BREAKING: Standing Up To Trump Works & Surrendering To Trump Doesn't

Inside these very obvious but also somehow shocking developments

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum describes her call with Trump at her daily press briefing.

While the inaugural months of Trump’s second term were rife with establishment figures and institutions bending to the president’s will, the wind has changed over the last few weeks.

In March, under the White House’s threat to cut $400 million in federal funding, Columbia University agreed to adopt the Daily Wire’s academic agenda.¹ The once-prestigious college released a memo saying it would ban masks, expel students who participated in last year’s anti-genocide protests, and rewrite the Middle Eastern studies curriculum to eliminate anti-semitism, bias, or any other hateful content that suggests it’s wrong for Israeli snipers to murder Palestinian children.²

The Columbia Library website boasts an impressive catalog of over fifteen million books. Yet, If You Give A Mouse A Cookie appears to have evaded Columbia’s esteemed collectors.

An excellent primer for university presidents and American Senators to learn how to resist fascism.

Unsurprisingly, Trump was unsatisfied. Just weeks after Columbia licked his boots from tip to tongue, the president sought judicial oversight of the deal. If Trump follows through, his government will control the university for years.³ By surrendering to his demands, Columbia implicitly admitted it needed governmental supervision. So it’ll be challenging for the school to defend itself in a court of law or public opinion. While ceasing academic control and free speech rights will inevitably harm Columbia’s standing amongst current and prospective students, there’s no guarantee the $400 million will even be returned. Whether the dean of Trump University is given legal discretion over Columbia remains in question. But whether or not a judge rules in his favor, what’s to stop Donald Trump from ending their public funding the next time Bari Weiss tells him the NYC campus is a Hamas training camp?

Congratulations to Columbia University leadership for becoming the New York Trump University campus.

In choosing cowardice, Columbia has locked itself in permanent subservience to Trump. He now knows they’re an easy target to punch whenever he needs a story to change the news cycle. While the Columbia affair might make it look like Trump can do whatever he wants, Harvard’s refusal to submit disproves that Trump is the omnipotent ruler he thinks he is.

On April 11th, the administration sent a letter to Harvard with identical demands as those sent to Columbia: the curricula must praise Israel, protestors should be suspended, and the school must end DEI and affirmative action in hiring and admissions, except for conservative professors, whom Harvard would now be required to employ.⁴ Being a century and a half older than the presidential office, Harvard rejected the demands the very next business day. Having faced no pushback from Columbia, the refusal sent the administration into a spiral.

Trump was likely furious, as his team in charge of blackmailing the Ivy League speed-dialed The New York Times to throw each other under the bus. Two people “familiar with the matter” told the paper that Sean Keveney, a Department of Health and Human Services lawyer, sent the letter but was “unauthorized” to do so. This is a transparent lie, as the heads of three separate agencies signed the letter. There were three cosigners, including Keveney, so we don’t have to think too hard about who the other two unnamed sources were.

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While I always enjoy the schadenfreude of watching MAGA freaks sacrifice scapegoats to appease their boy king, the Harvard episode shows that if you stand up to Trump and his cronies, they’ll blink. Tails between their legs, the rats climbed back on board the listing MAGA ship and stated that actually sending the letter to Harvard wasn’t a mistake. Those who said it was a mistake were mistaken. Trump stepped in and threatened to cut off $2 billion in federal funding, and Harvard immediately sued. While they still have a case to win, the Cambridge college has improved their position, moving the battlefield from the media, which is Trump’s strong suit, to the courts, where his administration has recorded loss after loss.

Fortunately for the human race, resisting Trump works even if you’re not a prestigious Ivy League university. While Trump is typically antagonistic with politicians who oppose him, he’s been unusually warm to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. As a Jewish, pro-Palestinian, Latina leftist woman scientist, we’d expect Trump to give Sheinbaum one of his patented nicknames and Truth (or, whatever’s the verb for posting on Truth Social) angry ramblings about her at 3 o’clock in the morning. So it’s a surprise to that the Mexican President has earned Trump’s obsequious praise.

In February, Trump told Sheinbaum, “You’re tough” when she rejected him during a tariff negotiation.⁵ A few weeks later, he praised her as a “wonderful woman” while signing superfluous executive orders. I’ve never heard him say that about his wife, never mind a foreign leader openly rebuking him.⁶

Trump’s crush on Sheinbaum might seem odd, but that’s only because the Mexican President is doing something that few people do: Tell him “No” and hold her ground. It’s a cliche, but Trump is a bully. He’s brutish, brash, and has no concern for anything or anyone that doesn’t advance his personal interests. But like all bullies, his bark is worse than his shite.

When someone stands up to Trump, he doesn’t know what to do. Most the time his victims lie down and take it, à la Columbia University. So when Claudia Sheinbaum tells him to kick rocks with open-toed shoes, he backs down. He doesn’t want to pick a fight he thinks he could lose and weaken his strongman image. It’s much better for him to praise Sheinbaum as peer than risk revealing that she’s his superior.

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While not everyone who rebukes the slumlord president earns his praise, it’s not necessary to thwart his agenda. On April 18th, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to meet Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a political prisoner Trump incarcerated in the country’s CECOT gulag. Emulating Trump, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a self-described dictator, initially refused Van Hollen from seeing his constituent.⁷ But as media pressure grew, Bukele buckled and delivered Abrego Garcia to the Senator’s hotel.

Senator Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia was overcome when he heard there was a movement to free him. The Maryland father assumed no one cared about him.

Upon return to the U.S., the Maryland Senator was invited on all five major network Sunday shows to talk about Trump’s crimes. As expected, Van Hollen’s anti-fascist message eclipsed the “do nothing” part of the Democratic Party. No one cared about Hakeem Jeffries’ “week of action” in which he planned to promote the Abundance Agenda, and Gavin Newsom was rightfully lambasted for calling Abrego Garcia’s detainment a “distraction.”

Abundance is the Next Big Democratic Excuse

The visit sparked a narrative change, one that has awoken many to Trump’s illegal incarceration agenda. Four Democrats followed Van Hollen’s and travelled to the central American prison. Upon return, Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost used the opportunity to call attention to Trump ignoring the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release⁸ and the President’s recorded intention to incarcerate his citizens in the foreign country. Others quickly latched on to the strategy, as Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey and Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Jim McGovern traveled to Louisiana to meet with their constituent Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student kidnapped by ICE last month. The trio released strong statements condemning her imprisonment, avoiding the “both sides-ing” that has often surrounded these Palestine-related disappearances.

These clear-eyed refutations of Trump have already shown positive effects. While Van Hollen was in El Salvador, ICE turned around a bus filled with Venezuelan en route to a prison flight.⁹ Just hours later, the Supreme Court paused the deportations.¹⁰¹¹ Recent polling shows Trump’s approval rating on immigration (which is how the media portrays Trump’s incarcerations) are plummeting. In March, YouGov found 53% of Americans favored Trump’s immigration policies with only 40% disapproving.¹² This month, the same poll found those numbers had flipped: only 45% of Americans approved of Trump’s immigration policies while 50% disapproved.¹³ Going from a +13 net approval to a -5 disapproval in less than two months is a shocking turn, one that validates the strategy of loudly rebuking Trump over doing nothing.

Courtesy of YouGov

As always, I must restate we can’t rely on institutions to save us. I’m glad Harvard and a handful of elected representatives are standing up to fascism. That’s great! And we should celebrate those who join us. However, we should not mistake high-visibility acts as by those with power as the source of resistance. The true source has always been, and will always be, the people. The louder we yell and the harder we fight, the quicker we will shatter the illusion that Trump is untouchable. More politicians and powerful officials will come aboard. Some will be motivated by good-intentions, but most will be opportunists who seek to capture the public sentiment. We shouldn’t mistake the latter for the former, but in this fight, I’ll take all the help we can get.

It’s still early in Trump’s second administration, but the spirit of resistance we’ve seen in the last few weeks has made Trump bleed — as evidenced by available polling, he’s literally bleeding public approval. And quickly, I might add. As fans of Predator will remember, “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” (Politically speaking, of course.)

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1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/21/columbia-university-funding-trump-demands

2. https://president.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/03.21.2025%20Columbia%20-%20FINAL.pdf

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/nyregion/columbia-trump-consent-decree.html

4. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/14/us/trump-harvard-demands.html

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/world/americas/sheinbaum-trump-mexico-tariffs.html

6. https://mexiconewsdaily.com/politics/mexico-pushes-back-us-border-military-base-wednesdays-mananera-recapped-16-04-25/

7. https://apnews.com/article/nayib-bukele-el-salvador-president-0ab3b1d63d3633c535b2cb9b60c56879

8. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/21/democrats-el-salvador-abrego-garcia-return/83192181007/

9. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/legal-fight-raged-ice-buses-filled-venezuelans-heading-airport-turned-rcna202007

10. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-orders-trump-administration-not-deport-venezuelans-now-rcna201949

11. This isn’t the word I would use, but it’s how the Supreme Court framed it.

12. https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_uHE5Cxl.pdf

13. https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_iR37dyy.pdf