As is standard in any story relating to Trump, a lot of the press hysteria about these stories ignore key angles. Both the crusade against DEI and Trump’s Hannibal-esque assault on Columbia University at least in theory could be looked at as anti-discriminatory moves, designed to get the government out of the business of sponsoring racist/stupid policies ranging from segregated graduation ceremonies (“Multicultural Celebrations,” in Columbia parlance) to segregated dorms (“Special Interest Communities,” in Columbia terms) to the forced diversity statements which have been an affront to the First Amendment for a while. Even harsh punishment of schools like a Columbia for failing to enforce Title VI responsibilities with regard to pro-Palestine protests could have been okay, if the administration had stuck to demanding that schools halt genuinely discriminatory practices like blocking movement using human chains or barring “Zionists” from entering certain areas.
Instead, Trump mangled the whole effort by bending all the way over for Israel and Bibi Netanyahu through a series of asinine moves, beginning with his 2019 Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism. That enshrined the concept of using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which includes clearly legal speech like “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination… by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” or “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about… the power of Jews as collective.” We just lived through nearly a decade without comedy and now Donald Trump, basically the political version of Don Rickles, wants to make stereotypesillegal? Forget that this and subsequent moves like his updated antisemitism order from this year openly conflict with the First Amendment, under which hate speech is protected. The broader stupidity is agreeing to the premise that we’re undergoing such an “unprecedented wave of vile anti-Semitic discrimination” that we need to punch a hole in the Constitution to fix it.
This is the exact same concept, and maybe dumber, than the post-George-Floyd rushes to declare racism a “public health crisis” of such virulence that it superceded the other speech-crushing state of emergency of that period, the Covid lockdowns. If Trump is half the negotiator he says he is, he’ll tell Israel and AIPAC they can have their Gaza Riviera or whatever else he’s promising in the way of support, but they can keep their hands off the Bill of Rights, thank you very much. Hell, even the man who wrote the IHCR definition, Kenneth Stern, said it was never intended to be used as a speech code (see FIRE interview). Trump and Vance last week seemed to have no problem standing up to Volodymr Zelensky, and by extension Europe, to protect American interests. They should be willing to do the same to save the Bill of Rights from a handful of lobbyists, unless they really are Israel’s bitches.
Trump never talked like a civil libertarian, which is fine. His schtick was always to play the opposite, coming off as a parody mix of Mobutu and Dirty Harry, like that time he told a crowd of police: “Please don’t be too nice” to suspects. But despite some unnerving episodes and 400+ actions filed against him by the ACLU, first-term Trump wasn’t the civil liberties disaster TV said he was. He spent most of that first four years as a high-profile stand-in for more commonplace victims of national policing authority, as Democrat opponents deployed everything, including digital censorship, political spying, sixties-style FBI leaks and “disruption,” and extravagant use of laws like the Espionage and KKK Acts to go after him. Trump said crazy things, but it was his lawyer’s office getting tossed. He was on the receiving end of the bigger civil liberties overreaches.
