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In his program to silence all (potential) opposition to his authoritarian rule, Donald Trump continues to go after top universities and top law firms. He has reason to believe that they "don't hold any cards" so he can bully them all he wants and bend them to his will, even if what he is doing is completely illegal.
The most recent Ivy League university to be hit is Princeton. Trump simply suspended $210 million of research grants on contracts that had already been signed. In the commercial world, this is called breach of contract and the injured party can sue for damages. That also holds for universities, but most of them feel powerless against the full force of the U.S. government, legal or not.
The nominal reason Trump is giving is that Princeton is not working sufficiently to fight antisemitism. Even if that were true, that would not be a legal basis to stop payments on existing contracts. And, as usual, Trump has presented no evidence that it is true. There weren't even a lot of pro-Palestinian activities at Princeton last year. Rabbi Gil Steinlauf, executive director of Princeton's Center for Jewish Life, said: "There are other universities, perhaps, where Jewish students might report feeling physically unsafe. That doesn't exist here on this campus." The reason Princeton was probably chosen, after Columbia, is that Princeton's president, Christopher Eisgruber, recently wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic arguing that Trump's (illegally) yanking funding from Columbia threatened academic freedom everywhere. So, Trump decided to make it personal to Eisgruber. It is all about making universities grovel in the dust and beg him to please let them continue to exist.
Thus far, the various schools Trump has targeted have made a decision that giving in to extortion is cheaper than fighting it. They would probably win in court simply on technical grounds: The president has no authority to unilaterally void signed contracts because he doesn't like the university. They could band together and sue as a group. There is a good chance a judge would place a temporary restraining order on the government ordering it to not suspend any lawful payments until the case had been fully adjudicated up to the Supreme Court, if need be. But they are all afraid. Maybe one of their distinguished professors of history could root around and see if Franklin Delano Roosevelt ever had anything interesting to say about fear.
Now onto the big law firms. As we noted yesterday, Trump has gone after another big law firm, Willkie Farr & Gallagher. Their sin? They hired former second gentleman Doug Emhoff, signing him up to work for them on cases involving reputational damages. Like Covington & Burling and Paul, Weiss, Willkie caved, even though it knew that the cost has gone up to $100 million. Yes, they have promised to do $100 million in pro bono work for conservative causes.
Whether that is a real problem remains to be seen. The devil is in the details. The "settlement" statement referred to cases involving veterans, members of the military, Gold Star families, law enforcement, and combating antisemitism. Many of these things are cases the firm might have taken on pro bono anyway, so this is mostly about forcing the firm to grovel rather than defending people they despise. Also, Trump has a very short attention span and no knowledge whatsoever of how law firms work. Willkie could take up some case where a veteran was shortchanged and claim 20 lawyers spent 100 hours each @ $1000/hr = $2,000,000. Trump is not going to ask what each of the lawyers did and why it took so long. If they can find 50 cases like this, they can later show they did what they promised. It is all about a display of dominance. The point is to humiliate the firm and make it clear to them that he is the king and they are vassals who must obey their king and they must admit this in public. Once that has been accomplished, he doesn't actually care about what they precisely did. (V)