Report: Trump may face a $100 million-plus tax bill if he loses IRS audit fight over Chicago tower
Josh Boaks – May 11, 2024
Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at the Waukesha County Expo Center in Waukesha, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump may face an IRS bill in excess of $100 million after a government audit indicates he double-dipped on tax losses tied to a Chicago skyscraper, according to a report by The New York Times and ProPublica that drew on a yearslong audit and public filings.
The report’s findings could put renewed focus on Trump’s business career as the presumptive Republican nominee tries to regain the White House after losing in 2020.
Trump used his cachet as a real estate developer and TV star to build a political movement, yet he has refused to release his tax filings as past presidential candidates have. The tax filings that the public does know about have come from past reporting by the Times and a public release of records by Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee in 2022.
Trump’s presidential campaign provided a statement in son Eric Trump‘s name saying the IRS inquiry “was settled years ago, only to be brought back to life once my father ran for office. We are confident in our position.”
The tax records cited by the report indicate that Trump twice deducted losses on the Trump International Hotel and Tower, which opened in 2009 near the banks of the Chicago River that cuts through that city’s downtown.
The report said Trump initially reported losses of $658 million in his 2008 filings under the premise that the property fit the IRS definition of being “worthless” because condominium sales were disappointing and retail space went unfilled amid a deep U.S. recession.
But in 2010, the published report said, Trump transferred the ownership of the property to a different holding company that he also controlled, using the move to save money on taxes by reporting an additional $168 million in losses over the next decade on the same property.
The report did not have any updates on the status of the IRS inquiry since December 2022, but said Trump could owe more than $100 million, including penalties, if he were to lose the audit battle.
Trump, meanwhile, is appealing a New York judge’s ruling from February after a civil trial that Trump, his company and top executives lied about his wealth on financial statements, conning bankers and insurers who did business with him. In early April, Trump posted a $175 million bond, halting collection of the more than $454 million he owes from the judgment and preventing the state from seizing his assets to satisfy the debt while he appeals.
Democrat President Joe Biden has said that Trump largely owes his fortune to an inheritance from his father, rather than through his own financial acumen. Biden has gone after Trump for not wanting to pay taxes, while his administration has increased IRS funding in order to increase audits of the ultra-wealthy and improve compliance with the federal tax code.
Trump May Owe $100 Million From Double-Dip Tax Breaks, Audit Shows
A previously unknown focus of an I.R.S. audit is a dubious accounting maneuver that effectively meant taking the same write-offs twice on a Chicago skyscraper.
By Russ Buettner andPaul Kiel – May 11, 2024
The I.R.S. believes that former President Donald J. Trump violated a law meant to prevent double-dipping on tax-reducing losses.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
This article was published in partnership with ProPublica. Russ Buettner of The New York Times has spent years reporting on the former president’s finances, including decades of his tax returns. Paul Kiel of ProPublica has reported on the I.R.S. and the ways the ultra-wealthy avoid taxes since 2018.
Former President Donald J. Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an Internal Revenue Service inquiry uncovered by The New York Times and ProPublica. Losing a years long audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.
The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Mr. Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.
But when Mr. Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the I.R.S. has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.
The first write-off came on Mr. Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless,” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.
There is no indication the I.R.S. challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Mr. Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the I.R.S. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.
The issues around Mr. Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the I.R.S. undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. The Times and ProPublica, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the I.R.S. would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties.
Mr. Trump’s tax records have been a matter of intense speculation since the 2016 presidential campaign, when he defied decades of precedent and refused to release his returns, citing a long-running audit. A first, partial revelation of the substance of the audit came in 2020, when The Times reported that the I.R.S. was disputing a $72.9 million tax refund that Mr. Trump had claimed starting in 2010. That refund, which appeared to be based on Mr. Trump’s reporting of vast losses from his long-failing casinos, equaled every dollar of federal income tax he had paid during his first flush of television riches, from 2005 through 2008, plus interest.
Mr. Trump at the tower in 2008, with his three eldest children. The project kept falling short of its predicted success, with condo units unsold and retail space sitting empty.Credit…Amanda Rivkin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The reporting by The Times and ProPublica about the Chicago tower reveals a second component of Mr. Trump’s quarrel with the I.R.S. This account was pieced together from a collection of public documents, including filings from the New York attorney general’s suit against Mr. Trump in 2022, a passing reference to the audit in a congressional report that same year and an obscure 2019 I.R.S. memorandum that explored the legitimacy of the accounting maneuver. The memorandum did not identify Mr. Trump, but the documents, along with tax records previously obtained by The Times and additional reporting, indicated that the former president was the focus of the inquiry.
It is unclear how the audit battle has progressed since December 2022, when it was mentioned in the congressional report. Audits often drag on for years, and taxpayers have a right to appeal the I.R.S.’s conclusions. The case would typically become public only if Mr. Trump chose to challenge a ruling in court.
In response to questions for this article, Mr. Trump’s son Eric, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said: “This matter was settled years ago, only to be brought back to life once my father ran for office. We are confident in our position, which is supported by opinion letters from various tax experts, including the former general counsel of the I.R.S.”
An I.R.S. spokesman said federal law prohibited the agency from discussing private taxpayer information.
The outcome of Mr. Trump’s dispute could set a precedent for wealthy people seeking tax benefits from the laws governing partnerships. Those laws are notoriously complex, riddled with uncertainty and under constant assault by lawyers pushing boundaries for their clients. The I.R.S. has inadvertently further invited aggressive positions by rarely auditing partnership tax returns.
The audit represents yet another potential financial threat — albeit a more distant one — for Mr. Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 presidential nominee. In recent months, he has been ordered to pay $83.3 million in a defamation case and another $454 million in a civil fraud case brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. Mr. Trump has appealed both judgments. (He is also in the midst of a criminal trial in Manhattan, where he is accused of covering up a hush-money payment to a porn star in the weeks before the 2016 election.)
Beyond the two episodes under audit, reporting by The Times in recent years has found that, across his business career, Mr. Trump has often used what experts described as highly aggressive — and at times, legally suspect — accounting maneuvers to avoid paying taxes. To the six tax experts consulted for this article, Mr. Trump’s Chicago accounting maneuvers appeared to be questionable and unlikely to withstand scrutiny.
“I think he ripped off the tax system,” said Walter Schwidetzky, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and an expert on partnership taxation.
The old Chicago Sun-Times building, which would be replaced by Mr. Trump’s 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper.Credit…Tim Boyle/Getty Images
From ‘$1.2 Billion’ to ‘Worthless’
Mr. Trump struck a deal in 2001 to acquire land and a building that was then home to the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. Two years later, after publicly toying with the idea of constructing the world’s tallest building there, he unveiled plans for a more modest tower, with 486 residences and 339 “hotel condominiums” that buyers could use for short stays and allow Mr. Trump’s company to rent out. He initially estimated that construction would last until 2007 and cost $650 million.
Mr. Trump placed the project at the center of the first season of “The Apprentice” in 2004, offering the winner a top job there under his tutelage. “It’ll be a mind-boggling job to manage,” Mr. Trump said during the season finale. “When it’s finished in 2007, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Chicago, could have a value of $1.2 billion and will raise the standards of architectural excellence throughout the world.”
As his cost estimates increased, Mr. Trump arranged to borrow as much as $770 million for the project — $640 million from Deutsche Bank and $130 million from Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund and private equity company. He personally guaranteed $40 million of the Deutsche loan. Both Deutsche and Fortress then sold off pieces of the loans to other institutions, spreading the risk and potential gain.
Mr. Trump planned to sell enough of the 825 units to pay off his loans when they came due in May 2008. But when that date came, he had sold only 133. At that point, he projected that construction would not be completed until mid-2009, at a revised cost of $859 million.
He asked his lenders for a six-month extension. A briefing document prepared for the lenders, obtained by The Times and ProPublica, said Mr. Trump would contribute $89 million of his own money, $25 million more than his initial plan. The lenders agreed.
But sales did not pick up that summer, with the nation plunged into the financial crisis that would become the Great Recession. When Mr. Trump asked for another extension in September, his lenders refused.
Two months later, Mr. Trump defaulted on his loans and sued his lenders, characterizing the financial crisis as the kind of catastrophe, like a flood or hurricane, covered by the “force majeure” clause of his loan agreement with Deutsche Bank. That, he said, entitled him to an indefinite delay in repaying his loans. Mr. Trump went so far as to blame the bank and its peers for “creating the current financial crisis.” He demanded $3 billion in damages.
At the time, Mr. Trump had paid down his loans with $99 million in sales but still needed more money to complete construction. At some point that year, he concluded that his investment in the tower was worthless, at least as the term is defined in partnership tax law.
Mr. Trump’s worthlessness claim meant only that his stake in 401 Mezz Venture, the L.L.C. that held the tower, was without value because he expected that sales would never produce enough cash to pay off the mortgages, let alone turn a profit.
When he filed his 2008 tax return, he declared business losses of $697 million. Tax records do not fully show which businesses generated that figure. But working with tax experts, The Times and ProPublica calculated that the Chicago worthlessness deduction could have been as high as $651 million, the value of Mr. Trump’s stake in the partnership — about $94 million he had invested and the $557 million loan balance reported on his tax returns that year.
When business owners report losses greater than their income in any given year, they can retain the leftover negative amount as a credit to reduce their taxable income in future years. As it turned out, that tax-reducing power would be of increasing value to Mr. Trump. While many of his businesses continued to lose money, income from “The Apprentice” and licensing and endorsement agreements poured in: $33.3 million in 2009, $44.6 million in 2010 and $51.3 million in 2011.
Mr. Trump’s advisers girded for a potential audit of the worthlessness deduction from the moment they claimed it, according to the filings from the New York attorney general’s lawsuit. Starting in 2009 Mr. Trump’s team excluded the Chicago tower from the frothy annual “statements of financial condition” that Mr. Trump used to boast of his wealth, out of concern that assigning value to the building would conflict with its declared worthlessness, according to the attorney general’s filing. (Those omissions came even as Mr. Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth to qualify for low-interest loans, according to the ruling in the attorney general’s lawsuit.)
Mr. Trump had good reason to fear an audit of the deduction, according to the tax experts consulted for this article. They believe that Mr. Trump’s tax advisers pushed beyond what was defensible.
The worthlessness deduction serves as a way for a taxpayer to benefit from an expected total loss on an investment long before the final results are known. It occupies a fuzzy and counterintuitive slice of tax law. Three decades ago, a federal appeals court ruled that the judgment of a company’s worthlessness could be based in part on the opinion of its owner. After taking the deduction, the owner can keep the “worthless” company and its assets. Subsequent court decisions have only partly clarified the rules. Absent prescribed parameters, tax lawyers have been left to handicap the chances that a worthlessness deduction will withstand an I.R.S. challenge.
There are several categories, with a declining likelihood of success, of money taxpayers can claim to have lost.
The tax experts consulted for this article universally assigned the highest level of certainty to cash spent to acquire an asset. The roughly $94 million that Mr. Trump’s tax returns show he invested in Chicago fell into this category.
Some gave a lower, though still probable, chance of a taxpayer prevailing in declaring a loss based on loans that a lender agreed to forgive. That’s because forgiven debt generally must be declared as income, which can offset that portion of the worthlessness deduction in the same year. A large portion of Mr. Trump’s worthlessness deduction fell in this category, though he did not begin reporting forgiven debt income until two years later, a delay that would have further reduced his chances of prevailing in an audit.
The tax experts gave the weakest chance of surviving a challenge for a worthlessness deduction based on borrowed money for which the outcome was not clear. It reflects a doubly irrational claim — that the taxpayer deserves a tax benefit for losing someone else’s money even before the money has been lost, and that those anticipated future losses can be used to offset real income from other sources. Most of the debt included in Mr. Trump’s worthlessness deduction was based on that risky position.
Including that debt in the deduction was “just not right,” said Monte Jackel, a veteran of the I.R.S. and major accounting firms who often publishes analyses of partnership tax issues.
After declaring the tower “worthless,” Mr. Trump claimed as much as $651 million in losses on the project. He later claimed $168 million more.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
A Second Bite at the Apple
Mr. Trump continued to sell units at the Chicago Tower, but still below his costs. Had he done nothing, his 2008 worthlessness deduction would have prevented him from claiming that shortfall as losses again. But in 2010, his lawyers attempted an end-run by merging the entity through which he owned the Chicago tower into another partnership, DJT Holdings L.L.C. In the following years, they piled other businesses, including several of his golf courses, into DJT Holdings.
Those changes had no apparent business purpose. But Mr. Trump’s tax advisers took the position that pooling the Chicago tower’s finances with other businesses entitled him to declare even more tax-reducing losses from his Chicago investment.
His financial problems there continued. More than 100 of the hotel condominiums never sold. Sales of all units totaled only $727 million, far below Mr. Trump’s budgeted costs of $859 million. And some 70,000 square feet of retail space remained vacant because it had been designed without access to foot or vehicle traffic. From 2011 through 2020, Mr. Trump reported $168 million in additional losses from the project.
Those additional write-offs helped Mr. Trump avoid tax liability for his continuing entertainment riches, as well as his unpaid debt from the tower. Starting in 2010, his lenders agreed to forgive about $270 million of those debts. But he was able to delay declaring most of that income until 2014 and spread it out over five years of tax returns, thanks to a provision in the Obama administration’s stimulus bill responding to the Great Recession. In 2018, Mr. Trump reported positive income for the first time in 11 years. But his income tax bill still amounted to only $1.9 million, even as he reported a $25 million gain from the sale of his late father’s assets.
It’s unclear when the I.R.S. began to question the 2010 merger transaction, but the conflict escalated during Mr. Trump’s presidency.
The I.R.S. explained its position in a Technical Advice Memorandum, released in 2019, that identified Mr. Trump only as “A.” Such memos, reserved for cases where the law is unclear, are rare and involve extensive review by senior I.R.S. lawyers. The agency produced only two other such memos that year.
The memos are required to be publicly released with the taxpayer’s information removed, and this one was more heavily redacted than usual. Some partnership specialists wrote papers exploring its meaning and importance to other taxpayers, but none identified taxpayer “A” as the then-sitting president of the United States. The Times and ProPublica matched the facts of the memo to information from Mr. Trump’s tax returns and elsewhere.
The 20-page document is dense with footnotes, calculations and references to various statutes, but the core of the I.R.S.’s position is that Mr. Trump’s 2010 merger violated a law meant to prevent double dipping on tax-reducing losses. If done properly, the merger would have accounted for the fact that Mr. Trump had already written off the full cost of the tower’s construction with his worthlessness deduction.
In the I.R.S. memo, Mr. Trump’s lawyers vigorously disagreed with the agency’s conclusions, saying he had followed the law.
If the I.R.S. prevails, Mr. Trump’s tax returns would look very different, especially those from 2011 to 2017. During those years, he reported $184 million in income from “The Apprentice” and agreements to license his name, along with $219 million from canceled debts. But he paid only $643,431 in income taxes thanks to huge losses on his businesses, including the Chicago tower. The revisions sought by the I.R.S. would require amending his tax returns to remove $146 million in losses and add as much as $218 million in income from condominium sales. That shift of up to $364 million could swing those years out of the red and well into positive territory, creating a tax bill that could easily exceed $100 million.
The only public sign of the Chicago audit came in December 2022, when a congressional Joint Committee on Taxation report on I.R.S. efforts to audit Mr. Trump made an unexplained reference to the section of tax law at issue in the Chicago case. It confirmed that the audit was still underway and could affect Mr. Trump’s tax returns from several years.
That the I.R.S. did not initiate an audit of the 2008 worthlessness deduction puzzled the experts in partnership taxation. Many assumed the understaffed I.R.S. simply had not realized what Mr. Trump had done until the deadline to investigate it had passed.
“I think the government recognized that they screwed up,” and then audited the merger transaction to make up for it, Mr. Jackel said.
The agency’s difficulty in keeping up with Mr. Trump’s maneuvers, experts said, showed that this gray area of tax law was too easy to exploit.
“Congress needs to radically change the rules for the worthlessness deduction,” Professor Schwidetzky said.
Susanne Craig contributed reporting. Read by Eric Jason Martin. Narration produced by Anna Diamond and Krish Seenivasan. Engineered by Steven Szczesniak
Russ Buettner is an investigative reporter. Since 2016, his reporting has focused on the finances of Donald. J. Trump, including articles that revealed tax avoidance schemes evidenced on several decades of his tax returns. In 2019, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for work that revealed the vast inheritance Mr. Trump had received from his father.
Not to spend too much time writing about Donald Trump this week, but I was struck by this report in The Washington Post on the former president’s recent overtures to oil executives. After hearing one executive during an event last month at his Mar-a-Lago club complain about supposedly burdensome environmental regulations promulgated by the Biden administration, Trump made a proposition.
You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation. Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
The rest of the story goes on to describe Trump’s plans to gut the federal government’s response to climate change and facilitate more and greater fossil fuel extraction.
Trump told the executives that he would start auctioning off more leases for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, a priority that several of the executives raised. He railed against wind power, as The Post previously reported. And he said he would reverse the restrictions on drilling in the Alaskan Arctic.
This would be a generational setback on climate change, a large and disastrous mortgage on the future so that oil and gas giants could fill their coffers for just a little bit longer before they are overtaken by clean energy.
I’m obviously angered by the blatant disregard for the planet and its inhabitants. But I’m also struck by the in-your-face brazenness of Trump’s reported quid pro quo. This is more than the hint of corruption; it is the overpowering scent of the rotting corpse of corruption. It is influence trading of the sort that would embarrass a Boss Tweed or a Roscoe Conkling, whose “honest graft” came with at least the pretense of pursuing the public good.
Even more striking than Trump’s corruption, however, is the fact that we seem to be completely unfazed by the fact that the former president has apparently offered to sell his prospective administration to fossil fuel interests. That might be because, from the beginning of his term to its end, Trump was a font for corruption while in office. His hotel, located just down the street from the White House, was a clearinghouse for anyone who wanted to buy a favor. His daughter and son-in-law may not have accomplished much as presidential advisers, but they walked away from the administration with upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars in new wealth. And six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
If Trump’s latest instance of corruption isn’t a campaign-ending scandal, it may be because it is nothing new. Trump is corrupt to his bones and now that appears to be as noteworthy as the weather.
California sisters were offered $5,000 from insurance for storm damage. A jury awarded them $18 million
Nathan Solis – May 10, 2024
The San Bernardino Justice Center is shown. Two San Bernardino women said they lived in their home for over five years without heat because of a dispute with their insurance company. (Google Maps)
Two San Bernardino sisters who sued their insurance company for failing to pay to repair flood damage on their home are now $18 million richer after a jury found in their favor and imposed emotional and punitive damages on the insurance company.
The $18-million verdict announced April 18 by a San Bernardino County jury was a far cry from the $5,000 an insurance adjuster had initially offered the women.
Jennifer Garnier’s and Angela Toft’s home in Piñon Hills was flooded by rainwater in February 2019. Muddy water damaged their home, including the heating and air conditioning ducts. The rainwater also damaged the electrical system in their prefabricated home, according to their attorney, Michael Hernandez.
The sisters estimated they needed more than $100,000 to fix the damage, but when they filed a claim with their insurance company, American Reliable, an insurance adjuster instead offered Garnier and Toft only $5,000, Hernandez said.
The sisters sued American Reliable in September 2020 for a breach of contract, claiming that the adjuster did not conduct a proper inspection of the home. The home was uninhabitable, according to their lawsuit, but Garnier and Toft continued to live there because they did not have anywhere else to go.
Arizona-based American Reliable and its parent company, Pennsylvania-based Global Indemnity Group, did not respond to requests for comment.
But in court filings, American Reliable argued that Garnier and Toft repeatedly delayed inspection of their home and, after they filed their lawsuit, they were slow to respond to requests made by the company’s legal team. The women also repeatedly asked for all communication from the insurance company to be made in writing, Hernandez said.
More than four years after they filed their claim, American Reliable said an oversight was made on their end and they offered the sisters $140,000 in October 2023, just a few months before the trial was slated to start. The company explained to Garnier and Toft that they learned about the sisters’ living conditions while deliberating the evidence in the trial, Hernandez said.
“We argued that they had known about those conditions for a long time, but they made the decision to pay my clients because they knew that they would be facing a jury,” Hernandez said.
Garnier and Toft moved ahead with the trial and received estimates to repair their home, but postponed repairs until after the trial was over, because they would be forced to relocate during construction, according to Hernandez.
After a six-week trial, a jury found in favor of the women and awarded them each $3 million for emotional damages. They were awarded $2 million in punitive damages from American Reliable and $10 million in punitive damages from Global Indemnity Group, according to court documents.
The verdict arrives during a tumultuous time in California as insurance companies flee the Golden State, claiming they are unable to provide insurance to homes under threat of wildfires and other natural disasters.
While climate-change-related liability coverage did not overtly factor into Garnier’s and Toft’s case, their home was damaged by floodwaters from a Southern California rainstorm. Forecasts show that climate change will exacerbate flooding in California in the coming years.
In March, State Farm announced that it would not renew policies for 72,000 property owners across the state, citing high inflation, catastrophe exposure, reinsurance costs and the limitation of decades-old insurance regulations as reasons for scaling back policies.
The California Department of Insurance announced a new strategy in September to streamline the rate approval process for insurers in the homeowners, auto and other markets. That process was last changed in 1988.
What Part of Civil Society Will Trump’s Party Target Next?
Michelle Goldberg – May 10, 2024
James Comer, center, and fellow members of the House Oversight Committee toured a student encampment last week in Washington. Credit…Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week, the Republican senator Josh Hawley demanded a federal investigation into dark money groups subsidizing “pro-terrorist student organizations” holding anti-Israel protests on college campuses. He cited Politico reporting linking big liberal philanthropies to some pro-Palestinian organizers. Open Society Foundations, for example, founded by the oft-demonized George Soros, has given grants to the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace, which has an active university presence. Hawley noted that an I.R.S. ruling denies tax-exempt status to organizations that encourage their members to commit civil disobedience, calling nonprofit funding for the groups behind the anti-Israel demonstrations “almost certainly illegal.”
Even if Garland doesn’t act on Hawley’s request, the attorney general in a second Donald Trump administration probably would. That’s one reason I fear that the backlash to the pro-Palestinian campus movement — which includes lawsuits, hearings and legislation — could help Republicans wage war on progressive nonprofits more broadly.
If they do, the right would be following a well-worn authoritarian playbook. In addition to repressing critical voices in academia and the media, the autocratic leaders Trump admires have regularly tried to crush the congeries of advocacy groups, think tanks, humanitarian organizations and philanthropies often referred to as “civil society.” Hungary, for example, passed what it called the “Stop Soros” law, which criminalized helping refugees and migrants apply for asylum. More recently, Hungary enacted a “sovereignty law,” which, as a report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it, “offers the ruling party and the Secret Service vast powers to accuse and investigate any groups or individuals that influence public debate and may have had foreign training or contact for any part of their work.”
That Carnegie report, written by Rachel Kleinfeld and published in March, offers a stark warning that something similar could happen here. In fact, Kleinfeld argues, it’s already started.
Titled “Closing Civic Space in the United States,” the report describes a wide array of efforts to curb organizing and assembly. Kleinfeld criticizes the left as well as the right, citing, for example, the pandemic-era rules that kept churches closed even after bars had reopened. But as she writes, “the vast majority of efforts to close space currently come from the illiberal right,” which is integrated into the Republican Party, and thus into government, in a way that has no analogue on the left.
Texas’ Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, for instance, has targeted a network of Catholic migrant shelters called Annunciation House, accusing them of abetting human smuggling. He also opened an investigation into the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, accusing it of manipulating data in an investigation into Nazi content on the social media platform X. Both these crusades have been blocked by courts, but they demonstrate the right’s ambition to use state power to hound nonprofits that oppose its agenda in ways that recall Hungary under Viktor Orban.
Anti-Israel protests have given Republicans a pretext to strike at liberal donors and organizers the way they’ve already struck at university presidents. As Kleinfeld wrote, authoritarians typically persecute the most controversial activists first: “Illiberal actors choose issues involving unpopular groups and cases with the most morally murky facts to create a permission structure that allows them to shut down a much broader set of activities.”
Demonstrations that seem to lionize revolutionary violence have stoked anxiety and outrage among many Democrats, and they’re often full of rhetoric that’s hard to defend. Some readers, I imagine, would be thrilled to see Students for Justice in Palestine’s resources cut off. Whenever I write about the troubling civil liberties implications of attempts to rein in anti-Israel activism, my inbox fills up with furious insults, as well as thoughtful, plaintive emails from people who feel that the climate in academia has become intolerable for many Jews.
But it’s precisely because the protests regularly transgress mainstream sensitivities that the right finds it useful to target them as part of a broader political project. That’s particularly true at a time when so many left-leaning organizations have aligned themselves with the pro-Palestinian movement. As one consultant who works with progressive nonprofits put it to me, careless activists have given Republicans “a Hamas-sized terrorist wedge to go after our entire infrastructure.”
Republicans seem to be laying the foundation to do just that. Last week, James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced an investigation into the “money trail” behind the campus protests. “It appears global elites are funding these hateful protests and pop-up tent cities,” he said. “These are the same groups that fund other radical agendas, including diminishing America’s energy production and pushing soft-on-crime policies that harm the American people.”
Meanwhile, the House recently passed, 382-11, a bill that would allow the Treasury secretary to revoke the tax-exempt status of “terrorist-supporting organizations.” Providing material support to terrorism is, of course, already illegal, and nonprofits that violate those laws should be shut down. But the House bill gives the executive branch the power to make these determinations unilaterally, and the measure is clearly aimed at funding for campus protests.
A November hearing of the House Ways and Means Committee at which the bill was discussed was full of dark insinuations about the forces behind Students for Justice in Palestine, which was presented as a terrorist front brainwashing naïve young Americans. An Arizona Republican, David Schweikert, spoke about the need to look at the tax code to ensure that “charitable giving, pretax monies,” are “doing good in the world and not ultimately financing evil.”
None of us, presumably, want to finance evil. The question is whether you want the government, particularly one controlled by Trump’s Republican Party, deciding what evil is. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, recently suggested that the F.B.I. investigate Soros’s role in the protests. A Trump F.B.I. wouldn’t need to be asked twice.
Donald Trump puts America on notice again: If he loses, he won’t go quietly
Doyle McManus – May 6, 2024
Insurrectionists storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after then-President Trump urged them to march to the building where lawmakers were certifying Joe Biden’s election win. (Associated Press)
Donald Trump has put America on notice: If he loses the presidential election, he reserves the right to encourage his followers to fight.
When Time magazine asked Trump whether the election would end in political violence if he loses, the former president replied: “If we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results,” he later told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
When Trump says “it depends,” here’s the problem: He has never competed in an election that he acknowledged as fair.
Even when he won the presidential election of 2016, he claimed that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats rigged the count to deny him a popular-vote landslide, contending without evidence that millions of noncitizens had voted in California. The official inquiry he ordered up found no significant irregularities.
In 2020, when he lost to President Biden by 7 million votes, Trump not only claimed the result was illegitimate; he worked for months to overturn it, demanding that state officials “find” thousands of new votes in his favor. When his court challenges failed, he summoned supporters to Washington and urged them to march on the Capitol.
He returned to that apocalyptic theme last week, when he told supporters in Wisconsin that if Biden wins a second term, “we won’t have a country left.”
“Joe Biden is destroying our country,” Trump said at a rally. “The enemy from within is more dangerous than China and Russia. … I actually think our country is not going to survive.”
It was as if he was priming his followers for extreme measures if he doesn’t prevail.
And it was part of a long pattern. In January, he warned that if his four criminal indictments prevent him from winning, the result will be “bedlam in the country.”
“It’s the opening of a Pandora’s box,” he warned.
In March, he posted a video on his social media account showing an image of Biden hog-tied like a prisoner.
“He’s telling us what his intentions are, as he did before Jan. 6,” Juliette Kayyem, a terrorism expert at Harvard University, said recently on PBS. “The language is the language of incitement. … If he loses, we certainly know from what Trump has said — and we also know from what the FBI is telling us — that there are large groups and organizations that are preparing to continue the fight.”
As matters stand in the presidential campaign, that kind of 2020-style crisis may not recur, since Trump stands a good chance of winning.
The average of public opinion polls published by fivethirtyeight.com shows a dead heat in the national popular vote — but it shows Trump winning in all six of the most important swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump used a day off from his New York criminal trial Wednesday to campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin, where he returned to his warnings about an unfair election process.
“The radical-left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020,” he claimed untruthfully yet again. “We’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election in 2024. We won’t have a country left … 2024 is our final battle.”
For months, Biden has sought to remind voters that Trump, if reelected, would run roughshod over the norms of American government and politics.
By reminding voters that he doesn’t accept the duty to recognize the result of an election he loses, Trump has paradoxically bolstered Biden’s case.
For some voters, this election may come down to a choice between preserving democracy and hoping for a return of the low inflation of the Trump years. They may not find it an easy choice.
A survey last year by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 38% of Americans believe the country needs “a leader who is willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.” That substantial minority included 48% of Republicans.
When Time’s reporter asked Trump whether his rhetoric about overriding the Constitution and ruling as a “dictator for a day” might alienate voters, the former president disagreed.
Former Republican Official Finds a Spine, Endorses Joe Biden
Ben Metzner – May 6, 2024
Georgia’s former Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan announced Monday that he is endorsing Joe Biden in the 2024 election, a stunning defection that puts him at odds with other leaders in his party.
Countless Republicans who have been personally slighted by Donald Trump, from William Barr to Ted Cruz, have nonetheless pledged their support to him in the upcoming election. But Duncan has drawn a line in the sand. The former Georgia official faced pressure from the Trump campaign to stop the certification of 2020 election results in the crucial swing state.
“The healing of the Republican Party cannot begin with Trump as president (and that’s aside from the untold damage that potentially awaits our country),” Duncan wrote in an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “This November, I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass.”
Despite conservatives’ insistence to the contrary, Trump’s legal troubles are convincing some Republican voters to jump ship ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Duncan, for his part, cited Trump’s criminal case directly: “The alternative is another term of Trump, a man who has disqualified himself through his conduct and his character. The headlines are ablaze with his hush-money trial over allegations of improper record-keeping for payments to conceal an affair with an adult-film star,” he wrote.
Duncan, who also refers to Trump’s chillingTime magazine interview as a reason for his defection, was once considered as a potential challenger to Trump in 2024. In March, Duncan considered and then turned down overtures from No Labels to mount a third-party campaign.
Now Duncan is throwing his support behind Biden, in the hope that it may convince other lifelong conservatives to break with the man who threatened Duncan’s colleague, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes.”
Duncan is the second high-profile Republican to express support for Biden in recent days. Last week, Trump’s former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews announced she will vote for Biden because Trump “will not uphold the Constitution.”
At a private donor event, Trump likens the Biden administration to the ‘Gestapo’
Dasha Burns and Abigail Brooks and Olympia Sonnier and Henry J. Gomez and Amanda Terkel and Alec Hernández and Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Jonathan Allen and Lindsey Pipia May 5, 2024
Curtis Means
PALM BEACH, Fla. — Donald Trump compared President Joe Biden’s administration to the secret police force of Nazi Germany in remarks at a private, closed-door donor retreat on Saturday afternoon.
The former president’s comments came as he was talking about his legal troubles, attacking the prosecutors in the cases and bemoaning the recent indictments in Arizona of several of his former top aides, along with 11 so-called fake electors from the 2020 election.
“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” Trump said, according to audio of the luncheon provided to NBC News. “And it’s the only thing they have. And it’s the only way they’re going to win in their opinion.”
“Once I got indicted, I said well, now the gloves have to come off,” Trump added, saying Biden is “the worst president in the history of our country. He’s grossly incompetent. He’s crooked as hell. He’s the Manchurian candidate.”
The former president added that he doesn’t let his legal troubles bother him too much.
“If you care too much, you tend to choke. And in a way, I don’t care. It’s just you know, life is life,” he said.
He did admit, however, that he was surprised when he was indicted.
“Once I got indicted, I said, ‘Holy s—, I just got indicted. Me. I got indicted,’” Trump said.
He also called Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting two federal cases against Trump, an “evil thug” and “deranged.”
The Biden campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.
Trump made his remarks at his Mar-a-Lago Club on Saturday afternoon, as hundreds of donors are gathered down here for the Republican National Committee’s spring retreat.
The former president has had limited time to campaign as he’s had to spend four days a week sitting in a Manhattan courtroom for his criminal trial there, related to hush money payments to an adult film star around the 2016 election.
Among the featured guests at the retreat this weekend are a number of potential vice presidential candidates, including South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.
Trump has yet to move past the early stages of vetting a running mate, as NBC News has reported. Top contenders have not yet received detailed questionnaires or other requests for information to help finalize a shortlist.
At the luncheon, Trump brought all these guests onstage — except Noem, who left early, according to two people in attendance — along with a number of other elected officials, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.
“By the end of it, there were a lot of people onstage,” one Republican source who attended the luncheon told NBC News.
Trump, according to the audio recording, praised Stefanik for her role in challenging former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, who resigned after facing scrutiny for testimony she gave at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism and after allegations of plagiarism in her academic work.
“You destroyed her,” Trump said. “She did so well, everyone said … she’s going to be the vice presidential candidate.”
Vance, who had been a prominent Trump critic in 2016 while promoting his “Hillbilly Elegy” memoir, “turned out to be incredible,” the former president said. The senator is scheduled to hold a fundraiser with Trump this month in Ohio.
“You know he wasn’t a supporter of mine,” Trump said of Vance. “He was saying things like, ‘The guy’s a total disaster!’”
Scott, whose campaign for the GOP presidential nomination fizzled before the Iowa caucuses, “did a good job,” Trump said. “But as a surrogate He’s unbelievable.”
“And you know what he said to me? He said, ‘I never felt comfortable talking about myself.’ There’s something nice about that. It never bothered me to talk about me. I’m the opposite.”
Trump also acknowledged Rubio and Donalds, his potential VP picks from Florida, where he also resides. The Constitution prohibits electors from voting for both a president and a vice president from their own states.
Rubio, Trump said, is “a talented guy” and “absolutely” being considered, “even though we do have a little problem. It’s a minor Florida problem with these Florida guys, I have to be honest with you — including that guy right there, Byron.”
Burgum, a former software entrepreneur who became the first of Trump’s high-profile rivals to endorse him, drew raves for his personal wealth.
“He’s a very rich man, he’s made a lot of money,” Trump said. “I would always say, ‘That guy’s really impressive.’”
Trump also offered a shoutout to Noem, though she did not make it to the stage, calling the South Dakota governor — who has been under fire since revealing in a forthcoming book that she shot and killed a family dog — “somebody that I love.”
“She’s been with me, and a supporter, and I’ve been a supporter of hers for a long time,” Trump added.
Trump also said he’d allow anyone who donated $1 million on the spot to come up to the stage. Two people took him up on the offer, including one woman who declared: “Donald J. Trump is the person that God has chosen.”
Dasha Burns, Abigail Brooks and Olympia Sonnier are reporting from Palm Beach, Florida; Henry J. Gomez from Cleveland; and Amanda Terkel from Washington, D.C.
No issue in U.S. politics is more contentious right now than the situation at America’s southern border.
Since President Biden took office in 2021 and reversed some of former President Donald Trump’s hard-line restrictions, illegal crossings have surged to a record high of more than 2 million per year, on average.
Democrats and other defenders of Biden’s record say the causes are complicated and predate his presidency: foreign violence, economic hardship and cartels that profit from crossings.
Republicans and other Biden critics argue that the president has effectively encouraged migrants to try their luck by using immigration parole at a historic scale and ordering a pause on most U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations.
But how could the differences between Biden and Trump reshape U.S. border policy going forward?
November’s election will be the first since 1892 to feature two presidents — one former, one current — competing as the major-party nominees. As a result, this year’s candidates already have extensive White House records to compare and contrast.
Here’s what Biden and Trump have done so far about the border — and what they plan to do next.
Part two in an ongoing series. Read part one: Abortion.
Where they’re coming from
Trump: More than anything else, Trump built his political following on a hard-line approach to immigration.
Starting in 2011, Trump boosted his profile on the right by positioning himself as the leading proponent of the false conspiracy theory that then-President Barack Obama — whose father was from Kenya — wasn’t born in Hawaii as stated on his birth certificate. In 2016, Trump finally admitted that so-called birthers (those who believe Obama isn’t a native-born citizen) were wrong and that “Obama was born in the United States.”
Trump spent much of 2016 vowing to build a physical wall along the border between the U.S. and Mexico — possibly fortified with spikes, electricity and an alligator moat — and make Mexico pay for it.
According to the New York Times, “the idea [of a border wall] was initially suggested by a Trump campaign aide … as a memory aid to prompt the candidate to remember to talk about immigration in his speeches. But it soon became a rallying cry at his events.”
“You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving,” Trump told the Times editorial board, “I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ And they go nuts.”
Mexican immigrants weren’t the only ones in Trump’s crosshairs. In late 2015, after domestic terrorists Syed Rizwan Farook (a U.S. citizen born in Chicago) and his wife, Tashfeen Malik (a native of Pakistan who’d lived in the U.S. for years), killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Around the same time, Trump said he would create a “deportation force” that would expel millions of unauthorized immigrants. “We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally,” he claimed during one primary debate. “They will go out.”
Biden: Biden entered the 2020 Democratic presidential primary under pressure from the left on immigration.
As Obama’s vice president, Biden could claim partial credit for 2012’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which shielded from deportation about 700,000 immigrants (known as Dreamers) who were brought to the country as children.
“[Obama’s] title of deporter in chief was earned,” Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said at the time.
As a result, Biden sought to mend ties to Latino voters by calling Obama’s deportation approach a “big mistake” and pledging to reverse Trump’s border policies — while making DACA permanent and providing a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.
“We’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” Biden said in his acceptance speech at 2020’s “virtual” Democratic National Convention. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.”
What they’ve done as president
Trump: During his four years in office, Trump issued more than 400 executive actions on immigration.
The changes started almost immediately. On Jan. 27, 2017, Trump signed an order seeking to block travelers from seven majority Muslim countries for 90 days while suspending refugee resettlement and prohibiting Syrian refugees indefinitely. Challenged in court, the administration issued revised travel bans as time went on, removing or adding certain countries.
Trump quickly zeroed in on his signature border wall as well. But Congress refused to meet his funding demands, sparking a lengthy government shutdown. Ultimately, Trump managed to build just 458 miles of barrier along the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border — nearly all of them in areas where older barriers already stood.
Mexico did not pay for any of Trump’s border wall.
Frustrated with the continued crush of illegal border crossings, Trump green-lit a plan in 2018 to separate migrant children from their parents or caregivers at the border and then criminally prosecute the adults. Trump eventually ended his “family separation” policy — but only after images of crying, traumatized kids detained in crowded facilities sparked a national outcry.
Despite Trump’s vow to expel “millions” of immigrants, deportations by ICE officers — who were given broad latitude to go after anyone without legal status — averaged just 80,000 per year during his presidency (significantly lower than the annual rate under Obama).
Why? Trump supporters and critics largely agree that the former president’s strict policies — including narrowing who is eligible for asylum; making it more difficult to qualify for permanent residency or citizenship; rolling back DACA; and forcing Central American asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are processed — “deterred” some migrants from even trying to cross the border.
But while Trump’s supporters described this as deterrence through strength, Trump’s critics called it deterrence through cruelty.
In March 2020, Trump implemented the emergency health authority known as Title 42, which allowed border officials to rapidly turn away asylum seekers on the grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19 — without giving them a chance to appeal for U.S. protection.
Biden: Biden vowed to reverse Trump’s immigration policies on “day one” of his administration — and it’s a promise he largely kept.
In early 2021, the new president halted construction of the border wall; ended his predecessor’s travel bans; created a task force to reunify migrant families separated under Trump; reinstated DACA; ended Title 42 expulsions for unaccompanied minors; and ordered a pause on most ICE arrests and deportations, issuing new guidelines directing officers to prioritize national security threats, serious criminals and recent border crossers.
At the same time, Biden warned that without more funding and stronger “guardrails,” such as additional asylum judges, the U.S. could “end up with 2 million people on our border” and “a crisis on our hands that complicates what we’re trying to do.”
“Migrants and asylum seekers absolutely should not believe those in the region peddling the idea that the border will suddenly be fully open to process everyone on day one,” said Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy adviser. “It will not.”
Initially, Biden kept Title 42 in place (until May 2023), expelling five times more border crossers than Trump did (in large part because more migrants were trying to cross the border illegally).
As a result, national surveys show that voters are unhappy about the border situation and prefer Republicans to handle it. A February Gallup survey found that nearly 20% of those who disapproved of Biden’s job performance cited “illegal immigration/open borders” as the biggest reason — more than any other issue.
What they want to do next
Trump: More of the same — with the emphasis on more.ADVERTISEMENT
Among the ramped-up policies Trump is reportedly planning, according to the New York Times:
“round[ing] up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain[ing] them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled”
reviving his Muslim travel ban and his COVID-era Title 42 restrictions on the basis “that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis”
and “scour[ing] the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport[ing] people by the millions per year” by redirecting military funds and deploying federal agents, local police officers and National Guard soldiers to help ICE.
In an April interview with Time magazine, Trump confirmed that he is plotting “a massive deportation of people” using “local law enforcement” and the National Guard — and “if they weren’t able to,” he added, “then I’d use [other parts of] the military.”
He also refused to “rule out” detention camps, saying “it’s possible that we’ll do it to an extent.”
His inspiration, he has said, is the “Eisenhower model” — a reference to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 campaign, known by the ethnic slur “Operation Wetback,” to round up and expel Mexican immigrants in what amounted to a nationwide “show me your papers” rule.
Trump has also said he would suspend refugee resettlement, revive his “Remain in Mexico” policy and end DACA. He has even left the door open to resuming “zero tolerance” family separations.
Biden: Most Democrats spent 2023 avoiding border politics while privately fretting about how the issue might affect the 2024 election. But the president finally bowed to GOP pressure last fall, agreeing to bipartisan border talks; the hope was that “a deal might take the issue off the table for his reelection campaign,” according to the New York Times.
In January, Senate negotiators actually struck a $20 billion bipartisan deal — a deal that gave the GOP much of what it had asked for, including provisions that would restrict claims for parole, raise the bar for asylum, speed the expulsion of migrants and automatically shutter the border if attempted illegal crossings reach a certain average daily threshold.
But Trump balked — and following his lead, Republicans on Capitol Hill effectively doomed the legislation.
“We can fight about the border — or we can fix it,” Biden said during his State of the Union address. “I’m ready to fix it. Send me the border bill now.”
In lieu of legislation, Biden is also considering using the same section of the federal code behind Trump’s most controversial actions, known as 212(f), to issue a “nuclear” executive order that would unilaterally crack down on migrants’ ability to seek asylum at the border after crossing illegally — but that would also risk legal challenges and left-wing backlash.
“Some are suggesting that I should just go ahead and try it,” Biden said in a recent interview with Univision. “And if I get shut down by the court, I get shut down by the court.”
Biden says Americans have ‘right to protest but not the right to cause chaos’ on college campuses after another night of mass arrests. Here are the latest updates.
Thursday marked the first time President Biden has directly addressed the student protests since they started in mid-April.
David Knowles, Senior Editor – May 2, 2024
President Biden on Thursday addressed the college protests unfolding across the United States, telling reporters that “dissent is essential for democracy” but that “dissent must never lead to disorder.”
“There’s the right to protest but not the right to cause chaos,” Biden said of the protests, which have seen more than 1,500 arrests nationwide. His remarks at the White House were the first since April 22, when he made brief comments to reporters.
“In moments like this, there are always those who rush in to score political points. But this isn’t a moment for politics. It’s a moment for clarity. So let me be clear. Violent protest is not protected, peaceful protest is,” Biden said.
Police in cities and towns across the country have been deployed in recent days to clear pro-Palestinian demonstrators from a growing number of encampments and occupied buildings on the campuses of American colleges and universities.
Police advance on demonstrators on the UCLA campus early Thursday. (Ryan Sun/AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
More than 90 protesters [The Dartmouth] were arrested at Dartmouth College Wednesday night and early Thursday morning after New Hampshire State Police were called to campus to dismantle the growing encampment.
Late Tuesday, nearly 300 protesters [Bloomberg] at Columbia University and City University in New York City were arrested. Police remained on campus Wednesday at the Ivy League school.
New York police arrested protesters who occupied the lobby of a building at Fordham University [Daily News] on Wednesday. They also cleared away a tent encampment.
Students at Portland State University [KOIN] continued to barricade themselves inside the school’s library, escalating a multiday standoff with officials, who canceled classes Wednesday.
Universities like Brown [AFP] and Northwestern have diffused protests [Associated Press] after pledging to demonstrators this week to take up votes on whether to divest from companies doing business with Israel.
What sparked the protests?
After decades of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians living in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas, Gaza’s militant government, launched an attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed nearly 1,200 people. The incident was the largest single killing of Jews since the Holocaust, and hundreds of hostages were taken.
In response, Israel’s right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declared war on Hamas and launched an invasion that has so far killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to figures from the Hamas-run Health Ministry.
The scale of Israel’s retaliation for the Oct. 7 attack has received international condemnation, including by President Biden, as indiscriminate and responsible for a heavy civilian death toll.
What do the protesters want?
While there is no single group organizing all of the protests across the U.S., one recurring demand that has emerged among demonstrators is for American universities to divest themselves from companies that have a financial stake in Israel’s government, or from companies that supply Israel with weapons or military technology.
At Columbia University, for example, protesters have often chanted the slogan “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.”
In the 1980s, students protested at colleges across the country to pressure universities to divest themselves from companies that did business with South Africa’s apartheid government. That movement has been credited with the downfall of the regime.
What about free speech rights?
The arrests of protesters at U.S. college campuses can be controversial. After all, the First Amendment of the Constitution protects the right to free speech. The rub, however, comes when demonstrations disrupt the rights of others or put their safety at risk.
“I condemn the violence at UCLA last night,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement issued Wednesday. “The law is clear: The right to free speech does not extend to inciting violence, vandalism, or lawlessness on campus. Those who engage in illegal behavior must be held accountable for their actions — including through criminal prosecution, suspension, or expulsion.”
Ultimately, it may be up to the courts to decide whether colleges that have brought in police to arrest protesters have gone too far.
At Arizona State University, some students arrested over the weekend have filed a lawsuit against the school for allegedly infringing on their free speech rights.
Political fallout
With a significant portion of his political base upset over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war, Biden has walked a delicate line regarding the pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations.
On Wednesday, Biden was content to let his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, field questions about the recent arrests at American universities.
“Americans have the right to peacefully protest, as long as it’s within the law,” Jean-Pierre said. “Forcibly taking over a building is not peaceful. It’s just not.
“Students have the right to feel safe, they have the right to learn, they have the right to do this without disruption,” she added. “They have the right to attend their commencement without feeling unsafe.”
On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump, who has also been critical of Netanyahu, openly mused about whether the protesters detained so far would be treated better than his own supporters who rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I wonder if what’s going to happen to them will be anything comparable to what happened to J6, because they’re doing a lot of destruction, a lot of damages, a lot of people getting hurt very badly,” he wrote in a post to his social media site, Truth Social. “I wonder if that’s going to be the same kind of treatment they gave J6. Let’s see how that all works out.”
