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**MARCH 31, 2025**
On the Prospect website
The Trump Factor in the Middle East [link removed]
Alternately belligerent, self-enriching,
militaristic, and realist, Trump's haphazard path is different from the establishment's slow road to obliterating Gaza. BY JONATHAN GUYER
Trump Stomps Workers [link removed]
Stripping bargaining rights from most federal employees is one more way he's converting a constitutional government into a monarch's court. BY HAROLD MEYERSON
Global Working Conditions Matter for American Workers [link removed]
The Trump administration has cut programs that help prevent forced labor and child labor. This will suppress wages everywhere, including the U.S. BY KATHERINE TAI & JULIE SU
Battling Gamification in Virginia [link removed]
As access to gambling expands, concerns about addiction among young people have increased. BY NIC SUAREZ
Kuttner on TAP
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**** Harvard Between Courage and Disgrace
Its law school faculty shames the university's general strategy of appeasement.
On Saturday, 82 members of Harvard Law School's teaching faculty out of 118 sent an open letter to Harvard law students [link removed], warning of the dire threats to civil liberties and the rule of law. The letter said, in part:
The rule of law is imperiled when government leaders:
* single out lawyers and law firms for retribution based on their lawful and ethical representation of clients disfavored by the government, undermining the Sixth Amendment;
* threaten law firms and legal clinics for their lawyers' pro bono work or prior government service;
* relent on those arbitrary threats based on public acts of submission and outlays of funds for favored causes; and
* punish people for lawfully speaking out on matters of public concern.
The Constitution, the letter added, was designed to enable
political disagreement without fear of punishment. "Neither a law school nor a society can properly function amidst such fear," the letter concluded.
The letter was a rebuke not just to Trump and to the law firms that have given in to Trump's shakedowns. It was a rebuke to Harvard's leadership, which has been among the most cowardly of any major university.
The interim dean of Harvard Law School, John Goldberg, did not sign the letter. And on the same day that the letter went out, David Cutler, the interim dean of Social Science, fired the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Cemal Kafadar, a professor of Turkish studies. In a nice touch, Cutler fired Kafadar while the latter was on sabbatical, as one more human sacrifice to Trump. Cutler himself is acting dean for only the current semester.
[link removed]
The Center has come under fire from the right for allegations of antisemitism. In a classic case
of moving the goalposts, Harvard as part of a January settlement [link removed] of Title VI allegations agreed to adopt the extreme definition of antisemitism created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which defines some kinds of criticisms of Israel as per se antisemitic. This was the work of Harvard's president Alan Garber, another prime Trump appeaser.
This definition in turn opened the door to claims such as that of Larry Summers [link removed], who contended in a post on X that a February panel event at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies with three non-Harvard scholars focused on the "past and present" of "Israel's war in Lebanon" was "very likely" antisemitic under the IHRA definition.
Summers also condemned as antisemitic the use of the term "Nakba" by Harvard Divinity School dean Marla Frederick. "Nakba,"
which means "catastrophe" in Arabic, has been used for at least half a century to describe the mass displacement of Palestinians during and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
The role of Summers, Garber, and Cutler in undermining free debate operates as an inside-outside game to weaken the resistance of elite institutions like Harvard to the predations of Trump. The letter by the law school professors refuses to play that game.
The big law firms have also been split, with three capitulating to Trump's extortion and three taking Trump to court [link removed]. As law firms grovel, Trump keeps upping the cost. Paul, Weiss pledged $40 million in pro bono legal services for causes Trump supports. With Skadden, Arps, the price rose to $100 million.
All of this is unfolding against the background of Trump looking like a fool on several fronts. On Saturday, he told NBC that he "couldn't care less
[link removed]" if car prices went up as a result of his 25 percent tariffs-this after warning auto executives not to raise prices, a warning that he tried to deny having made.
And then on Sunday, Trump told NBC that he was "very angry" and "pissed off" at Putin [link removed] for not agreeing to his peace deal on Ukraine. Apparently, it comes as news to Trump that Putin is not to be trusted.
Trump's approval ratings are sinking. Republicans are fearful of losing safe House seats. Elon Musk's attempt to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election is backfiring. The remnants of democracy are starting to kick in.
Were elite institutions unified in their resistance to Trump, that would make it harder for him to persist in his assaults and would strengthen the resolve of courts. But
courage continues to be the exception. If Trump survives his serial blunders and keeps defying the rule of law, bastions of privilege like Harvard and Columbia and the craven law firms will be his accomplices.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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