The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 4 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
After the New York Times reported that President Trump had backtracked on the major demand he’d made on Harvard University, he spiraled out of control in three wild tirades. He denied backtracking, demanded a correction from the Times, and levied a series of unhinged new threats against Harvard. What’s interesting here, though, is how panicked, ineffective, and humiliated Trump looked as he fired off crazed, half-cocked threats at the university. Why don’t more institutions grasp that standing firm in the face of Trump’s bullying is the only way to defuse it? We’re talking about all this with Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard who’s been at the forefront of arguing that Harvard shouldn’t cave. Ryan, nice to have you on.
Ryan Enos: Thanks. I’m very glad to be here.
Sargent: So, the Times reported that Harvard seems to have decided not to pay the $200 million that the Trump administration was demanding over claims that it had mishandled antisemitism on campus. Apparently, Harvard’s leadership worried about the backlash to surrendering to Trump. They had to weigh that against the prospect of losing a lot of federal research grants, which the administration has been attempting to cut. Ryan, can you walk us through how all this happened and bring us up to date?
Enos: Yeah. Well, look, I mean, it’s a long, convoluted story, but we have to remember that this is all in the context of Trump’s authoritarian attacks on civil institutions. And the universities are just one of those; just like other authoritarians have done in other countries, universities are a prime target. And everybody knew from day one that Harvard would be one of those prime targets—the prime target—because of its standing in American higher education.
And so not long after Trump took office, he set off a series of demands to Harvard and went through and illegally canceled contracts that had been awarded to Harvard—with the promise that these would come back, as ransom payments go, as extortionary payments go, if Harvard acceded to a series of demands that essentially took away its independence as a university, that were completely an affront to the system of higher education in the United States.
And then Harvard sued—led by the faculty and then joined by the university—and won, and won these grants back after our research funding had been canceled. So supposedly in the background, at least we hear from the New York Times, that there’s been a series of negotiations ongoing. And as you mentioned, when it was reported that Harvard was not going to pay out this sort of arbitrary yet very high sum of 200 million or 500 million—it’s gone all over the place—that Trump seems to have “lost it,” for lack of [a] better term, and gone on a ramp that now is a billion dollars, which I think, you know, just shows the arbitrariness of this whole situation.
Sargent: Well, Trump indeed exploded in fury at this news. He claimed on Truth Social that the Times has been fed a lot of nonsense by “strongly anti-Semitic Harvard.” He said, quote, “We are now seeking $1 billion in damages.” He also said this should be a “criminal, not civil event.” So, Ryan, it’s very clear that he’s deeply humiliated by the suggestion that he might backtrack. So he seems to be saying that the Justice Department should investigate Harvard criminally in some way and that the administration won’t back off unless Harvard hands over a billion dollars. Can you make any sense of this new set of threats?
Enos: Well, I think the only way to make sense of it is not from a legal perspective or, in many ways, even a political perspective, but to put it in the perspective of Trump trying to assert authoritarian control. What he cares about is control. He cares about winning because he wants to take control of civil institutions.
And so all he really wants to signal is that he’s caused Harvard to bend to his will. There’s a dollar amount—doesn’t matter. I don’t think he even really knows what he’s talking about when he says that Harvard could be subject to criminal charges. He says this about anybody that defies him. He says it about Democrats; he says it about universities; he says it about media organizations. And it shows how he extends the federal government as a tool of his authoritarian tactics, not as [a] matter of justice, like the Justice Department is actually supposed to operate.
Sargent: Well, it’s worth pointing out that if you take the two things together, he’s essentially saying, “We will criminally investigate you unless you hand a billion dollars over to causes that I value.” I’m not sure that that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Is it?
Enos: No. I mean, this is extortion. And we need to call it that, right? I mean, people talk about “negotiations” and “deals” and things like that—and that’s extortion. We would call this extortion if it was a guy on the street putting a gun to your head and saying, “Give me a billion dollars or I’m going to pull the trigger.” We know what that is. Or, “I’m going to break your knuckles in the back room.”
But this is the federal government doing the same thing. And when we put it in those terms—which is clearly what they’re doing—it shows just how outrageous and how against any kind of system of law this is.
Sargent: It’s absolutely extortion. And to your point about language like “deals,” I want to underscore what you’re saying there—which is that media organizations have often covered this by saying something like, Trump is trying to make a deal with Harvard or Trump is trying to make a deal with whatever institution he’s extorting. And that actually adopts the administration’s framing of it and sanitizes what he’s actually doing. Yet this sort of language has been ubiquitous. It’s a real problem, I think.
Enos: I totally agree. And look—I mean, if I could go in and rewrite every headline in the New York Times, I’d really like to, because they adopt this language. And I think they should know better. But I don’t even entirely blame the New York Times, because I think what this shows in some ways is that in a democracy—which the United States has been—we are not used to having a government doing this.
And we don’t know what other language to use. We are used to assuming that our governments operate in, sort of, a good faith—or at least they’re subject to electoral pressures where they try to stay within the bounds of the law. And so we assume that what governments are doing is something that’s going to be normal and responsive, somewhat, to the citizenry. And now we’re met with this president that is operating as an authoritarian. There’s no doubt about that. That’s exactly what he’s doing. And so we tend to use this old language that isn’t really suitable for the situation.
Sargent: Yes. Well, let’s just go into the situation a little more. Can you explain the role of research grants here? Why they’re so essential to Harvard’s flourishing and how seriously Harvard has to take the prospect of losing them? We’ve seen Harvard fight back on that front and Harvard has won—at least temporarily. That’s where we are, right? But it’s still a looming threat. Can you talk about why it matters?
Enos: Yeah, it’s definitely a looming threat. And it’s not even clear that it will ever go away as long as an administration can make arbitrary decisions like this outside the rule of law. And the reason this matters—and I think this is a really important question, I’m glad you asked, Greg—is because American universities, not just Harvard, one way that they—we—fund this research, which is the world-leading research, is through contracts we get with the federal government.
And it’s important to use that term because these are not “grants” in the way someone might think of it. It’s not like, you know, a grant you give to somebody to—you know, that—because they want an art contest or something like that, however we think about that.
These are contracts where people put in competitive bids to further the interests of the United States as prescribed by law from Congress. And—and Harvard, or whatever university has these, won a competitive grant and then enter into a contract to deliver these research projects that would further the interests of the United States.
Sargent: And the U.S. government awarded it. The U.S. government made the decision that Harvard won the competitive bidding process, too. I want to underscore your point here, which is that when the U.S. government enters into a contract with Harvard to conduct some research, it’s doing so because it has undergone, theoretically, a rigorous process and determined that doing this contract would be in the interests of the United States. It’s not something that’s handed to Harvard for nothing.
Enos: That’s absolutely right. And it’s vetted by experts that are previously vetted by the U.S. government. People apply from across the country, sometimes even across the world. And these are, as you said, grants around things that are in the interests of the United States. Most of these come out of medical research to do things like fight cancer and infectious diseases.
A lot of them are related to national defense when it comes to things that serve our military. A lot of them are things that are aimed at trying to help the American population generally when it comes to things like fighting hunger and things like that. And so these were things that were prescribed by law to be things that the United States government should be funding because it’s in our best interest for the American people.
And Trump—not for any particular policy-oriented reason, but simply to punish what he perceived as his political enemies—came and said, “We’re going to take these away from Harvard.” And so, we can’t underscore enough: what he’s actually doing is taking away research that was supposed to be done in the best interest of the American people.
But essentially Harvard, like anywhere else, is therefore unable to do this very expensive research that was undertaken not for its own good, really, but because there’s professors and other researchers here whose main motivation is to produce research that makes America’s society better and healthier and safer.
Sargent: Just as a quick aside—I think this is really rooted in Trump’s utter inability to have any conception of something called “the public interest.” To him, all he’s doing is hurting Harvard in his head, right? And so it does hurt Harvard to lose these federal grants because Harvard relies on them for the way it does business and survives as an institution and flourishes as an institution.
But Trump is incapable of saying to himself, Wait a minute, do we want this contract to continue because it’s in the interest of the American people or not? Everything is just a tool or a weapon to reward friends and punish enemies. That’s really the essence.
Enos: Of course. And this is—to use this term again, because it’s 100% appropriate—this is the way authoritarians operate. They can’t separate the national interest from their own interests. They think they are the same thing. And Trump has shown over and over again he’s incapable of separating these things. He’s willing to burn down any institution—be it our elections, be it free speech, be it our trust in government—in order to serve his own ends. And that includes research that betters the American people.
I mean, look, you know—you know that the Harvard School of Public Health... public health, think about that. You know, there’s not any greater public good than that is—is... had to undergo a radical downsizing where they’re losing faculty. They’re losing their ability to research. They’re losing their ability to serve the public interest because Donald Trump thinks it’s something he wants to target in a political game, and he’s hurting the American people, but he thinks it’s in his best interest.
Sargent: I want to highlight a really interesting nugget in the Times’s reporting. It says that Trump’s cratering standing with the public is now making Harvard leaders more inclined to refuse to cave to Trump, because if they did that now, they’d face backlash for easing the pressure on him when he’s vulnerable.
Ryan, that seems to capture the basic collective action problem here. It’s not until Trump has been severely weakened that Harvard leaders came to this realization, but they should have realized it a little sooner, no? I mean, in other words, if more institutions had realized that if they all stood up to Trump, it would weaken him further—which would in turn make it easier to resist his bullying—we’d be better off now.
Enos: Yeah, 100 percent, because this underscores a collective action problem that’s been here from the beginning. And a lot of us have said that Harvard needed to stand up and push back. And to their credit, the Harvard administration did. They did stand up and push back.
But in the background, there’s been this idea that some people in Harvard leadership wanted to cut a deal with the Trump administration. And maybe that was the best way out. Maybe that was a way to move things forward.
But, I’ll tell you, you know who Harvard should owe a debt of gratitude to is the people of Minneapolis and Minnesota more largely that have really stood up and shown just how much Trump’s approval will crater when people actually push back against it. And they’ve made him politically weak.
He’s been his own worst enemy, and he’s getting politically weaker as he goes, because this is what authoritarians do—they get in their own way. But every institution that stands up and pushes back enables that. And that’s what we’ve seen from the ones that actually have, including Harvard.
Sargent: Well, can you explain some of the internal politics at Harvard to us? There seems to be a camp there—as you said—that wanted Harvard to surrender to Trump’s, you know, $200 million extortion demand. But there’s also this group of professors—I guess you’re in this camp—who specialize in threats to democracy. And they see any cave like this as having much broader societal ramifications for our slide into authoritarianism. Can you talk about that divide at Harvard?
Enos: You’re absolutely right that there is a group of professors that really are feeling the pain of what’s going on and want to say that the best and easiest route is to just normalize things. And look, that’s what authoritarians do—is they apply pain and they want to normalize things. And so it’s hard to blame somebody that’s, for example, being essentially kidnapped or has somebody held ransom by an authoritarian.
And that’s what a lot of Harvard professors are feeling right now. They can’t move forward with their research because of what Donald Trump is doing. But a lot of us are looking at the broader picture—people like political scientists and other people that have looked at what happens when countries lose their democracy. And they say: this is exactly what we’re facing here. There is no doubt about it. And we are facing a situation where if we don’t stand up now, then things are going to just keep getting worse and we’re going to keep sliding into authoritarianism. We’re already there.
And the question is whether we can allow this anti-democratic regime of Donald Trump to consolidate or not. So when we look at the larger picture, all of this research and these things we want to do are tied up in our system of free government. They’re tied up because we are a place where researchers want to be. They’re tied up where people have free expression. They’re tied up in the idea that people can express free ideas. And that’s, frankly, what has made the American higher education system the envy of the world. There’s no doubt that we lead in that. And it’s tied up in our system of free government. These things do not flourish in places where people don’t want to go and do research freely. And so if we don’t look at that in the bigger picture, eventually that all goes away—no matter what kind of short-term extortion or ransom we’re willing to pay.
Sargent: Why don’t these other camps at Harvard—the ones that sort of aren’t as preoccupied with the larger societal ramifications of all this—why aren’t they aware of what you’re saying? How do they respond when you bring this kind of thing up—when your camp brings this kind of thing up?
Enos: Well, I think part of it is the collective action problem that we’ve noted, where everybody thinks maybe it’s somebody else’s job to push back and things will go back to normal. And of course, when that happens, eventually we all lose, right? We all put our head in the sand, and [when] we put them back up, our democracy is gone.
But I think it’s the easy human ability to push things off, or to rationalize things away—to say, “Maybe this isn’t so bad.” But I also think—and I think this is a problem that the American public is just waking up to, no matter Harvard professors and everybody else—in many ways, it doesn’t matter how educated you are. It’s hard for us to see the threats that we’re facing because we always assumed that these were things that happened in other countries. You know, America was “the democracy”; we’re the oldest democracy in the world.
And in many ways, those of us that are alive now lived through the most fully democratic period of our democracy. And so it’s hard for us to imagine a situation where, when somebody like me says, “No, our democracy is coming apart,” [or] in many ways, it’s already come apart, and it’s a matter of whether we can take it back to its full state or not—they think that’s hyperbole because they’re basing this, somewhat rationally, on the whole history they’ve seen. And what they need to do is think about it more holistically and realize that, yeah, we are now in a system of “competitive authoritarianism.” And it’s just about whether we manage to take our democracy back from that.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, it’s really puzzling to me that this camp still persists in that set of views. Because if you look at the broader picture here, Harvard has been winning some of the skirmishes in this war by fighting back. They have their federal funding, at least for now. Trump’s efforts to prevent international students from enrolling hasn’t panned out again—at least for now.
Harvard President Alan Garber is seen, kind of widely, as a real fighter for academic freedom and democracy, and he’s getting feted for that. Meanwhile, universities that have caved to Trump were only rewarded by a renewed effort by Trump to extort more from them. So clearly the lesson is that standing up to Trump is the only way. So to close this out, Ryan, what happens now? Does Harvard hang tough, and does Harvard end up winning?
Enos: Look, I think if they do hang tough, they’re going to win. The courts are pushing back against Trump. I do. The courts are pushing back against Trump. The American people are pushing back against Trump. He is politically weak, and institutions that actually push back are winning against him. So if Harvard has the willpower to stand up and to do what’s right, then I think it will absolutely win in the long run.
Sargent: It sure seems that way to me. And the alternative is just unthinkable. Ryan Enos, thanks so much for coming on, man. I really hope Harvard’s leaders are listening to you.
Enos: So do I. Thank you very much.