May 1, 2025

100 days of chaos

By William H. Freivogel >>

In 100 days of chaos, President Donald J. Trump has violated laws, ignored time-tested norms, damaged the world’s most respected system of higher education, undermined the world’s leading network of medical and health research facilities, surrendered America’s important instruments of “soft power,” endangered the health of tens of thousands of families around the world and detonated a tariff bomb in the middle of the world’s economy, wiping out $5 trillion in wealth in two days.

He has called into question the rule of law by ignoring judicial orders, proposing impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him, and by bullying, threatening and punishing law firms that had connections to lawyers who investigated him. Last month his lawyers refused to tell a federal court how they would comply with an order endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court to explain how the administration would facilitate repatriation of a Maryland man wrongfully deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Trump is abolishing the Education Department, firing the government official in charge of protecting whistleblowers, cutting off funds for the nation’s public libraries and threatening to cut off Title 1 education funds for public schools unless they certify they have rooted out the bogeyman of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. By the way, Title 1 money is intended for schools in poor areas.

Trump has warped DEI into a powerful sword. During the election, he claimed he was running against the DEI vice president. After the plane crash in D.C. and the fires in LA, DEI was a handy scapegoat but never the actual cause. Now, he is inferring that the 2023 Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action means all DEI must be forbidden in education and the workplace.

In actuality, that is not what the Supreme Court said. An institution’s pursuit of DEI is protected under the First Amendment unless it results in illegal discrimination against a particular people. After all, the word “equal” is in the Declaration of Independence; the words over the entrance of the U.S. Supreme Court say: “Equal Justice Under Law.” It is the value that Abraham Lincoln singled out on the Gettysburg battlefield. Trump’s blunderbuss targeting of Harvard’s $2 billion in grants was announced without proof of discrimination or evidence that the university had failed to protect students from “divisive ideologies,” as Trump claims. Vice President JD Vance says universities are the “enemy” and both he and the president appear to be acting on that belief, having already brought Columbia to heel. Northwestern and Cornell are next on the list.

Trump’s right-hand man — Elon Musk, the world’s richest man — has fired more than 200,000 federal employees as he and his DOGE acolytes run amok through agencies and their computer files, no matter the confidentiality. It is not clear how long Musk will be wreaking havoc on the government, despite recent reminders that his plan is to leave within the coming months. Nor has the government come up with an explanation of what exactly DOGE’s status is; members of the administration give conflicting accounts of its authority, membership, leadership and how much its employees are paid. Meanwhile, Trump fired the inspector generals who are the legitimate officials designated to root out waste, fraud and abuse. Musk’s grandiose boast that he would save $2 trillion in wasteful federal spending has shrunk and shrunk until it is $150 million, and that’s without full accounting for the cost of firing so many workers.

At the same time that Trump’s tariffs have blown up free markets, destabilized the world’s financial system and undercut the dollar, he has coddled Russia, cut aid to Ukraine, obfuscated Russia’s role in starting the war, shunned NATO’s moves to protect the country and generally undermined the Atlantic alliance that U.S. presidents of all parties have sought to strengthen over the 80 years since World War II. The “shining city on the hill” that Ronald Reagan spoke of proudly as he confronted the Soviet Union has gone dark. Trump even turned off Radio Free Europe broadcasts into Russia. Last month Trump fired top national security officials at the behest of Laura Loomer, the far-right social media influencer who calls provocateur Roger Stone her mentor. It was Loomer who falsely claimed during the election campaign that Haitains were eating pets in Ohio — and in the past claimed that 9/11 was an inside job by U.S. intelligence officials.

Loomer also complained to the White House in March about a Justice Department lawyer in Los Angeles whom she described as a Trump hater. The lawyer was fired an hour later. Shortly after taking over in January, the Trump Justice Department reenacted the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” of Watergate fame, by firing a dozen top lawyers who had worked on the criminal cases against the president. More lawyers, this time those who had worked on the Jan. 6 prosecutions, were fired a week later; lawyers have resigned, too, as we’ve seen prosecutors of Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, do upon being ordered to drop charges. The administration’s lawyer defending against a federal judge’s discovery of “grievous error” in the deportation of a Maryland man to a prison in El Salvador was fired for not arguing “zealous” enough.

Former St. Louisan and acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin has enthusiastically served as Trump’s spear carrier, insisting that it was “unacceptable” for Georgetown Law School to “continue to teach and promote DEI” and demanding the school report to him that DEI has been removed from the curriculum. The dean refused on religious and constitutional grounds. Martin fired more than a dozen Justice Department lawyers and acknowledged in April that he had given more than 100 interviews in recent years to Russia Today and Sputnik parroting Putin talking points – this from the person who is now prosecutor in D.C. in charge of investigating and prosecuting Russian spies. Martin, without grounds, said he was investigating whether former President Biden was competent to issue pardons before leaving office. Jack Goldsmith, a conservative legal scholar who served in the Bush Justice Department, wrote that Martin shouldn’t be confirmed because “has wielded prosecutorial power recklessly and openly,” and is the worst example of the abusive powers that prosecutors can manipulate. Meanwhile, D. John Sauer was confirmed as solicitor general, the government’s top lawyer in the Supreme Court; as solicitor general of Missouri, Sauer led the frivolous legal effort by red states to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

In addition, Trump has targeted big law firms in D.C. with connections to special counsels Jack Smith or Robert Mueller or other perceived enemies by imposing unprecedented sanctions that would make it impossible to function. This undermines the rule of law. Trump’s executive orders lift security clearances for all the firms’ lawyers, bar federal business, exclude them from federal buildings and require federal contractors to disclose whether they have used the firm. Beryl Howell, a judge for the U.S. District Court, temporarily blocked Trump’s order, saying it punished free speech; 500 law firms and 300 former judges filed a brief with the court asking the judge to permanently block the executive order. But some of the biggest firms, such as Paul, Weiss and Skadden, have capitulated and made a deal with the White House. New York Times conservative columnist David French said the firm was making Trump’s work easier — and his opponents’ work harder — by throwing in the towel before they even attempt to appeal to a legal system that should be built for exactly this moment.” Yet the number of law firms capitulating grows. Trump announced deals with five more firms in late April that pledged about $1 billion in pro bono work. Pro bono work is supposed to be for those who can’t afford a lawyer.

This accounting of Trump’s actions doesn’t include his most glaring absurdities, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali while making belligerent advances on Greenland, Canada and Panama. And his promotion of bulldozing Gaza into his very own Mediterranean resort reflects America’s “Manifest Destiny,” which he dug up from some 19th century graveyard of bad ideas. Last month Trump issued an executive order — “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” — assigning Vance to “save” the Smithsonian by “removing improper ideology” from the museums, followed by expected special emphasis on Black, women and Native American museums and exhibits. Trump took over the world-renowned Kennedy Center, appointing a new board that made him chair. He also canceled most of the programs funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, including $250,000 for the Missouri History Museum.

Although Trump has touted his administration as a rebirth of free speech, his EEOC subpoenaed personal information of hundreds of UC Berkeley professors who signed pro-Palestinian petitions about the war in Gaza. The EEOC claimed college campuses are “fostering antisemitism” and should lose federal funds. French, the conservative columnist said “the atmosphere for free speech in this country is the worst it’s been since the Red Scare. This might sound strange, but I’m actually more alarmed by the capitulation of so many powerful legal and academic institutions than I am by Trump’s unconstitutional demands…. to rely on the First Amendment, you have to have the courage to go to court, to sue the administration, to secure court rulings and then make the president defy the Supreme Court if he wants to continue his campaign of censorship.” In late April, came the report that the Naval Academy had removed 381 books from the Naval Academy Library, banning access to books like ones about the Holocaust and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville lost a $250,000 grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to train underrepresented students.

Meanwhile, hundreds of students around the country, including at the University of Illinois and Southern Illinois University Carbondale, received private notifications that their visas are canceled. Student newspapers have received dozens of inquiries from those who fear their columns or letters or photos in the newspaper could be used against them. The result, as the Stanford Daily put is, is “student speech, from our own reporters and those we’re reporting on, is startlingly chilled.” A recent Trump reversal on the visa revocations has left the situation confused, like much of Trump’s agenda.

AP was banned from the White House for not capitulating Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, until a court told Trump the ban violated the First Amendment. Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr, depicted with his lapel pin showing a golden bust of Trump, has begun multifaceted investigations of national news organizations for reasons ranging from “news distortion,” DEI programs and running commercial ads on noncommercial public broadcast stations. Trump has said he would love to see public broadcasting defunded. As Trump reached his 100th day, the White House sent emails to three of the five members on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting telling them they were dismissed; the board members immediately challenged the firings in court, maintaining the president doesn’t have the power to dismiss them.

What is left is a welter of confusion with more than 200 lawsuits filed against Trump actions and 70 court orders blocking Trump’s path. Certainty and predictability have been replaced by chaos and confusion.

In this spring’s print issue, GJR told the story of Donald Trump’s unprecedented dismantling of institutions that are foundational to America’s role in the world as a leader of education, health research, human rights and the free exchange of ideas — institutions that make America the most powerful nation in the world and the leader in humanity’s search for knowledge.

This is not a time for timidity when so much that our country can be proud of is being torn apart. The Congress is useless and the Supreme Court has been extremely cautious. Our future is in the hands of the people.