People Have the Power: Week Whatever of the Stupid Coup and the Pushback

I wrote the following early yesterday before the big news of the Wisconsin election in which Elon Musk's estimated $20 million and illicit bribes to voters did not net a win for his candidate and may have done the opposite and before Cory Booker's filibuster entered its final hours and triumph at the 25-hour mark. It was a good day for democracy and for Democrats and one no one quite foresaw. I was writing about the nature of power, and Booker's power to stand on principle, literally, for more than a full day, while hundreds of millions sat up and paid attention (he got 400 million likes on TikTok alone), and Musk's powerlessness to buy an election or prop up his sagging car company said a lot about it. I wrote:  

This is a test. Not like a test as not the real thing like a fire drill or a math test, but the real thing itself: a test as in all of us are being tested, as in "these are times that try men's souls" and everyone's principles. Who will stand up to the coup/constitutional crisis? Who has already surrendered? The coup is unfolding as an attack on the institutions and relationships and even facts that stabilize and sometimes protect and aid this nation and the world and people across the world, as a vicious attack on nature itself, and as an attack on the rights of individuals and the rule of law. It's a horrific nightmare of an era, and each of us had a choice in how to respond to it. 

This is a test with two options for people in this country, resisting or acquiescing; there is no third alternative, no sitting this out. (Obviously, children, the infirm, and those already facing great danger are exempt, but that leaves a whole lot of us, especially those of us who are straight, white, and born in the USA.) In how we respond, we find out who we are, who is with us, who is strong and lives by their principles and who is weak and surrenders theirs (or didn't have any, or finds Trumpist principles just fine).  

I write as Senator Cory Booker enters the seventeenth hour of his filibuster-ish speech protesting the Trump Administration, a performance that only highlights the comparative absence of most of our senators from the public arena. Everyone in this crisis who can speak up should speak up, and while some people are vulnerable in that they would face difficult to dangerous consequences for so doing, senators are uniquely empowered to speak up. Also it's their job, and they took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and the domestic enemies are in their face right now, and as obvious as can be. 

 Of course more than half of the hundred senators are already Team Trump but the Democrats in Congress have overall been missing in action in what is, arguably, the biggest crisis in this country's history. Not being on the wrong side of history is not good enough. They need to be on the right side, loudly, to do the job we voted for and pay them for. Pretending that this is a normal situation for which a normal legislative response is adequate is delusion or deceit. The same goes for the lower house, in which we've been listening to the sounds of silence from a lot of representatives who are not representing us. 

(I must acknowledge, though, that the news media are not doing a great job in keeping us informed on what's going on, and though I'm (obviously) obsessively scouring the news most days, I miss stories. While looking for something else, I just ran across Elizabeth Warren speaking up for the Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk, the PhD candidate snatched off the street by ICE and incarcerated in Louisiana, calling for her release and the restoration of her visa. And then I came across mention of the Social Security war room Warren and Senator Ron Wyden announced at a press conference today. I do think that Democrats in Congress need to do a much better job of telling us they hear us, they're doing stuff, and what that stuff is. It's striking that Booker said he decided to filibuster because he was listening to us. "We need a greater love in this country a greater fight in this country, a greater determination," he said toward the end of his extraordinary performance.)

 Right now a lot of elites are surrendering or at least some very high profile ones--a number of elite private universities and law firms have very publicly caved to the Administration's direct pressures and demands. Which has in turn prompted some very public resignations from brave lawyers at these firms, who did not sign up for surrender to lawless authoritarianism. More than a thousand of them signed a petition and a few of them at the firms that acquiesced have written public letters of resignation. 

 Academics have circulated and signed similar petitions. Law-school deans, led by UC Berkeley, signed on to a public letter affirming their principles. It's striking that the supposedly top eleven law schools did not sign on, which raises some questions about what makes an institution top. A BlueSky commenter wrote "Mr. Rogers said, 'Look for the helpers' - but maybe don't look for them in the Ivies. And rethink those rankings. " It raises more questions about elites and what power and wealth and strength are. 

"Columbia University agreed on Friday to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department in a remarkable concession to the Trump administration, which has refused to consider restoring $400 million in federal funds without major changes," the New York Times reported on March 21. "This week, the University of Pennsylvania was also explicitly targeted by the Trump administration, which said it would cancel $175 million in federal funding, at least partly because the university had let a transgender woman participate on a women’s swim team" in 2022. This is forced ideological conformity, and I'm pretty sure it violates a bunch of laws. 

 It's worth mentioning Penn because it's a reminder that it's not just about campus protests or alleged antisemitism; it's about anything they want, and breaking universities as strongholds of education, research, and intellectual activity serves authoritarianism well. Here's another example from Forbes, which declares: "The recent attempt to deport Kseniia Petrova, a 32-year-old Russian medical researcher at Harvard Medical School, and her current detention has ignited a firestorm of concern among academics and human rights advocates. Her alleged infraction—failing to declare frog embryos used in research—has led to her visa revocation and the threat of her removal to Russia, where her outspoken criticism of the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine places her at severe risk.​" 

 In the case of Columbia University, some part of its administration seemed to welcome making the campus a place where speech is no longer free (and after the university's president agreed to these outrageous conditions, she was fired by its board for allegedly saying in a zoom meeting that enforcement might be lax). The Trump Administration is seeking to crush the first-amendment-guaranteed freedom of speech, association, and maybe religion, along with the freedom of the press as it intimidates news outlets with lawsuits (some of them caved by paying settlements rather than fighting winnable cases in court). And the freedom of the legal profession to defend people of all political persuasions and ethnicities. 

 A number of conservative Jewish organizations have also gotten behind the Trump Administration's supposed pursuit of antisemites, with a definition of antisemitism suggesting that opposing the current government of Israel is antisemitism, though many Israelis and Jews vehemently oppose the Netanyahu regime and its mass killings. Letting authoritarians aligned with actual antisemites as in Nazis decide who's a Jew and who's a good Jew is a dangerously corrupt choice. Trump announced on Truth Social Tuesday that Wilkie Farr & Gallagher had agreed to supply $100 million in pro-bono work on causes his administration supports, including "Combatting Antisemitism," which will likely mean critics of Israel and not Trump's neo-Nazi supporters. 

 Some surrenders are public. Some take the form of quiet acquiescence, of not speaking up, and I'd include in this category all the celebrities who seemed to be passionately anti-Trump last year, in their campaigning for Kamala Harris (and in the case of George Clooney and a lot of others, campaigning against Joe Biden). Where did all the celebrities go? Do any of them have a guitar that, like Woody Guthrie's, fights fascism? Could Bruce Springsteen please sing us a song of no surrender? White Dudes for Harris, you need to become White Dudes for Democracy. (At least Mark Hamill is lively for democracy on BlueSky.) Celebrities are more securely placed than most of us when it comes to speaking up and have more impact when they do. Where are they hiding? 

 What's most striking to me about all this is the question of: what is power? Normally we'd say that Columbia University and those law firms taking in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars annually are powerful. They're rich, they're highly visible, but in their  acquiescence they have proven they are weak rather than strong, that what is supposed to be their power is their accumulation of privilege they are so afraid to lose they turn out to also be afraid to use. If you can't use it, it's not power and you're not powerful. Or maybe it's that you can both accumulate power and spend it, and they're afraid to spend it. I think this is often the case with elites – they become hostage to their own privileges, so afraid of losing them they are acquiescent to whatever comes.  

 At least if their loyalty is to rank, status, riches. Some are willing to risk or just walk out on all those things. Take this young lawyer who just resigned from Skadden, one of those elite law firms that surrendered. "On Friday, hours after Jenner and WilmerHale filed their lawsuits, Trump said he had reached an agreement with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, in which the firm would provide at least $100 million in pro bono legal services for causes the president supports," the Washington Post reports, noting that the firms Jenner & Block and WilmerHale went to court to stop the executive order Trump issued against them, as had Perkins Coie, while Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison surrendered. 

 Anyway, Thomas Sipp, formerly of Skadden,  wrote about loving history when he was in school, and how he would, while reading about those who acted with conscience in times of crisis, "often imagine myself faced with the same dilemmas. What would I do if I was there? Would I do the right thing? It always felt like there was no way to know." He concludes, "As lawyers, we have an obligation to uphold the rule of law. This responsibility does not end when profits are threatened by a burgeoning autocracy. I am making this decision to leave even though I was happy here. I have made so many great friends at this firm and learned from many great mentors. Thank you so much, I will miss you all dearly. And I am making this decision knowing that not everyone can leave as readily as I can, that many of you have families who depend on the income you earn here—I do not mean to shame you into leaving, only to explain my decision. Skadden is on the wrong side of history. I could no longer stay knowing that someday I would have to explain why I stayed." 

 He demonstrated that he had the power to act on conscience, to face the consequences of so doing, and to speak up about it. Individual courage – embodied for the past 36 years by that man facing off the tanks approaching the pro-democracy protests in Beijing's Tienanmen Square in 1989 – is inspiring, and I hope what it inspires is more courage. But safety in numbers is a rule that applies exceedingly well to acts of resistance, opposition, and defiance. The more of us who stand up and speak out the safer it is to do so. It's easier to pick off a few than round up the majority.  

 I recently watched the famous scene in which the Roman authorities demand Spartacus identify himself and lots of the enslaved men stand up and announce "I am Spartacus." It's a demonstration that even these men have the power of solidarity. The script for the 1960 film Spartacus was written by Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted left-wing screenwriter, adopted from the novel by Howard Fast, who was likewise a former Communist, and the novel and film were critiques of their own era of McCarthyite right-wing repression and attacks on freedom of thought and speech in violation of the Bill of Rights. We're in an era like it, and it behooves all who can to speak up and stand up when they come for any of us. 

 Here's another thing about power; the power the Trump Administration has is largely what we give it. They often cave when it is not given or when it's taken away by the courts. And they're spending power, not tending it, by breaking alliances, support, relationships, treaties. their threats to seize Greenland. They may desire to make the US weaker, because they may think a weakened country with undermined institutions may be easier to dominate, but as the heads of government they're also making themselves weaker. The administration has sabotaged relationships with our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and with NATO and EU allies. So they're losing the power of alliances abroad, along with the power of public support at home.

 They seem to have miscalculated--so far as I can tell by assuming their power is boundless, to be endlessly spent, never built up and protected, as political leaders normally do. Take the threats to seize Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark, which in turn is part of the European Union and NATO, so that any invasion of the indigenous-majority island would be an attack on these powerful alliances. The loud threats have infuriated and alienated Greenlandic and Danish and many other people around the the world. The stunt whereby the administration decided to send the vice president's wife to Greenland for what was clearly a publicity campaign pretending to be a little holiday backfired badly. 

 Usha Vance was going to attend a dogsled race, show herself about, and then the vice president decided to join her. Greenlanders made it so clear they were so unwelcome that they limited their tour to a few hours at the isolated US military base for a pathetic photo op. It was a fool's errand and they showed their weakness by backing down from something that was always a dumb idea and maybe one that shows they lack intelligence in the ordinary sense of being smart and the specific sense of having good analysis of the political situation and the consequences of given actions. Or maybe they think their power is irresistible, but a small indigenous population resisted it effectively. They certainly failed, again, to anticipate both public reaction to their conduct and the fact that the public has power too. 

 Elon Musk has helpfully just proven how resistible power is, or the folly of confusing mountains of money with outright power. He had an apparent meltdown last night over his failure to buy the Wisconsin supreme court election, in which his candidate didn't just lose but lost in a landslide. And earlier he choked up on Fox News talking about the protests against Tesla and the impact it's having on the company's valuation. Both these things demonstrate the limits of his power and the scope of our power. The Tesla protests are working. People have the power. 

p.s. Remember that there are nationwide protests, marches, and rallies on Saturday, April 5, called by Indivisible, 50501, Third Act, and other groups, and Tesla Takedown actions continue across the country. The big day of worldwide action against Tesla last Saturday seems to have been a success. And remember that if there's no event in your area you can organize one. 

p.p.s. after sending this one out, so many connections and sources continued to tumble through my mind. I can't add them all in to this draft, but I did wish I'd said that ythe law firms and universities that caved out of apparent fear of loss of revenue or safety have lost something that may prove more valuable. As unpacked in this New York Post headline: "Columbia University faces new trouble as top admissions consultant says students won’t accept offers — ‘brand has been tarnished’"

p.s. Friends point out Princeton is standing up: https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2025/04/princeton-news-adpol-eisgruber-university-concessions-bloomberg-interview

And Tufts issued a moving defense of its kidnapped student Rumeysa Ozturk: https://www.tufts.edu/president/speeches-and-messages/04022025-university-declaration-for-rumeysa-ozturk?fbclid=IwY2xjawJa9R1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHcNaQ6PY_urMOKxJPKZ3YYdrcnvJ6q-sJl2kYb0hsnO6aeEeP0Sc_4cmfQ_aem_GqwIhJEOVTyFndtSKB6ycA