Though in its early days, the second Trump administration has proved to be significantly more radical than the first. A president who, in his initial term, lacked the wherewithal and the administrative expertise to use the power of his office to transform US politics now seems able and eager to fulfill the darkest fantasies of his critics.
With the aid of a coterie of loyalists, most notably the South African billionaire Elon Musk, Trump has begun using his presidential power to begin the process of destroying certain institutions of the administrative state, especially those that have become targets in the culture war like the Department of Education. Beyond this, he has proven more than willing to break norms, and even laws. At the time of writing, he has issued ninety-seven executive orders — twenty-six on his first day in office alone. And in mid-March, his administration defied a judicial order, deporting hundreds of Venezuelan nationals to a Salvadoran prison.
Especially chilling for academics like myself, the Trump administration arrested Badar Khan Suri, an Indian graduate student teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa, for “actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” as well as Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and a leader of last year’s pro-Palestine protest movement at Columbia University.
Trump’s frightening actions have understandably engendered concern among liberals and leftists — and even some conservatives. If the president’s first term, during which his greatest achievement was a massive tax cut for the wealthy, hardly departed from the practices of bog-standard Republicans, his second appears motivated by a desire to transform the American state and…
Auteur: Daniel Bessner
