The Phantom Public

In 2016, Donald Trump famously said that he “loved the poorly educated.” That must be true as he is doing his best to undermine some of the most important institutions of higher learning in America as his administration announced earlier this month that it was reviewing about $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives. Along with that threat was a list of demands that would need to be met if Harvard hopes to continue receiving its federal funding. The Trump administration has also targeted Brown, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia among others.

The Federal government is saying that their demands are focused on addressing antisemitism on college campuses. And while this is a laudable goal, it seems more likely that Trump and his minions are more interested in using this as an excuse to control what is taught and how it is taught at some of the country’s premier institutions. According to Inside Higher Education there is concern that Trump’s real goal is to go after universities and programs he deems “too woke.”.

In its letter to Harvard, the federal government listed demands among which were a call to re-fashion admissions policies as well as a ban on masks at campus protests at the university. In a similar letter to Columbia, a demand was made to place an entire department under receivership.

According to the New York Times, Andrew Manuel Crespo, a law professor at Harvard and general counsel of the American Association of University Professors-Harvard Faculty Chapter, said in a statement that

the administration’s policies are a pretext to chill universities and their faculties from engaging in speech, teaching and research that don’t align with President Trump’s views.

Mr. Crespo went on to say that

“Harvard faculty have the constitutional right to speak, teach and conduct research without fearing that the government will retaliate against their viewpoints by canceling grants,”

Perhaps the most disturbing comment on the federal government’s actions was by Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement for the American Council on Education. He commented that the letter to Harvard was so vague as “to look like a fishing expedition.” In other words, it puts the onus on Harvard to come up with stuff all on its own that will please Trump if they want to see their funding continue.

Inagine that, one of American’s most important universities trying to come up with stuff that will please a man who loves the poorly educated.

Here’s the latest insanity from Washington according to documents obtained by CNN: The Trump Administration intends to get rid of the “research arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), close all weather and climate labs and eviscerate its budget along with several other NOAA office.”

Though the documents in question are a part of the budget proposal for 2026 calling for cuts of more than 27%, CNN reports that the “administration expects agencies to enact the changes immediately.”

We know that Republicans have a long history of denying the reality of climate change which, according to the United Nations, refers to

long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Such shifts can be natural, due to changes in the sun’s activity or large volcanic eruptions. But since the 1800s, human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Climate, on the other hand, is simply the weather observed over time. In their rush to deny climate change, the Trump Administration has decided that perhaps it would be better if we didn’t know what kind of weather to expect at all. But as CNN points out:

The cuts would devastate weather and climate research as weather is becoming more erratic, extreme and costly. It would cripple the US industries — including agriculture — that depend on free, accurate weather and climate data and expert analysis. It could also halt research on deadly weather, including severe storms and tornadoes.

The justification from the administration is that the cuts are to “education, grants, research and climate-related programs in the NOAA…which the administration believes “are misaligned with the … expressed will of the American people.” But is this really the will of the American people?

To be clear, having the capacity to give people useful information about the tornado heading their way might remind them that extreme weather events are becoming more severe and more common and that there could be a reason for that. If they look too hard for the reason, they might begin to ask questions the Trump Administration thinks best left unasked. Makes sense to me.

One of the great fears of living under this Trump presidency is that so many bad things are happening we may either miss or fail to appreciate the significance of things that would be considered catastrophic in more normal times. On Wednesday, Trump took aim at two former appointees who worked for him in his first administration, taking away their security clearances and directing the Department of Justice to look into their activities for any wrongdoing they may have committed at the time they worked for him.

The two individuals targeted are Chris Krebs, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official.

Krebs’ apparent transgression is that he failed to find anything wrong with the way the 2020 election was conducted and said so publicly. Just after Biden’s victory he stated, “in every case of which we are aware, these claims [of fraud] either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” For his honesty, Krebs was fired by Trump shortly after making this statement.

Miles Taylor wrote a well-publicized and anonymous op-ed in 2018 in the New York Times highly critical of Trump and went on to write a book about the general dysfunction of the White House during Trump’s tenure. Just prior to the 2020 election he identified himself and announced that he would be voting for Joe Biden.

It should go without saying that a president should not be putting pressure on the Justice Department so that he not be seen as using his office for political retribution, which would be a particularly egregious breach of the judicial process. Clearly Trump is not in the least worried in the least about how this looks.

Though Trump has called Miles Taylor a traitor and has labelled Chris Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority,” there appears to be little chance either is in real legal jeopardy. In their book Lucky Loser about Trump’s business career prior to his first term as president, authors Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig note Trump’s penchant for using litigation or the threat of such to bully those who find themselves in a weaker position. Being right is little solace if it requires going bankrupt to make your case in court.

Taylor and Krebs are surely already paying lawyers and using considerable amounts of their professional energy and talent to dispute Trump’s absurd claims. What they are less likely to be doing is to use that talent and energy to be effective critics of Trump and his administration.

Chris Krebs, upon hearing of Trump’s direction to the DOJ posted on X “I said this would happen…Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous.” All of this is true, but claims by the office of the presidency to the contrary can certainly make it very expensive in time and money to stage a defence. This is the point, and a point for all others who might consider standing up in the future.

For 25 hours and five minutes, Senator Cory Booker stood on the Senate floor to give what is now the longest speech in the history of that body. He didn’t eat, he didn’t use the bathroom, he just kept on talking. When it was over, he had surpassed the record set in 1957 by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina that was intended to thwart efforts to pass civil rights legislation

Senator Booker’s goal was to get something going amongst those who are looking for leadership, looking for a way to challenge the shockingly anti-democratic measures taken by President Trump in his first two months in office. The list is well known: the deportation of international students; threats to institutions of higher learning; threats to private law firms; shutting down entire federal agencies; firing thousands of federal workers; tariffs on foreign goods based on bogus claims; and executive orders on any number of initiatives that by-pass legislative authority, and on and on.

Without majorities in the House and Senate, without conventional legislative tools, Democrats everywhere have been wondering what can be done. Certainly AOC and Bernie Sanders have been doing their part, but beyond that that there is little sense that other elected Democrats have much understanding of or taste for the fight ahead.

Enter Senator Booker.

Who knows ultimately what impact his speech will have, but coming on the same day that Democrats cut the margin of victory in half in two deep red Florida congressional districts in special elections and Democrats won a hotly contested Wisconsin Supreme Court seat we can only wonder if a tide is turning.

I think we know by now that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is not the guy to show the way in the Senate and beyond, and though it’s too early to say that Senator Booker is the guy, he has certainly put himself in the mix. He also has done no damage to any presidential aspirations he may have in 2028.

Many of the headlines today about Booker’s speech hit on the same theme which is in effect that it may have been a stunt but it was a pretty effective stunt. Why is that, we may ask? Perhaps precisely because he showed what has been so lacking in the opposition: passion, stamina, and focus. He gave so many what they have been looking for.

No single speech is going to be the answer, but let it begin here.

When Republican Michael Waltz became President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, he vacated his Florida congressional district seat, which set in motion a special election to fill it. That election takes place Tuesday, April 1st.

It is probably true that few people believed the Republicans would have a difficult time holding the seat given the fact that in November Walz won by an impressive 33 points and Trump beat Vice President Harris in the district by 30 points. But all of that was before Trump decided to take a torch to American Democracy as we know it. Now voters in this very red district will have a chance to weigh in on how they feel about what the president has done so far on important issues like Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts, tariffs on imports, and immigration policy, to name a few of the hot-button items defining his presidency to date.

The race is between Republican state Senator Randy Fine and Democrat Josh Weil. There have been a few polls and amazingly this one appears to be competitive, with one survey showing the Trump-endorsed Fine with a 4-point lead and another actually putting Weil ahead by a few points. Both of these polls are within the margin of error, but given the political leanings of the district, this is quite amazing. Add to this that the Democrat Weil has significantly out-raised his Republican opponent by more than 10 times.

Another indicator of how much trouble the Republicans may be in is that some members of the Florida GOP establishment are already calling this race “candidate-specific” meaning that if Fine underperforms, it’s on him and not President Trump or the party. Throwing shade on your own candidate in the days leading up to the election is definitely not a good luck.

The Republicans may well hold this seat given the history, but even if they do, the margin will matter. Similarly, Matt Gaetz’s seat in the Florida 1st Congressional District is up for grabs and while no one is suggesting the Democrats have a real shot there, the margin of victory will matter.

When the dust settles, spinners will spin, but if the Democrat’s significantly over-perform, you have got to believe that vulnerable Republican members of the House and the Senate will notice and will perhaps be a little less likely to rubber stamp Trump’s agenda. We all know how well the threat of a primary challenge has been used to keep congressional Republicans in line but if they start to feel like winning their party’s nomination is a short-term victory on the way to ultimate defeat, some things could start to change.

In the couple of months since his second term began, President Trump’s attacks on the Canadian economy and sovereignty have given rise to a fair bit of anger from Canadians. Yes, we are nice, but we have our limits. Trump’s tariffs, and promises of more, despite having signed onto a new free-trade agreement with Canada and Mexico near the end of his first term, and his threats to make Canada the 51st state, have enraged Canadians to the point that these issues are top of mind for nearly everyone here.

The response is taking several forms. Certainly the Canadian government has been clear that it will retaliate with tariffs of its own and has signalled a willingness to pursue other economic measures such as export taxes on energy to the the U.S. Canadian politicians from all parties have loudly rejected challenges to our sovereignty.

The people of Canada have also made it clear what they think as they cancel trips to the United States either as a political statement or because they have concerns about how non-citizens might be treated. The New York Times has reported that Canadian airlines are “eliminating tens of thousands of seats to the United States this April, a peak period when Canadians travel to warmer destinations.” There is considerable community effort to encourage Canadians to avoid buying goods made in America, and all sorts of social media activity encouraging Canadians to keep their “elbows up,” a hockey reference essentially calling on Canadians to remain strong in the face of threats made by Trump and his administration.

For many of us, the single most interesting development is what it has done to our electoral politics. Prior to the beginning of Trump’s second term, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, was trailing his main opponent Pierre Poilievre of the Conservative Party by as much as 25 points in the polls. Trudeau stepped down and Mark Carney, former head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, was chosen as new leader of the Liberal Party, becoming prime minister in the process. Whether or not Trudeau would have been able to close the gap with Poilievre in the face of Trump’s aggressive actions is a moot point as his leadership had become untenable.

Mark Carney has closed the gap and more, erasing Poilievre’s lead in the polls, going ahead by 5 points according to an aggregation of polls. This change is based on the simple fact that Canadians have decided Carney is in the best position stand to to Trump.

According to a report from Ipsos:

Mark Carney is thought to be the best federal party leader to help Canada navigate challenges associated with the Donald Trump Presidency, performing well ahead of Justin Trudeau on the same measures. By contrast, Pierre Poilievre is the candidate chosen by Canadians as most likely to roll over and accept whatever President Trump demands…

If you have any doubt how serious Canada is about the threat Donald Trump poses, know that a more than 30 point swing in the polls has taken place based upon the belief that the incumbent Liberal Party and it’s leader will do a better job on this one question. The general election will take place on April 28th.

Earlier this week, Carney had a phone call with Trump which was characterized by both parties as positive. According to reports, Trump signalled more respect for Canadian sovereignty in discussions with Carney and may even have suggested that new world-wide tariffs to be announced on Wednesday will not fall as heavily on Canada as previously thought. Perhaps a good signal but we also know things can change in an instant.

It should be noted that all of the above is within the realm of fairly normal politics. There is much unpleasantness, but these things can, let us hope, be managed. The other side is what might happen if Donald Trump decides he no longer wishes to play by the rules of the game either at home or abroad. What can we possibly say about this very real possibility other than a call to work together to make it unbearably costly for him to go that route? Canadians have so far refused to capitulate and been clear that it will respond to Trump’s bullying in any and all ways proportionate to the challenge.

In Timothy Snyder’s useful little book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, his first lesson is to “not obey in advance.” He writes:

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who acts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

With the appropriate adjustment to the world of international relations, Canada never considered obeying in advance and it may have caught Trump by surprise.

Growing up in the United States as I did, I can say that most Americans know very little about Canada but they are learning, especially the president and those around him.

Many people have been wondering what shape mass resistance to Donald Trump will take. Of course it’s far better to be the resistance rather than wait for it and so on Saturday millions of people across America and the world took to the streets to protest against actions taken by the American president and his right-hand man Elon Musk. I happened to be in Ottawa where I took part in an enthusiastic though rain-drenched event at the U.S. Embassy.

According to the organizing group called “Hands Off,” protesters “demanded an end to the authoritarian over-reach by Trump and Musk.” They called it “the largest day of collective action since’s Trump’s inauguration,” in defence of “healthcare, wages, education, civil rights, and democracy.”

Passionate yet peaceful protests are an important part of democratic life and it is certainly encouraging to see people coming out of what seemed like a prolonged slumber somehow created by the shock of America having elected this horrible man once again.

Yet one day of protests does not a movement make and it will be interesting to see what the structure of a truly effective opposition movement could look like. People will protest for an idea but it is far easier to motivate those whose day-to-day existence is adversely impacted. Bizarrely, Trump seems hell-bent on doing real damage to the very citizens he was elected to serve, which should be enough to create a sustained movement.

American history is full of effective mass organizations created to supports policies and ideas for the greater good, though as Robert Putnam pointed out over 20 years ago, we are much less likely to be joiners now. Let us hope Americans will buck the trend lest they put themselves in the unfortunate position of being “hanged separately” as they say.

Saturday was a start.

There are many things that have changed since we first watched Donald Trump come down that escalator on June 16, 2015, but if there is one thing that stands out it is that we no longer have any confidence in our ability to know what matters and what doesn’t matter when it comes to a presidential candidate’s competitive viability.

I remember thinking that Trump had destroyed himself and his political future, in July of 2015, when he said about John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” In Rick Perlstein’s 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, he makes the point that President Nixon executed a pretty clever mind trick by convincing many Americans that the return of the country’s Vietnam POWs was, in a strange sense, the victory America sought. Never mind that the war was a disaster, the pictures of reunited families on tarmacs, of children and wives running to their fathers and husbands was, Nixon hoped, a story happy enough to make people forgot what had been lost.

The extent to which Nixon succeeded is debatable, but the place of those returned POWs in American folklore, particularly among conservatives, has never been in doubt. For Trump to criticize John McCain, famously known for refusing early release from captivity, surely made many of us think Trump had done himself irreparable damage. On top of that, of course, is that the remarks came from someone who had ducked the draft through college deferments and medical exemptions, another “black mark” that has raised eyebrows in past presidential campaigns.

We could talk about the Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged about the sexual assault he is able to get away with because he is a celebrity. There is the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, the Stormy Daniels case, January 6th, and on and on with scandal after scandal. January 6th is interesting because so many high profile, experienced Republicans thought Trump’s political career would be over because of his support for the rioters, though they mostly backed off when it became clear his base (and their base) didn’t care. Again, old rules did not apply.

Then there is Tuesday’s debate when any number of truly laughable statements were made by Trump, statements about immigrants eating pets, Kamala Harris’s ethnicity, and January 6th rioters. It’s all so new we don’t need to go into detail, but the point is that it really hasn’t seemed to matter.

Why is that?

There are three things that come to mind. The first is in a clever term that someone came up with called “sane-washing,” which has been defined as “an act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that make them seem normal.” The argument goes that reporters, charged with making the world make sense for us go the extra mile to make otherwise incoherent statements meaningful.

Another factor is in what some of Trump’s supporters tell us we should do, which is to take Trump “seriously but not literally.” Trump strategist Corey Lewandowski once said that “the problem with the media is that [they take] everything Trump says so literally. The American people don’t.” I guess this means we are supposed to be satisfied that Trump doesn’t literally mean that immigrants are eating cats and dogs, but that they are here and doing bad stuff in general. Perhaps his question about whether Kamala Harris is really black isn’t that he cares about such things, but that she changes positions for political gain. You get it.

And finally, the existence of Fox News has created an immensely powerful safety net for Trump, an entire network dedicated to his protection. Someone once said that if Fox News had been around in the early ’70s, Richard Nixon would not have had to resign because a sufficiently robust counter-narrative would have been available to protect him and to make Nixon’s voter base sufficiently organized to threaten any Republican who got out of line.

I’m sure there are other reasons Trump gets away with so much, and the few ideas proposed here don’t, I’m sure, explain everything nor do they operate in silos. More than one mechanism can be at work at once, and different mechanisms are likely at play with different kinds of statements and actions.

To end where I began, since Trump, we no longer have any confidence in our ability to know what matters, and it is frustrating as hell, though I doubt I am alone in thinking about it, a lot.

A question on the minds of many a supporter of Kamala Harris’s presidential bid is the extent to which Trump will be able to effectively attack her new running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, as a radical leftist.

With all the appropriate qualifiers about how Harris is the one at the top of the ticket and vice presidential nominees don’t move that much vote, Democrats are still hoping that Walz can help to balance concerns voters might have about Harris’s perceived vulnerability of being too liberal.

Put simply, Harris and her campaign team are hoping that Walz’s image, his midwestern-nice, gun-toting, football coaching, military serving, dad-energy personae will make enough people, particularly older white men in the middle of the country, comfortable enough with the Harris-Walz option to vote for it and thus eat into the majorities this cohort will surely deliver for Trump. And make no mistake, this calculation is about losing this bloc of voters by less and not outright winning it.

Republicans are hoping they can point to a bunch of policy decisions and actions by Walz that make it easy to tar him as a radical. They say he is on board with much of Harris’s liberal agenda with issues such as expanding benefits like paid family leave, protecting abortion rights, and restricting guns. They ramble on about his policy of free tampons in school bathrooms as a way to accommodate transgender students and voting rights for felons. They are particularly vocal about how he handled the civil unrest in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

Democrats are hoping to emphasize something entirely different. As Lisa Lerer writes at the New York Times, “The Democratic strategy is based far more on the identity politics of race, gender and cultural affiliation than on any policy calculation.” It is, according to this argument, about who he is, or who he is perceived to be and not what he has done or supported through work and deed.

The argument is, however, more complicated.

My guess is that no matter how hard Trump and Vance try to suggest these positions he has taken and the things that he has done are the work of the devil, a large chunk of voters, even many white working class men, are going to see this as the kinds of positions one might take when they try to serve their constituents as governor, when they try in good faith to get things done.

Maybe this is a hard sell in today’s political environment, but if you respect voters enough to tell them why you have done what you have done, they are not going to be overly fussed that they don’t agree with everything you have done.

The magic of someone like Walz, a guy who exudes integrity and decency, is that whatever policies Trump thinks he can attack him with, it is precisely the way Walz presents himself, his identity, that makes him attractive to voters. In others words, it’s not who he is versus what he has done; it’s his ability, because of who he is, to talk to voters in a respectful way about why he did what he did, and what he thinks needs to happen next.

Trump doesn’t respect people who vote for him. And don’t forget Hillary Clinton’s major blunder of describing some who might vote against her as deplorables. Walz will not get a majority of white working class voters. But he is going to get some of them by being who he is, a guy who knows you can disagree with people and still respect them, and sometimes even vote for them.