The Opinions - Welcome to Trump’s Mafia State

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

In this episode, the columnist M. Gessen argues that when it comes to America’s institutions, President Trump is taking a page out of a Soviet-style playbook.Thoughts? Emails us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur and Jillian Weinberger. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is Masha Gessen, and I'm an opinion columnist for the New York Times. The Trump administration has threatened at this point. I hesitate to say how many high-profile universities with pulling their federal funding, which in this case means pulling research grants. some of them amounting to more than $2 billion, as in the case of Harvard, unless they submit to various demands.

The administration wanted Harvard to limit activism on campus and DEI programs and change the school's governance. President Trump also threatening to revoke the university's tax-exempt status, accusing the school of pushing political, ideological, and terrorist-inspired sickness. Harvard's president wrote a... letter in response saying the school, quote, will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights by agreeing to the terms. And in effect, these demands are to place the university under direct federal oversight. So the pretexts that the administration is using have to do

with D.I. and anti-Semitism. But the real reason, I think, is anti-intellectualism and greed. and the fact that Trump is building a mafia state. Now, a mafia state is an absolutely centralized system in which one person, the patron, the Don, distributes money and power. And so in order to build a mafia state, such an aspiring patron needs to strip other agents of their money and power.

So then he can give some of that money back to them or not. Some universities are actually quite wealthy. So they are, to some extent, independent financial centers. And they are centers of independent intellectual and political power. And that's what he's really going after. I hesitate to talk about how important it is that Harvard stood up because it really should be a no-brainer. Like, of course, these demands are blatantly illegal.

And there are just, it almost literally says. nice university you got there. Shame if something happened to it. There's no way that a university could accede to those kinds of demands. And yet, we saw Columbia, which was the first university targeted, try to bend. Apparently in the hopes of preventing further attacks, it very quickly became obvious that that doesn't work.

After Colombia had $400 million in federal research, grants suspended. And Colombia immediately seated to demands that are similar, weren't as broad as the demands levied against Harvard. But after Colombia did that, the money didn't rematerialize. So then Colombia sacrificed its president pro tem. And that still wasn't enough. So I think that Harvard, on the one hand, was consulting with its lawyers. On the other hand, we now know hearing from its political scientists who were warning that it would be extremely dangerous to cave into this administration. And on the third hand, looking at what happened to Colombia and realizing that there is no negotiating with this mafia state, that if you give them a little, they will just

take the rest. We've had many previews of what Trump is going to do to universities. And I think it's worth taking a minute to sort of review his strategy, because he has said that he would use nonprofit status against universities, that he would try to get an endowment tax against universities, that they would go after international students who represent a significant source of revenue for a lot of big universities, and other sources of federal funding, such as financial aid, which is also very important for a lot of schools, including ones that don't get a lot of research funding from the federal government. So it's interesting to me that Trump started with these research grants, because research grants are really the easiest thing to wield individually

against universities. And divide and conquer is, of course, one of the most important strategies. And so an endowment tax would be more likely to affect many universities across the board. But research grants are granted individually, and so they can be pulled individually. But I think we should expect the Trump administration to use the full arsenal of tools as its disposal. And it has the ability to, if not bankrupt universities. It certainly has the ability to bankrupt universities that don't have significant endowments, which is most of them. But it has the ability to weaken universities that even have giant endowments, such as Harvard. I think that the only way for universities to really address this

is to come to terms with the fact that there's no way for them with this administration to keep their federal money. So what are they going to do knowing that they're going to suffer huge losses? I don't think at this point it's preventable. What is preventable is an all-out destruction of universities as places where young people learn, as places where humanities research is done, as places where intellectual work gets done, and disseminated. So the approach that some people have been advocating is they should protect their endowments, they should try to protect their science funding, to try to get through. trumps four-year term, and then hopefully things will get better. I don't think it's realistic. I think if they want to have a university in addition to their endowment, they have to shift

their priorities from what universities currently focus on, which is competition, which is getting as many applicants as possible and admitting as low percentage of them as possible, which is growth real estate, the growth of their endowment, and the rising in rankings by U.S. News and World Report. So set all of that aside and start teaching as widely as possible. I use the example of Bard College, which remarkably has responded to every crisis it has faced in the last 20, 25 years by teaching more people. And so Bard College has more degree candidates outside its campus and upstate New York than it does on campus. And these degree candidates include more than 400 people who are studying in prisons in the Bard Prison Initiative, thousands of people who are attending

Bard High School Early College, which are free high schools in six or seven different cities in the United States. It's a really amazing and imaginative way of making the university widely accessible to the largest possible number of people. We've seen what happens when universities succumb to autocrats. I side in Russia where I've lived most of my life. We side on Hungary where, and it's no coincidence, that independent universities were an important target of the urban administration. what happens is that there is very little intellectual opposition,

and such as it is, it is marginalized because it doesn't have any institutional support, which is part of what universities are for. And in the long run, it is, one of my books is called The Future's History, and one of the things that I look at in the future's history, how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia, is what one person I talked to called net knowledge loss that occurred in the Soviet Union over the course of its 70 years of totalitarian rule, where after the Bolshevik revolution, there was systematic and intentional destruction of the old intellectual class. And as a result, this one economist told me

that economists who were trained in Soviet universities in the 1970s lacked the sophistication, the knowledge necessary to read Russian economists who had worked in the 1920s. So in a rapidly developing field, such as economics, they actually knew less. They had less language. They had fewer tools of self-understanding than people who had worked 50 years earlier. And that's an extreme but perfectly realistic example of what happens when you have an autocratic president who wants to destroy knowledge production. So this is not going to stop with Harvard, however the battle of Harvard ends. But resistance on the part of Harvard, I think, makes it more difficult for the administration to expect significant concessions from me.

other universities that have the resources to fight. You know, I've lived through this before, not nearly at this rate. It took Vladimir Putin a year to take over Russian media and almost a decade to really bring universities to heal. And to see sort of the same playbook, but vastly speeded up, And to see that Americans who don't have the history of living under totalitarian rule, who think of themselves as freedom-loving and valuing their rights to free speech and freedom of movement and all sorts of other important things, to see them just fold a lot of the time, as happened with Colombia,

as happened with many of the law firms, is incredibly disheartening. I think the broader lesson is that there's no such thing as negotiating with this administration. It is always going to demand more concessions until nothing is left of the institution that is targeted. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Vashaka, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger.

It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Brusick, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero,

Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amon Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker,

and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.