order goes on to direct J.D. Vance, in his capacity as a member of the board of regents, to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and “ensure that future appropriations … prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that … promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

The Smithsonian has yet to formally respond. But again, though it is not part of any branch of US government, two-thirds of the institution’s $1.25 billion annual budget comes from federal allocations. Secretary Lonnie Bunch, who founded the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), faces a difficult choice.

NMAAHC was another target of Trump’s executive order. The poet Kevin Young, Bunch’s successor as NMAAHC director, was put on indefinite leave on March 10. He resigned “to focus on his writing” on April 4.

The war on science and education

The administration started softening up America’s universities early in Trump’s second term, with cuts to federal research funding causing hiring freezes, lab closures, layoffs, cuts in graduate admissions, and the withdrawal of job offers. MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania were among the schools affected.

At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which now falls under the jurisdiction of vaccine skeptic Robert Kennedy Jr., grant review panels were suspended, blocking millions of dollars in funding for medical research.

On March 27, Kennedy announced 10,000 job losses, including leaders of divisions regulating food and drugs, studying chronic diseases and the risks of environmental disasters, and targeting HIV prevention. Among those fired were eleven principal investigators, who lead research teams. One senior NIH scientist predicted the result would be “chaos,” with cutting-edge neurological research particularly at risk.

It speaks volumes that the hundreds of “words federal agencies are now discouraged from using” (per a New York Times compilation of government documents) include not only Black, disabilities, equality, gender, historically, indigenous community, transgender, and women, but also clean energy, climate crisis, and climate science.

During the night of April 3, state humanities councils and recipients of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) began receiving emails telling them their funding was ending immediately because the agency would be “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the president’s agenda.”

The new acting director of the agency, Michael McDonald, who was appointed after his predecessor Sally Lowe was forced to resign “at the direction of president Trump,” told senior NEH staff that upward of 85 percent of the agency’s current grants would be canceled. In the future, NEH would focus on “patriotic programming.” The New York Times had previously reported that DOGE wanted to cut 80 percent of NEH’s 180 staff.

Though the NEH is not about to find a cure for cancer—that prospect just grew a lot more distant thanks to the cuts at the NIH—we should be in no doubt of the magnitude of the stakes here. According to its website:

NEH is the only federal agency in the United States dedicated to funding the humanities. Since its founding in 1965, NEH has awarded over $6 billion in grants to museums, historic sites, colleges, universities, K–12 teaching, libraries, public television and radio stations, research institutions, independent scholars, and to its humanities council affiliates in each of the nation’s 56 states and jurisdictions. Panels of independent, external reviewers examine and select top-rated proposals to receive grants.

Who needs experts? On this as on everything else, the self-professed stable genius in the White House knows best.

The antisemitism canard

Alongside these cuts, Trump’s administration has attacked academic freedom under cover of combatting “antisemitism”—which in Trump’s America, like in Biden’s America, has been redefined to encompass virtually any criticism of Israel’s “plausibly genocidal” actions in Gaza, even when the critics are Jewish.

On March 7, Trump’s so-called Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced the immediate cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University in New York “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The statement went on:

The decisive action by the DOJ, HHS, ED, and GSA to cancel Columbia’s grants and contracts serves as a notice to every school and university that receives federal dollars that this administration will use all the tools at its disposal to protect Jewish students and end anti-Semitism on college campuses.

On March 10, the Department of Education—a body Trump is committed to abolishing, but which in the meantime has its uses—put sixty elite institutions on notice that they were under investigation for “antisemitic discrimination and harassment.”

In fact, under President Minouche Shafik, who resigned under Republican pressure in August 2024, and her successor Katrina Armstrong, Columbia bent over backwards to protect Jewish students.

Among other measures, the university restricted access to campus to those carrying Columbia ID; tightened up event policies; revamped procedures “to report allegations of hate speech, harassment, and other forms of disruptive behavior, including antisemitic behavior”; “enhanced reporting channels … supplementing internal resources through a team of outside investigators”; established an antisemitism task force; banned student societies, including Jewish Voice for Peace; twice invited NYPD armed riot police onto campus to break up protests, leading to scores of arrests; disciplined student protestors; removed three deans for allegedly antisemitic text messages; and forced law professor Katherine Franke into early retirement for her claim that “students who “come right out of their military service” have “been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus”—a reference to a case in which ex-IDF Columbia students sprayed protestors with an unknown substance, sending several of them to hospital.

It is difficult to see what more the university could reasonably have done to protect its Jewish community—many of whose members were (and are) active in the protests. But facts (and Jews) are not what matter here. It’s all about messaging.

As New York Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Adriano Espaillat wrote in a joint statement:

Revoking federal grants to Columbia University isn’t about combating anti-Semitism; it’s about the Trump administration’s war on education and science … Today’s announcement does nothing to keep Jewish students safe and sends a chilling message that universities must align with the MAGA agenda or face financial ruin.

The administration has since threatened to axe billions of dollars in federal funding from Princeton, Harvard, Brown, and other elite universities over their alleged tolerance of antisemitism, and has suspended $175 million in research grants to the University of Pennsylvania over a transgender swimmer who last represented the school in 2022.

Bending the knee

Faced with the threat of further cuts in funding, Columbia caved to Trump’s blackmail, agreeingamong other measures to ban face masks, hire 36 “special officers” to arrest individuals, and install a “senior vice-provost” to take over running the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies, with a mandate to “review all aspects of leadership and curriculum.”

Scores of schools, including UCLA, the University of Florida, Georgia Tech, Iowa State University, the University of Michigan, Texas A & M, the United States Naval Academy, the University of Virginia, and the entire University of North Carolina and University of Texas systems hastened to close DEI offices, dismantle DEI programs, and purge DEI statements from their websites.

Harvard—the richest university in the world, with an endowment of $53.2 billion—suspended its research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and dismissed the director and associate director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Cemal Kafadar and Rosie Bsheer. NYU cancelled a talk on challenges in humanitarian crises by Dr Joanne Liu, a former head of Médecins Sans Frontières, over the content of some of her slides. They dared to mention casualties in Gaza and cuts at USAID.

Yale fired the Iranian legal scholar Helyeh Doutaghi, a prominent critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, for her alleged connections with a Palestinian charity the US government has designated as a fundraiser for terrorism. Johns Hopkins instructed faculty, staff, and students not to obstruct ICE officers if they try to arrest any member of the university community on campus, nor tip off anyone that ICE was hunting them, “or engage in any behavior in an effort to enable them to leave the premises or hide.”

A few brave holdouts like Brown, Tufts, the Rutgers University Senate, and one lonely University of Michigan dean at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design have stood up against the Trump administration’s pressure, but many more institutions have not.

Even Barack Obama—who like former Presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Joe Biden has kept disgracefully quiet about Trump’s assault on liberal America—was moved to comment:

If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?

If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.

The chickens come home to roost

With a handful of exceptions—the most notable being Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee, and other members of “the Squad”—the Democrats have mounted no significant opposition to Trump’s blitzkrieg.

Rather than boycotting—or even showing up and turning their backs on—Trump’s address to both houses of Congress on March 3, Hakeem Jeffreys called upon his colleagues to maintain a “strong, determined and dignified” presence. Under the leadership of Chuck Schumer, enough Senate Democrats voted with the Republicans to confirm almost all Trump’s appointments and pass a funding bill House Democrats characterized as “an assault on critical programs for vulnerable Americans.”

Kamala Harris made herself notorious for shutting up hecklers who dared protest her policy on Gaza during the election campaign with her catchphrase “I’m speaking”—a stance that may well have cost her the election. A YouGov poll released on January 20 showed that “29 percent of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 cited ‘ending Israel’s violence in Gaza’ as their reason for withholding their vote.” This may have been enough to tip the balance in the key swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which would have put Harris in the White House had the vote gone the other way. Now, the only speaking Harris is doing is to real estate conventions in Australia (where she is listed as giving “no interviews” to the media).

The high point of the Democrats’ “resistance” is Cory Booker’s 25-hour Senate speech, which beat the previous record for bloviating set by the arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond filibustering the Civil Rights Act in 1957. In all of that time Booker did not once mention the genocide in Gaza—or the repression of protests in the US.

Two days later Booker voted against Bernie Sanders’ attempt to block $8.8 billion in new arms sales to Israel, including more than 35,000 2000-pound bombs whose sale the Biden administration had suspended. His two motions were defeated by majorities of 83-15 and 82-15. Only 14 Democrats (out of 45) strayed from the party line.

And here, in a nutshell, is the problem. The Democrats cannot credibly lead resistance to Trump’s trampling on democratic norms and the rule of law in America because that is exactly what the Biden–Harris administration—along with most other Western governments—had been doing in relation to Gaza for the last 18 months.

In the words of the activist writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaking to an audience of students at the University of Michigan on February 21:

We are in a moment right now where people are asking themselves, ‘Why can’t the Democratic Party defend this assault on democracy?’” However you take the state of democracy in America to be … I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, if you can’t fight for something that is so blatantly and obviously unjust, if you can’t oppose the 2,000 [pound] bombs dropped on schools and on hospitals, what does everything else mean?