This is the 5th in a series of articles covering Donald Trump's efforts
to end liberal democracy in the United States and replace it with
authoritarian autocracy--a Trumptatorship--and the grim consequences
of that. The others:
Trumptatorship 1: The Crisis
Trumptatorship 2: Of Enemies, Alien & Domestic
Trumptatorship 3: Gangster Government
Trumptatorship 4: Speech, Free & Otherwise
That was my aim when I began these articles early last year, to tackle what I called "the most serious internal crisis the U.S. has faced since the Civil War," and I did it precisely because, in my perception, it wasn't being widely enough recognized or treated as such. The tendency of the corporate press and the alleged opposition party to treat Trump's presidency as just that, just another presidency, even if a bad one, rather than sounding a thousand alarms, has aided Trump immeasurably by normalizing his regime. At the same time, Trump's shock-and-awe tactics--piling on 20 new outrages a day--rendered much more difficult any sort of orderly assessment of the fundamental changes he was imposing and trying to impose and certainly of the repercussions of them. I wanted to create an orderly accounting of them and of what was driving them--to unsnarl, in real time, the deliberate snarl the regime was creating and get at what was beneath it.
While I think that work was pretty good--maybe a judgment others will have to render--I have to regard that original approach to the project, the "real time" part of it, as a failure. My efforts to cover a subject then continue providing updates ran so long that the updates were, collectively, running longer than the original articles. And I wasn't just overwhelmed by the subject (though I was); I was hit with one serious health issue after another, a run of problems that began before I launched the series, and I'm still not even back to the diminished state that constituted "normal" for me in the years preceding all of that.
So I blew it, and at the worst possible time. And I badly need to get back on this particular horse.
I didn't stop working after the 4th article. I had big chunks of 2 further ones, written in that same effort-at-being-reader-friendly style, but looking over that work now, they seemed hopelessly out-of-date. The situation is so much worse now they seemed almost quaint. Even when writing the earlier ones, I chafed against some of the rules I had imposed on myself for them, a departure from my usual much more free-form polemical style aimed at making them more General Audience-friendly. Too much work has gone into them--and the subject is too important--to just dump them, so I'm going to try to whip them into shape, maybe bring them up to date and send them out, starting here, acknowledging right from the beginning that they may seem a bit dated as we've fallen much further than when the original versions of them were composed. And then, hopefully, I'll be able to continue from there.
When I left off, some of Trump's efforts to quash free speech were blending into his efforts to take over things. The Trumptatorship has tried to seize control of a broad range of institutions. Previous articles in this series covered some examples, such as Trump's entirely illegal
efforts take over independent agencies established by congress (a
campaign now being unconscionably aided by the U.S. Supreme Court), to illegally cut
off federal funds to private hospitals and other medical institutions in order to force them to stop providing gender transition care (funds entirely unrelated to that
care, usually educational or research grants), to take over private law-firms that take on clients that oppose the regime. The Trump presently on the campaign trail hysterically raving against imagined "communists" is the same one whose regime has acquired ownership stakes in at least 30 major companies.
In a depressingly symbolism-laden move, the Trump regime physically raided and took over
the U.S. Institute of Peace with guns. Though established by congress, USIP is a
non-profit think-tank, not a government agency. Trump simply declared it an
executive-branch government agency and sent armed agents to
break into the org's privately-owned headquarters, purport to fire its
employees, replace its leaders, take down its website and steal its data and other assets.
Those who ran USIP sued and, in May 2025, won their case, a federal court ruling that while USIP "must be considered a part of the federal government, at least for purposes of resolving the constitutional separation-of-powers questions posed here," it doesn't "exercise governmental, let alone executive, power under the Constitution and is not part of the Executive branch." Trump's purported firing of USIP's employees was held to be "unlawful and ultra vires," and the firings, the theft and everything else done by the thugs Trump purported to install was "effectuated by illegitimately-installed leaders who lacked legal authority to take these actions, which must therefore be declared null and void."
Trump appealed, requesting that the court's order be stayed until the appeals process had run its course. Though Trump's actions was based on a false premise and violated every aspect of the law that had established USIP decades earlier,[1] an appeals court simply ignored all of this and granted the stay. In November, Darren Beattie, whom Trump had purported to install as head of the org, purported to turn over control of USIP's stolen headquarters to the Trump State Department. A few weeks later, Trump purported to rename the org after himself, "The Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace," and while carrying out belligerent military actions around the world, he had his name put on its headquarters in big silver letters and now uses it as, in the words of the New York Times, "a backdrop for ceremonies with foreign leaders."
There is no precedent in our history for presidents trying to name buildings, organizations, monuments after themselves or to add their images to them. This has always been something done only by later generations to memorialize presidents thought worthy of the honor (and, in many cases, can only be done in that way by law). Trump's behavior in this is the exclusive domain of authoritarian dictators feeding personality cults. Following in the footsteps of Hitler, Stalin and countless such creatures, Trump, from 4 months into his regime, began ordering banners of his own portrait to be flown on the headquarters of multiple government agencies.
Trump has purported to rename the Kennedy Center after himself and put his name on it (more on that in a moment), purported to rename a new class of battleships after himself, announced that Trump's signature will be added to U.S. paper currency, announced that Trump's portrait will appear on $250 bills (a direct violation of U.S. law but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has uncharacteristically said congress would have to approve this) and the regime has illegally created $1 coins with Trump's image on it (more examples of such things and details here).
Trump has tried to take over the Library of Congress, which, as the name says, is a congressional, not an executive, body. Besides being the largest library in the world, the LOC is also the research arm of congress, which makes it a juicy target for a would-be dictator. "There is deep concern among lawmakers and aides," reported the Associated Press, about the regime's efforts to meddle in LOC's operations:
Shira Perlmutter, as the Register of Copyrights, is congress' advisor on copyright matters; Trump purported to fire her because he disliked the advice she'd given to congress regarding policy related to artificial intelligence--the equivalent, as a circuit court would later note, of "the President trying to fire a federal judge's law clerk." She has sued the regime over her "firing." By law, the ROC is appointed and can only be removed by the Librarian of Congress. Legally, this is an open-and-shut case but--in another warning that the courts can not be relied upon to protect us from the Trumptatorship--a district court on 3 different occasions denied Permutter injunctive relief from the regime's actions, essentially just ignoring the law and ludicrously dancing around the standards for such relief in order to give Trump a win. Last Sept., an appeals court corrected this, but even then, one of the 3 judges sided with the regime.
Trump's efforts to take over cultural institutions and exert control over art "typify the strategy of a dictator," writes Adrian Horton in the Guardian. "[T]he new administration's cultural decrees are very much a part of the authoritarian playbook to suppress dissent, scapegoat select groups and seize power."
In March 2025, Trump issued an executive order that, among the usual torrent of misrepresentations and lies, outlined one of his many ludicrous conspiracies, "a concerted and widespread effort," as his ghost-writer puts it, "to rewrite our Nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth." To combat this fantasy, Trump steps entirely outside the chief executive's role to dictate the propagation of an ultranationalistic version of American history that doesn't qualify for the name but is, at his command, to be adopted and imposed by his government through institutions as the official "history" and "truth." Trump's ghostwriter asserts that "museums in our Nation's capital [sic] should be places where individuals go to learn--not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination," immediately after outlining the ideological indoctrination Trump wishes to impose as "history" on museums and other institutions, saying it's his policy to offer not substantive, accurate, nuanced, vibrant, well-researched, engaging, healthily debated accounts of the past from which people can learn but, instead, "solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing," with any hint of anything Trump views as critical scrubbed as impermissible.
Like the dictate itself, the EO's complaints about impermissible history are often straightforwardly neo-Nazi/white nationalist in character. It objects, for example, to the Smithsonian hosting an exhibit that points out the mundane scientific fact that race is a social construct, rather than, as Trump (and Nazis) would have it, "a biological reality," and that notes that sculpture has often been used as a tool to promote racist pseudo-science, an historical fact that, unless one is a Nazi and seeking to perpetuate the practice, is no more controversial than the time of day.
Trump orders that the Vice President carry out the terms of the EO via his office's standing position on the Smithsonian's Board of Regents by "seeking to remove improper ideology"[2] from the Institution, which is neither an executive-branch agency nor a government agency at all.[3] It also calls for appropriations to the Smithsonian to be conditioned so as to "prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with" Trump's preferred version of "history," to "celebrate the achievements of women in the American Women’s History Museum and do not recognize men as women"--trans women--"in any respect in the Museum," etc.[4]
The EO also orders Trump's underlings to
Trump has tried to take over the Library of Congress, which, as the name says, is a congressional, not an executive, body. Besides being the largest library in the world, the LOC is also the research arm of congress, which makes it a juicy target for a would-be dictator. "There is deep concern among lawmakers and aides," reported the Associated Press, about the regime's efforts to meddle in LOC's operations:
"Especially worrisome to them is potential meddling with the Congressional Research Service, known as the nonpartisan think tank of Capitol Hill. It fields roughly 75,000 requests from members of Congress every year for research, legal expertise and other information critical for policymaking.By law, the Librarian of Congress serves a 10-year term; Carla Hayden had been on the job for 8 when Trump purported to fire her, something he has no legal authority to do (and no Librarian has ever been fired in the entire 225-year history of the LOC). The LOC is also the home of the U.S. Copyright Office and Trump purported to fire its chief, the Register of Copyrights, as well, something else he has no legal authority to do. Trump has sought to install his cronies as interim replacements in these positions, something else he--say it with me--has no legal power to do. In mid-May 2025, said cronies were denied entry into the LOC's headquarters by its employees, who are congressional employees.
"The discussions between lawmakers and the Congressional Research Service are considered so sensitive that they are protected under the speech or debate clause of the Constitution, which shields members of Congress from being questioned--such as in court--about official legislative acts.
"The service's 'utility and trustworthiness would be substantially undercut if these inquiries were not protected or the Administration sought to shape responses to reflect its priorities,' said Hope O’Keeffe, a former associate general counsel at the Library of Congress."
Shira Perlmutter, as the Register of Copyrights, is congress' advisor on copyright matters; Trump purported to fire her because he disliked the advice she'd given to congress regarding policy related to artificial intelligence--the equivalent, as a circuit court would later note, of "the President trying to fire a federal judge's law clerk." She has sued the regime over her "firing." By law, the ROC is appointed and can only be removed by the Librarian of Congress. Legally, this is an open-and-shut case but--in another warning that the courts can not be relied upon to protect us from the Trumptatorship--a district court on 3 different occasions denied Permutter injunctive relief from the regime's actions, essentially just ignoring the law and ludicrously dancing around the standards for such relief in order to give Trump a win. Last Sept., an appeals court corrected this, but even then, one of the 3 judges sided with the regime.
Trump's efforts to take over cultural institutions and exert control over art "typify the strategy of a dictator," writes Adrian Horton in the Guardian. "[T]he new administration's cultural decrees are very much a part of the authoritarian playbook to suppress dissent, scapegoat select groups and seize power."
In March 2025, Trump issued an executive order that, among the usual torrent of misrepresentations and lies, outlined one of his many ludicrous conspiracies, "a concerted and widespread effort," as his ghost-writer puts it, "to rewrite our Nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth." To combat this fantasy, Trump steps entirely outside the chief executive's role to dictate the propagation of an ultranationalistic version of American history that doesn't qualify for the name but is, at his command, to be adopted and imposed by his government through institutions as the official "history" and "truth." Trump's ghostwriter asserts that "museums in our Nation's capital [sic] should be places where individuals go to learn--not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination," immediately after outlining the ideological indoctrination Trump wishes to impose as "history" on museums and other institutions, saying it's his policy to offer not substantive, accurate, nuanced, vibrant, well-researched, engaging, healthily debated accounts of the past from which people can learn but, instead, "solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing," with any hint of anything Trump views as critical scrubbed as impermissible.
Like the dictate itself, the EO's complaints about impermissible history are often straightforwardly neo-Nazi/white nationalist in character. It objects, for example, to the Smithsonian hosting an exhibit that points out the mundane scientific fact that race is a social construct, rather than, as Trump (and Nazis) would have it, "a biological reality," and that notes that sculpture has often been used as a tool to promote racist pseudo-science, an historical fact that, unless one is a Nazi and seeking to perpetuate the practice, is no more controversial than the time of day.
Trump orders that the Vice President carry out the terms of the EO via his office's standing position on the Smithsonian's Board of Regents by "seeking to remove improper ideology"[2] from the Institution, which is neither an executive-branch agency nor a government agency at all.[3] It also calls for appropriations to the Smithsonian to be conditioned so as to "prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with" Trump's preferred version of "history," to "celebrate the achievements of women in the American Women’s History Museum and do not recognize men as women"--trans women--"in any respect in the Museum," etc.[4]
The EO also orders Trump's underlings to
"ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior's jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape."It gets into the matter of problematic Civil War monuments, thrown up in the decades after the war by pro-Confederate interests to promote revisionist Lost Cause ideology and launder the ugly cause of the Confederacy, then, later, as a defiant resistance to civil rights. It doesn't say any of that, of course, but that constant bugaboo of the far-right is the thing to which it's referring when it orders that any such monuments under the regime's jurisdiction that have been changed or removed be changed back. To beat back "improper partisan ideology," you see?
Trump has taken over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the national cultural center of the United States. Though established by congress and with a board featuring political appointees, the Kennedy Center isn't an executive-branch agency or a government agency of any kind. It functions as a non-profit, nearly all of its financing private, and is legally designated a living memorial to the slain president for which it was named. The Center's board is supposed to be bipartisan and, by law, board members are supposed to serve staggered six-year terms but Trump announced that all board members appointed by Democrats, regardless of how long they still had left in their terms, were fired, something the law establishing the Center gives him no authority to do.[5] He filled their slots with laughably unqualified cronies then had them vote to oust the board chairman and install Trump himself in the position--a demanding job no president has ever held and one at which Trump has no experience whatsoever. He indicated that, henceforth, he would be dictating the Center's programming and, on social media, vowed "NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA (hysterical all-caps in the original). "We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center," raved Trump, "and we don’t need--some of the shows were terrible. They were a disgrace that they were even put on." Asked by a reporter if he'd ever even seen a show at the Center or been there, Trump replied, "no." Wide swathes of experienced Center employees were fired or driven out, replaced by Trump goons. The national cultural center of the United States, a place that enshrines freedom of expression as one of its highest ideals, in the hands of a dictator, who--again, like a dictator--purported, in December, to rename it "The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts."
No one wanted to have anything to do with this. Ticket-sales collapsed spectacularly. When artists mass-canceled slated performances at the Center, the Trump regime attacked and slandered them, accusing them of being "leftist activists" or giving in to "the woke mob," and even threatened them with legal retribution and, as what seemed to be a test case, sued one,[6] which, of course, only made everyone even less interested in having anything to do with this.
Probably to mask the losses these shenanigans had inflicted on the Center, the regime announced it would, without any trace of the required process, illegally close the facility for 2 years for "renovations."
An ex-officio member of the Center's board of trustees sued the regime over the name-change and the effort to close it. The regime actually argued in court that the name-change was necessary to overcome the Center's money woes and carry out its renovation--money woes that only began and were entirely a consequence of Trump's illegal takeover of the institution and subsequent behavior. In May, a U.S. district court ruled that Trump couldn't rename the Center after himself, would have to remove his name from the Center's building, website and materials and vetoed its closure. Trump threw up scaffolding with a tarp in front of the building, so there would be no video of his name being removed (which was done at night), and has left it in place in all the months since, while Trump's phony board voted in August to inscribe the words "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" on the building's facade below its name and to name the physical grounds on which the Center sits the "President Donald J. Trump Plaza." So it was back to court and the court again vetoed these illegal moves, holding--again--that only congress could do something like that. Trump's response was to again announce that the Center was closed, to declare, on TruthSocial, that if the appeals court doesn't let him add his name to the Center, he will carry out no renovation of it ("If the [appeals] ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.") and, two days later, to threaten to physically destroy it if his name wasn't added to it.
Trump's threat sprouted a unicorn in congress--a genuinely bipartisan effort to pass a bill declaring that "a memorial to honor a president of the United States designated by an act of Congress may not be demolished unless authorized by an act of Congress." This is already the law, of course, but... points for trying? But even this redundancy didn't go anywhere. Since Trump's current regime began, Republicans in congress have persistently moved to expand Trump's dictatorial powers while removing even more executive accountability--building the Trumptatorship and essentially abolishing their own branch of government one piece at a time. It this case, Trump-aligned Utah Sen. Mike Lee blocked the legislation.
Ed Martin, Trump's initial choice to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, spent weeks in 2025 sending ominous letters to various private institutions, even members of congress, inappropriately demanding information on their political views and speech and threatening them with various legal actions for those views and their expression. He seemed to have a particular fetish for sending such letters to medical journals. Protecting the public from the political depredations of CHEST Magazine. Pursuant to Trump's war against history, Martin fired off one to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. "Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform," he wrote,
That last can be seen as a sort of sideshow to Trump's extraordinary efforts to take over educational institutions.
Some background here: In March 2025, Trump signed one of his "executive orders" directing the Secretary of Education to, "to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education." The language is, as usual, strictly Orwellian. Congress created the Department of Education, congress assigned it the tasks it performs (which are Trump's sworn duties to carry out); both legally and constitutionally, only congress can abolish it and in the absence of congressional action, no steps to close it are "permitted by law."[8] Reflecting far-right tropes, rather than anything resembling reality, Trump's ghostwriter calls DoEd "Federal control over education," outlines various failings of the education system in the U.S. and just sort of randomly blames them on "the Federal education bureaucracy" (typifying the regime's mad fantasies on this, Trump's deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller offered an insane fascist anti-DoEd rant that wouldn't have been at all out of place in "Mein Kampf"). The EO says abolishing DoEd will "return authority over education to the States and local communities." But DoEd doesn't control education--it's major task, in fact, is simply managing student loans. Control over education (and responsibility for its outcomes) rests almost entirely with local communities and states, in that order. Where it has always been.
This decentralizing rhetoric is, of course, directly at odds with Trump's actual actions. To be sure, Trump's major education "policy" has been an effort to direct money intended for public education to "school choice" initiatives--to defund already-cash-strapped public schools in order to subsidize the private-school education of the children of his wealthy benefactors--but the regime has put major effort into trying to micromanage and dictate, from the dictator's White House office, the policies of local schools across the U.S.. While falsely implying that DoEd imposes curriculum and condemning it for this, Trump has weaponized the DoEd to try to impose on public schools the same government-dictated ultranationalistic "history" and "civics" curriculum as he has on other institutions:
In its early weeks, the regime began revoking billions of dollars in then-ongoing contracts the federal government had with universities, usually for research--invaluable work that not only benefits Americans but the entire world. While these universities met all the legal requirements for receiving such grants, the regime announced it was suspending the grants without even pretending to comply with the legal requirements necessary to take them away and doing so based on the universities' failures, real or imagined, to meet new requirements found nowhere in law and simply invented by the dictator. It expanded from there, with the regime diversifying its tactics, escalating its efforts. Some institutions gave in, to varying extents, others have fought.
In September, in U.S. News & World Reports, Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder did a good job of cataloging a lot of this, though not necessarily a good job of organizing it or putting it into a larger context (it is a huge subject). Harvard, America's wealthiest and best-known university, has been a prime target of the regime and its experience provides a nutshell of what's been happening. In April 2025, the regime sent a letter to Harvard president Alan Garber simply declaring that "Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment" and proposing a "settlement agreement" that would turn control of the university over to the regime.
The letter, only 5 pages, must be read to be believed. Some of its highlights: The regime demands that Harvard completely restructure its internal government, centralizing power in such a way as to empower "exclusively those most... committed to the changes indicated in this letter" and "reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty" and "reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism" as defined by the regime, "than scholarship." The University must implement "merit-based" hiring and admissions policies--no recruiting or aiding minority students--and all of its data on hiring and admissions are to be submitted to the regime for "audit." At the same time, the 1st Amendment President baldly cast aside the 1st Amendment to demand the university adopt hiring and admissions quotas for MAGA, couched as "viewpoint diversity" and without any apparent concern for the "merits" of such creatures. Every "department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse," and
This and the rest will be necessary to "maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government."
Even upon reading the letter, seeing it on a page, it's difficult to believe anything like this is happening in the United States. Harvard president Garber's response was swift...
Smith-Schoenwalder:
Harvard, meanwhile, took the grant-suspension to court and, in September 2025, won the case on summary judgment, Judge Burroughs holding that while the regime claimed to do all of this to battle anti-Semitism,
Though the regime hadn't, in court, even been able to make any real case for its own actions, its immediate response was, as usual, to attack the court in such a way as to undermine public support for the institutions of the liberal democracy, vow to appeal the decision and publicly declare it wouldn't abide by the ruling anyway:
In August 2026, a whisteblower came forward to reveal the obvious, that Trump's alleged task-force on anti-Semitism, where all of this began, was a fraud and that
In October 2025, the regime began circulating to universities a proposed "compact," a sort of part-carrot approach--surrender your independence and "adopt the White House's vision for America's campuses" and get "more favorable access to federal money", "substantial and meaningful federal grants" and "increased overhead payments," all of which you lose if the regime overseeing you decides you aren't living up to the terms.
I've focused on Harvard to give the reader a taste, but this is what America's major private universities have been facing, the same out-of-control, reactionary would-be dictator who has increasingly cast aside the law and the constitution and, as part of his centralization of power, has been seizing control of institutions throughout his reign and bending them to his will in an effort to destroy the liberal democracy then leave his name and image on the rubble for the personality-cult he's created to admire while the squalid tyranny he's built in place of America slouches into whatever little future it has left.
This isn't what you want, America. Do something about it.
-j.
---
[1] An example: By law, a president can engineer the firing of a board member of USIP but only with the approval of a majority of the rest of the board and/or the agreement of multiple congressional committees.
[2] The "fact"-sheet accompanying the orders says the Vice President will "eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo."
[3] On TruthSocial on 30 May, Trump wrote, "I am herby [sic] terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery," denouncing her as "a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position." The Gallery is a Smithsonian museum that houses images of prominent Americans. Trump has absolutely no authority to fire its director, who is appointed by the Smithsonian, and initially, the Gallery simply ignored the "firing," and Sajet continued her duties as before. She eventually resigned her post though.
[4] This part of the order is somewhat anomalous for Trump, in that it says his regime should work with congress to impose these restrictions. Legally, that's necessary but in almost every other case, Trump simply orders his favored conditions be illegally imposed, with no input or even mention of congress.
[5] At the same time he purported to fire the board members, Trump also announced he'd fired the National Archivist. By law, Trump can remove the Archivist but he's required to have a reason for doing so and to inform congress of it; he's done neither. By statute, the Archivist is supposed to be a non-political post, filled based on professional qualifications; Trump has appointed his Sec. of State, Marco Rubio, who has no professional qualifications for the job, as acting director. The "firing" was widely seen as revenge against the Archivist for the National Archives' efforts to retrieve public documents that Trump had stolen when he left the White House in 2021.
[6] The regime sued musician Chuck Redd for $1 million, alleging breach of contract. Redd had hosted the Center's annual Christmas Eve Jazz Jam, a free-admission event, for nearly 2 decades but canceled the 2025 show. Richard Grenell, then the purported president of the Center, straight-up said they were going after Redd for his political speech, ranting that Redd's cancellation, "explicitly in response to the Center's recent renaming, which honors President Trump's extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure" is "classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution." The suit was accompanied by "an offer to settle if Redd paid $7,500, played at this year's concert, and refrained from issuing 'political commentary' about his decision to withdraw" from the show. After Redd, who had never, in fact, signed any contract to play the show, was forced to spend the money to defend himself, it was laughed out of court. Compared to Trump's mad pursuit of his other enemies--or scapegoats (subjects for a subsequent article)--Redd got off easy.
[7] Martin is a walking ethics violation--among other things, he ordered his office to drop the charges against a 6 Jan. defendant whom Martin, himself, was simultaneously representing as a defense attorney in the same case. Trump eventually dropped Martin as nominee for the D.C. Attorney but seemingly only because his antics became such a public embarrassment that Republican senators were declining to support the nomination. So Trump made Martin his pardon attorney, overseeing Trump's grotesquely unethical pardons of his criminal cronies, and director of the Justice Department's Weaponization Working Group, which, under the banner of fighting "weaponization" of the government, works to weaponize the government against Trump's enemies.
[8] The EO is full of other misinformation. Trump, for example, calls DoE "one of the newest Cabinet agencies," which, he says, was created in 1979 as, he implies, a pay-off by the Jimmy Carter administration to a teacher's union, and "has existed for less than one fifth of our Nation’s history." In reality, the Department of Education was created in 1867. It was eventually downgraded to the Office of Education and transferred around to different federal agencies over the decades before going cabinet-level again under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 as the Department of Health, Education & Welfare. In the late '70s, this department was split into the Department of Education and the Department of Health & Human Services, as we now have them.
Probably to mask the losses these shenanigans had inflicted on the Center, the regime announced it would, without any trace of the required process, illegally close the facility for 2 years for "renovations."
An ex-officio member of the Center's board of trustees sued the regime over the name-change and the effort to close it. The regime actually argued in court that the name-change was necessary to overcome the Center's money woes and carry out its renovation--money woes that only began and were entirely a consequence of Trump's illegal takeover of the institution and subsequent behavior. In May, a U.S. district court ruled that Trump couldn't rename the Center after himself, would have to remove his name from the Center's building, website and materials and vetoed its closure. Trump threw up scaffolding with a tarp in front of the building, so there would be no video of his name being removed (which was done at night), and has left it in place in all the months since, while Trump's phony board voted in August to inscribe the words "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" on the building's facade below its name and to name the physical grounds on which the Center sits the "President Donald J. Trump Plaza." So it was back to court and the court again vetoed these illegal moves, holding--again--that only congress could do something like that. Trump's response was to again announce that the Center was closed, to declare, on TruthSocial, that if the appeals court doesn't let him add his name to the Center, he will carry out no renovation of it ("If the [appeals] ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.") and, two days later, to threaten to physically destroy it if his name wasn't added to it.
"I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition. Because frankly, if we don't do that, it's going to close. It'll end up being ripped down."And again, a court ruled that Trump wasn't to proceed with destroying the monument to a former president of which he had himself made a trusteee without 30 days notice. As these articles have covered--and will cover at greater length in time--the regime regularly just ignores or otherwise defies court orders it doesn't like but that's where things stand on this at the moment.
Trump's threat sprouted a unicorn in congress--a genuinely bipartisan effort to pass a bill declaring that "a memorial to honor a president of the United States designated by an act of Congress may not be demolished unless authorized by an act of Congress." This is already the law, of course, but... points for trying? But even this redundancy didn't go anywhere. Since Trump's current regime began, Republicans in congress have persistently moved to expand Trump's dictatorial powers while removing even more executive accountability--building the Trumptatorship and essentially abolishing their own branch of government one piece at a time. It this case, Trump-aligned Utah Sen. Mike Lee blocked the legislation.
Ed Martin, Trump's initial choice to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, spent weeks in 2025 sending ominous letters to various private institutions, even members of congress, inappropriately demanding information on their political views and speech and threatening them with various legal actions for those views and their expression. He seemed to have a particular fetish for sending such letters to medical journals. Protecting the public from the political depredations of CHEST Magazine. Pursuant to Trump's war against history, Martin fired off one to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. "Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform," he wrote,
"including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s 'educational' mission."He added that "Wikipedia's operations are directed by its board that is composed primarily of foreign nationals, subverting the interests of American taxpayers." He threatened Wiki's non-profit status, which is the jurisdiction of the IRS, not Ed Martin. He sent a letter to Elon Musk, then running Trump's Department of Government Efficiency or not, depending on what court was asking on what day, saying he was investigating and would prosecute critics of DOGE, an org whose activities are not only wildly illegal but whose very existence is as well. Martin opened investigations against at least 2 members of congress for their political speech. Martin sent a letter to the dean of Georgetown University Law Center--by enrollment, the largest law school in the United States--demanding to know if the school had eliminated the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives found at nearly every other major institution and employer in the U.S. and warning the dean that no lawyer who graduates from a school with such initiatives would find employment with his office.[7]
That last can be seen as a sort of sideshow to Trump's extraordinary efforts to take over educational institutions.
Some background here: In March 2025, Trump signed one of his "executive orders" directing the Secretary of Education to, "to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education." The language is, as usual, strictly Orwellian. Congress created the Department of Education, congress assigned it the tasks it performs (which are Trump's sworn duties to carry out); both legally and constitutionally, only congress can abolish it and in the absence of congressional action, no steps to close it are "permitted by law."[8] Reflecting far-right tropes, rather than anything resembling reality, Trump's ghostwriter calls DoEd "Federal control over education," outlines various failings of the education system in the U.S. and just sort of randomly blames them on "the Federal education bureaucracy" (typifying the regime's mad fantasies on this, Trump's deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller offered an insane fascist anti-DoEd rant that wouldn't have been at all out of place in "Mein Kampf"). The EO says abolishing DoEd will "return authority over education to the States and local communities." But DoEd doesn't control education--it's major task, in fact, is simply managing student loans. Control over education (and responsibility for its outcomes) rests almost entirely with local communities and states, in that order. Where it has always been.
This decentralizing rhetoric is, of course, directly at odds with Trump's actual actions. To be sure, Trump's major education "policy" has been an effort to direct money intended for public education to "school choice" initiatives--to defund already-cash-strapped public schools in order to subsidize the private-school education of the children of his wealthy benefactors--but the regime has put major effort into trying to micromanage and dictate, from the dictator's White House office, the policies of local schools across the U.S.. While falsely implying that DoEd imposes curriculum and condemning it for this, Trump has weaponized the DoEd to try to impose on public schools the same government-dictated ultranationalistic "history" and "civics" curriculum as he has on other institutions:
"The federal government historically has not dictated curriculum choices... Yet the Education Department is prioritizing patriotic education, promoting civics lessons that present American history and the nation's founding principles in an 'inspiring' manner. History should portray an 'ennobling characterization' of the country's past, the department said."Local schools that try to aid or accommodate minorities hated by the far-right face the full wrath of the Trump regime juggernaut:
"The department is using its Office for Civil Rights to press public schools to drop programs and policies designed to help Black or Hispanic students... [T]he department has repeatedly targeted school districts for allowing students who were born male but identify as female to play on girls sports teams and use bathrooms and locker rooms reserved for girls. In some instances, the department has issued or threatened sanctions, including the potential loss of federal funding and referral to the U.S. Department of Justice for further action."Meanwhile, Trump has been carrying out a major campaign to try to seize control over America's major private institutions of higher learning. The initial pretext for this was battling "anti-Semitism," functionally defined by the regime as any show of solidarity with Palestinians while they were being mass-murdered by the Israeli government. The universities stand condemned not for being this breed of "anti-Semitic" but for allowing students to practice it--that is, to practice their constitutional right to protest U.S. support of this massacre. The regime then began to use, as another pretext, the notion that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives--again, initiatives that have been adopted by every major institution and employer in the U.S.--were somehow a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, another ridiculous "interpretation" of the law unilaterally invented by the dictator. And "DEI," in the regime's handling, is another of those elastic phrases that no one in the regime itself can define, another empty, negative label the dictator, at any moment, slaps on anything he doesn't like. The regime has used other pretexts along the way as well, uniformly laughable, and the story is always the same: the schools are told to surrender their autonomy to the regime or be stripped of federal funding, "investigated" in the kind of Star Chamber proceedings these articles have described elsewhere, swamped by prolonged and expensive legal battles, prevented from functioning to the extent that the regime can prevent them from functioning.
In its early weeks, the regime began revoking billions of dollars in then-ongoing contracts the federal government had with universities, usually for research--invaluable work that not only benefits Americans but the entire world. While these universities met all the legal requirements for receiving such grants, the regime announced it was suspending the grants without even pretending to comply with the legal requirements necessary to take them away and doing so based on the universities' failures, real or imagined, to meet new requirements found nowhere in law and simply invented by the dictator. It expanded from there, with the regime diversifying its tactics, escalating its efforts. Some institutions gave in, to varying extents, others have fought.
In September, in U.S. News & World Reports, Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder did a good job of cataloging a lot of this, though not necessarily a good job of organizing it or putting it into a larger context (it is a huge subject). Harvard, America's wealthiest and best-known university, has been a prime target of the regime and its experience provides a nutshell of what's been happening. In April 2025, the regime sent a letter to Harvard president Alan Garber simply declaring that "Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment" and proposing a "settlement agreement" that would turn control of the university over to the regime.
The letter, only 5 pages, must be read to be believed. Some of its highlights: The regime demands that Harvard completely restructure its internal government, centralizing power in such a way as to empower "exclusively those most... committed to the changes indicated in this letter" and "reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty" and "reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism" as defined by the regime, "than scholarship." The University must implement "merit-based" hiring and admissions policies--no recruiting or aiding minority students--and all of its data on hiring and admissions are to be submitted to the regime for "audit." At the same time, the 1st Amendment President baldly cast aside the 1st Amendment to demand the university adopt hiring and admissions quotas for MAGA, couched as "viewpoint diversity" and without any apparent concern for the "merits" of such creatures. Every "department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse," and
"Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity."All of this to be overseen and "audited" by a regime-approved auditor. Another such auditor is to "audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture." Harvard is to change its student discipline policies and procedures to, among other things, ban masks worn by student demonstrators--particularly delightful while the regime has filled American streets with violent, masked ICE and Border Patrol thugs--and is not to recognize or fund "student groups or clubs that engaged in anti-Semitic activity since October 7th, 2023"--pro-Palestinian groups (and they're even named). The university "must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence"--no doubt, they must meet the rigorous respect for the Constitution displayed by the regime in composing these demands--"including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism," all as defined by the regime. "Harvard will immediately report to federal authorities, including the Department of Homeland Security and State Department, any foreign student, including those on visas and with green cards, who commits a conduct violation." This, too, will be audited by the regime.
This and the rest will be necessary to "maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government."
Even upon reading the letter, seeing it on a page, it's difficult to believe anything like this is happening in the United States. Harvard president Garber's response was swift...
"We have informed the administration... that we will not accept their proposed agreement. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights....and the regime's response was to immediately "freeze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard University." And thus began a long vendetta by the regime intended to crush Harvard beneath its boot--to either force it to relinquish control to the regime or to end the institution. Smith-Schoenwalder in that U.S. News piece:
"The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard's First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government--regardless of which party is in power--should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue."
"That led to an escalating dispute that has seen all additional federal funding withdrawn, new civil rights investigations initiated over hiring practices [at Harvard], threats to end the university’s tax-exempt status and a presidential proclamation banning foreign students from studying at Harvard, among other actions."At the time of that last, 28% of the student body at Harvard were foreign students. Harvard sued the regime over its initial move to bar foreign students and won an injunction against the regime's action. Trump issued that proclamation to--no kidding--"safeguard national security by suspending the entry of foreign nationals seeking to study or participate in exchange programs at Harvard University." The same court--U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs--blocked it too. The regime has appealed. It took more than a year for the matter to get back into court, no decision yet.
Smith-Schoenwalder:
"Trump in April 2025 signed an executive order to require the 'full and timely disclosure of foreign funding by higher education institutions.' The order asks for stricter enforcement of a federal law that requires colleges to disclose financial ties with foreign sources. 'We believe that certain universities, including, for example, Harvard, have routinely violated this law, and this law has not been effectively enforced,' White House staff secretary Will Scharf said at the executive order’s signing ceremony.And...
"The Trump administration opened investigations into Harvard University; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of California, Berkeley; and, most recently, the University of Michigan over foreign funds."
"The Education Department took steps to notify accreditors of violations its Office for Civil Rights found at certain institutions, including Harvard University and Columbia University. It accused both schools of violating federal antidiscrimination laws, saying, in turn, that the schools no longer appear to meet their accreditor's standards. The agency noted in its press releases that 'if a university fails to come into compliance within a specified period, an accreditor must take appropriate action against its member institution.'"Just one thing after another after another.
Harvard, meanwhile, took the grant-suspension to court and, in September 2025, won the case on summary judgment, Judge Burroughs holding that while the regime claimed to do all of this to battle anti-Semitism,
"[T]here is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism. In fact, a review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that [Trump regime] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country's premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the [Administrative Procedures Act], the First Amendment and Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act]. Further, their actions have jeopardized decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research, as well as reflect a disregard for the rights protected by the Constitution and federal statutes."Burroughs ruled that the Trump regime resume payments on the terminated funding and blocked it from refusing to award funding in the future without following the law.
Though the regime hadn't, in court, even been able to make any real case for its own actions, its immediate response was, as usual, to attack the court in such a way as to undermine public support for the institutions of the liberal democracy, vow to appeal the decision and publicly declare it wouldn't abide by the ruling anyway:
"White House spokesperson Liz Huston in a statement vowed to appeal the ruling by an 'activist Obama-appointed judge,' saying Harvard 'does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars and remains ineligible for grants in the future.'"Increasingly, the regime is simply refusing to abide by court orders and rulings that go against it, a much larger subject to which I'll return in later articles. For now, the regime has appealed this one. It has taken over a year for the matter to get back into court.
In August 2026, a whisteblower came forward to reveal the obvious, that Trump's alleged task-force on anti-Semitism, where all of this began, was a fraud and that
"the investigations into some of the nation's most prestigious academic institutions were designed to strong-arm the schools into cutting deals for political purposes. Outcomes of the investigations were 'predetermined, without regard to the evidence' in a 'politically mandated effort' to extract money from schools through settlement demands and funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out antisemitism, the complaint alleges.Judge Burroughs' smokescreen.
"The work of the multi-agency task force... was 'marked by extraordinary procedural irregularities, predetermined outcomes without factual or legal support' and disregard for the law and Constitution, lawyers for the former government attorney wrote in seeking watchdog investigations into their client's complaints."
In October 2025, the regime began circulating to universities a proposed "compact," a sort of part-carrot approach--surrender your independence and "adopt the White House's vision for America's campuses" and get "more favorable access to federal money", "substantial and meaningful federal grants" and "increased overhead payments," all of which you lose if the regime overseeing you decides you aren't living up to the terms.
I've focused on Harvard to give the reader a taste, but this is what America's major private universities have been facing, the same out-of-control, reactionary would-be dictator who has increasingly cast aside the law and the constitution and, as part of his centralization of power, has been seizing control of institutions throughout his reign and bending them to his will in an effort to destroy the liberal democracy then leave his name and image on the rubble for the personality-cult he's created to admire while the squalid tyranny he's built in place of America slouches into whatever little future it has left.
This isn't what you want, America. Do something about it.
-j.
---
[1] An example: By law, a president can engineer the firing of a board member of USIP but only with the approval of a majority of the rest of the board and/or the agreement of multiple congressional committees.
[2] The "fact"-sheet accompanying the orders says the Vice President will "eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo."
[3] On TruthSocial on 30 May, Trump wrote, "I am herby [sic] terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery," denouncing her as "a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position." The Gallery is a Smithsonian museum that houses images of prominent Americans. Trump has absolutely no authority to fire its director, who is appointed by the Smithsonian, and initially, the Gallery simply ignored the "firing," and Sajet continued her duties as before. She eventually resigned her post though.
[4] This part of the order is somewhat anomalous for Trump, in that it says his regime should work with congress to impose these restrictions. Legally, that's necessary but in almost every other case, Trump simply orders his favored conditions be illegally imposed, with no input or even mention of congress.
[5] At the same time he purported to fire the board members, Trump also announced he'd fired the National Archivist. By law, Trump can remove the Archivist but he's required to have a reason for doing so and to inform congress of it; he's done neither. By statute, the Archivist is supposed to be a non-political post, filled based on professional qualifications; Trump has appointed his Sec. of State, Marco Rubio, who has no professional qualifications for the job, as acting director. The "firing" was widely seen as revenge against the Archivist for the National Archives' efforts to retrieve public documents that Trump had stolen when he left the White House in 2021.
[6] The regime sued musician Chuck Redd for $1 million, alleging breach of contract. Redd had hosted the Center's annual Christmas Eve Jazz Jam, a free-admission event, for nearly 2 decades but canceled the 2025 show. Richard Grenell, then the purported president of the Center, straight-up said they were going after Redd for his political speech, ranting that Redd's cancellation, "explicitly in response to the Center's recent renaming, which honors President Trump's extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure" is "classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution." The suit was accompanied by "an offer to settle if Redd paid $7,500, played at this year's concert, and refrained from issuing 'political commentary' about his decision to withdraw" from the show. After Redd, who had never, in fact, signed any contract to play the show, was forced to spend the money to defend himself, it was laughed out of court. Compared to Trump's mad pursuit of his other enemies--or scapegoats (subjects for a subsequent article)--Redd got off easy.
[7] Martin is a walking ethics violation--among other things, he ordered his office to drop the charges against a 6 Jan. defendant whom Martin, himself, was simultaneously representing as a defense attorney in the same case. Trump eventually dropped Martin as nominee for the D.C. Attorney but seemingly only because his antics became such a public embarrassment that Republican senators were declining to support the nomination. So Trump made Martin his pardon attorney, overseeing Trump's grotesquely unethical pardons of his criminal cronies, and director of the Justice Department's Weaponization Working Group, which, under the banner of fighting "weaponization" of the government, works to weaponize the government against Trump's enemies.
[8] The EO is full of other misinformation. Trump, for example, calls DoE "one of the newest Cabinet agencies," which, he says, was created in 1979 as, he implies, a pay-off by the Jimmy Carter administration to a teacher's union, and "has existed for less than one fifth of our Nation’s history." In reality, the Department of Education was created in 1867. It was eventually downgraded to the Office of Education and transferred around to different federal agencies over the decades before going cabinet-level again under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 as the Department of Health, Education & Welfare. In the late '70s, this department was split into the Department of Education and the Department of Health & Human Services, as we now have them.
