Trump has used his presidency to attack universities, schools, media organizations, corporations, foreign students, and everyone else he sees as his enemy. He has used Elon Musk to close down agencies–like USAID–and Departments–like Education. He has taken personal control of the Kennedy Center and intends to remove exhibits he doesn’t like from the Smithsonian. He has directed the Department of Justice to investigate his critics and enemies. He has blighted whatever he chose. The list of his attacks on democracy is long.
Trump will leave no independent board untouched by his political venom, as he demonstrated by his hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, where he removed every Biden appointee and replaced a bipartisan board with an all-Trump board. He also removed the nonpartisan director of the Kennedy Center and replaced her with a Trump loyalist. And he named himself President of the Kennedy Center.
The Trump administration has begun firing at least some of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s appointees to the board that oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, including Douglas Emhoff, the husband of former Vice President Kamala Harris, and other senior Biden White House officials.
“Today, I was informed of my removal from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council,” Mr. Emhoff said in a statement on Tuesday. “Holocaust remembrance and education should never be politicized. To turn one of the worst atrocities in history into a wedge issue is dangerous — and it dishonors the memory of six million Jews murdered by Nazis that this museum was created to preserve.”
Mr. Emhoff is Jewish and an outspoken critic of the rise in antisemitism. His appointment to the council was announced in January; presidential appointments are typically five-year terms.
The other officials who were dismissed include Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s first chief of staff; Tom Perez, the former labor secretary and senior adviser to Mr. Biden; Susan Rice, the national security adviser to former President Barack Obama and Mr. Biden’s top domestic policy adviser who led a major national strategic effort to counter antisemitism; and Anthony Bernal, a senior adviser to Jill Biden, the former first lady.
Daisy Gonzales, the executive director of the California Student Aid Commission, speaking at Hancock College in 2019.
Credit: California Community Colleges
When Dr. Daisy Gonzales took over as executive director of the California Student Aid Commission in June, she stepped into the position at a tumultuous time on the financial aid front, marked by state budget deficits, outside schemes to defraud financial programs and concerns over what President-elect Donald Trump will mean for undocumented students.
Among her first priorities: making sure more students apply for financial aid this year following declines in 2024 amid the chaotic and oft-delayed rollout of the federal government’s revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The U.S. Department of Education last month made the 2025-26 version available. Most students in California use that form to access both state and federal aid for college costs. FAFSA completions in the state declined by an estimated 10% among incoming freshmen in 2024, mirroring a national decline, as students and families found it difficult to access and complete the form in a timely manner.
The state student aid commission (pronounced See-Sack by insiders) oversees more than $3.5 billion in state grants available to college students mainly based on need. That includes the Cal Grant, the state’s main financial aid awards that come in various types for tuition, living allowances and career or technical programs. The commission also oversees the Middle Class Scholarship, which can provide substantial grants to underwrite attendance at California’s public colleges and universities for students from families earning up to $217,000 a year.
In addition, the commission runs the California Dream Act Application for undocumented students, who can use it to apply for Cal Grants despite not being eligible for federal aid. Some students, including those who have citizenship or legal residency but an undocumented parent, may still be fearful to fill out any financial aid applications out of concern that information will be shared with the federal government. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to deport undocumented residents when he takes office next year. State officials promise that Dream Act information will not be shared.
Meanwhile, community colleges in California and across the country continue to be plagued by financial aid fraud. Scammers, posing as students, enroll at the colleges for the sole purpose of stealing financial aid. California’s community colleges have lost more than $7.5 million this year alone to such fraud.
Dr. Gonzales was deputy chancellor of California’s community college system before joining the aid commission in July. She also served as the system’s acting and then interim chancellor. She was selected to her current post by the 15 members of the commission, 11 of whom are appointed by the governor and another four by the Legislature.
Previously, she was a consultant for the Budget and Appropriations Committees in the state Assembly. She has a bachelor’s degree from Mills College and received both a master’s degree and a doctorate in sociology from UC Santa Barbara.
She recently spoke with EdSource. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What is the Student Aid Commission doing to ensure students are completing the FAFSA this year?
We’ve been working differently with Cal Volunteers and training all of their volunteers to learn about financial aid, because they’re the boots on the ground. And even working differently with our segments. I’ve been really grateful to the community colleges. I gave them the data of those districts and colleges where we are leaving students behind, and they immediately got to work doing professional development, deploying messaging. (Cal Volunteers is a state office charged with increasing volunteering. Its College Corps program provides stipends for college students who volunteer.)
It was also important that I could hear directly from students. So I’ve also launched a student council where all the student associations (at local community college districts)have appointments on that council, and then they are activating their associations to educate students about financial aid, the deadlines, and even solutions to some of the common barriers that they face.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to deport undocumented residents. What guidance are you giving to undocumented students or students who have undocumented parents and are worried they could expose them by filling out the FAFSA?
We believe in providing students and their families with the information that will allow them to consider all of their options. We know that there are many concerns around privacy protections for individuals without a Social Security number.
Last year, the commission opened the Dream Act application to students from mixed-status families (those with both documented and undocumented individuals), and we are maintaining that. And so for any student, particularly if you’re a first-time applicant, if you have a family member, a parent, or a spouse that is a part of your application that does not have a Social Security number, you are being invited to complete the Dream Act application. We also have to inform you that as a part of not completing a FAFSA, you will not be able to benefit from federal aid. And our job is to help you understand that it’s your choice. And that applying is a family decision. Here at the commission, we protect your data. However, there are no similar federal reassurances that we can provide.
Are you doing any messaging to make sure students know that any information they submit via the California Dream Act Application is not shared with the federal government?
We redid our website so that we could have a very clear message around our data security. You can also then click on that message and it’ll show you additional information that’s important as you’re making your decision on whether to file a California Dream Act Application or FAFSA. We’ve also been deploying messages. For the first time, at least in the last several years, we actually sent out a notice that went to all education leaders — meaning the K-12 superintendents, the higher education presidents and CEOs. They all got the same message. And it was a message saying that our job is clear. We need students to stay enrolled. We need to offer them a safe option. And that is the California Dream Act Application.
There has been a big push by lawmakers in recent years to reform the Cal Grant by simplifying it and making more students eligible for aid, especially low-income community college students. That reform hasn’t happened because of state budget constraints. Is it still a priority of yours?
I’m here with a very clear mission to transform financial aid. I believe that it’s something that we can do together. And in doing so, then that means we are building financial aid pathways that are centered in student success. Yes, we need Cal Grant equity to be a reality, but that’s not yet funded.
But there are still so many other things that we can be doing. So, for example, I envision a California financial aid system that’s actually predictable. What would it look like to have an expedited renewal process for aid? I hear that as the No. 1 burden for students and families.
Another example I can give you is foster youth. They end up having to fill out two to five different applications. So at the commission, they might do three applications, if they qualify for those programs. And then when they get to a college, they still have to fill out an application for institutional aid. And so I challenged the team here at the commission, and I said, “What would it look like to create one application where we can ask students about all of the additional special programs that California has?” We need to be able to do this differently.
Even though Cal Grant reform was not funded in the latest state budget deal,there have been other ideas floating around about how to come up with that funding. One suggestion was to create a new tax that would raise dollars for financial aid. Are there other creative ways to possibly raise new funding?
There are many other states that do have additional taxes, particularly on alcoholic beverages. There are also so many different ways that I think we can move the needle here in California. I think we can do a better job in general communicating with students about what exists, how do they access it, and how we can actually help them achieve their end goal much faster. There are many other things that we can and should be doing.
What are your expectations for the 2025-26 state budget? Are you worried there could be further cuts to financial aid?
Nothing can be taken for granted, especially in a difficult year. We have a number of new legislators. So for me, it’s about reeducating, reaching out, building that relationship, especially with new elected officials. We’ve had to cut funding for the commission already by 7.95%. All state agencies received the same reduction. There was also a hiring freeze here at the commission. And all of this happened before I arrived. I don’t take anything for granted. I know it’s a really difficult year, but I also know that poverty has been increasing in the state. And so when I go out and advocate, I’m advocating for our students, and I’m defending the dollars that we have while helping California build pathways for many more Californians.
On another topic, California’s community colleges have lost millions of financial aid dollars this year and in recent years to fraudsters. Is there anything the student aid commission can do or is doing to alleviate the fraud? Or does that responsibility fall to the colleges?
I think the challenging thing about fraud is it keeps getting more sophisticated. Our campuses play a really critical role in identifying that fraud. And they are best positioned. But the commission can be a part of the alert system and a part of the professional development process. I’ve also asked for additional IT positions through the state budget process to be able to deal with some of these situations.
Jamelle Bouie, one of the most insightful columnists for The New York Times, observes that Trump has no interest in governing. He is interested in ruling. He thinks he has a mandate, even though he did not win 50% of the popular vote. He thinks his will is as powerful as law. He does not share power with Congress, and he’s testing how far he can go to diminish the courts.
I think it’s obvious that neither President Trump nor his coterie of agents and apparatchiks has any practical interest in governing the nation. It’s one reason (among many) they are so eager to destroy the federal bureaucracy; in their minds, you don’t have to worry about something, like monitoring the nation’s dairy supply for disease and infection, if the capacity for doing so no longer exists.
But there is another, less obvious way in which this observation is true. American governance is a collaborative venture. At minimum, to successfully govern the United States, a president must work with Congress, heed the courts and respect the authority of the states, whose Constitutions are also imbued with the sovereignty of the people. And in this arrangement, the president can’t claim rank. He’s not the boss of Congress or the courts or the states; he’s an equal.
The president is also not the boss of the American people. He cannot order them to embrace his priorities, nor is he supposed to punish them for disagreement with him. His powers are largely rhetorical, and even the most skilled presidents cannot shape an unwilling public.
Trump rejects all of this. He rejects the equal status of Congress and the courts. He rejects the authority of the states. He does not see himself as a representative working with others to lead the nation; he sees himself as a boss, whose will ought to be law. And in turn, he sees the American people as employees, each of us obligated to obey his commands.
Trump is not interested in governing a republic of equal citizens. To the extent that he’s even dimly aware of the traditions of American democracy, he holds them in contempt. What Trump wants is to lord over a country whose people have no choice but to show fealty and pledge allegiance not to the nation but to him.
What was it Trump said about Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, during his first term in office? “Hey, he’s the head of a country. And I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different,” Trump said in 2018. “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
He’s using the White House to get rich from anonymous investors—and it’s hardly even a news story.
Imagine that Joe Biden, just as he was assuming office, had started a new company with Hunter Biden and used his main social media account to recruit financial backers, then promised that the most generous among them would earn an invitation to a private dinner with him. Oh, and imagine that these investors were all kept secret from the public, so that we had no idea what kinds of possible conflicts of interest might arise.
Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Take a minute, close your eyes. Let yourself see Jim Jordan’s face go purple in apoplexy, hear the moral thunder spewing out of Jesse Watters’s mouth, feel the shock (which would be wholly justified) of the New York Times editorial board as it expressed disbelief that the man representing the purported values and standards of the United States of America before the world would begin to think it was remotely OK to do such a thing. The media would be able to speak of nothing else for days. Maybe weeks.
Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”
Trump announced this week that the top 220 buyers of his $Trump (strump, as in strumpet) meme coin between now and mid-May will be invited to an exclusive dinner on May 22 (“a night to remember”) at his golf club outside Washington, D.C. The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that in the days since the announcement, “buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars” into the coin; further, that the holders of 27 crypto wallets have acquired at least 100,000 coins apiece, “stakes worth about a million dollars each.” Holders of crypto wallets are anonymous, if they want to be, so the identities of these people (or businesses or countries or sovereign wealth funds or whatever they might be) are unknown and will presumably remain so until the big dinner or, who knows, maybe for all time.
It’s also worth noting that Trump launched this meme coin just a few days before inauguration. Its value quickly shot up to around $75. It steadily declined through the first month of his presidency, and by early April, as Americans grew weary of a president who was tanking the economy, it had fallen to $7.14.
Mind you, a meme coin is a thing with no intrinsic value. It’s just some … thing that somebody decides to launch based on hype because they can get a bunch of suckers to invest in it. As Investopedia gingerly puts it: “Most meme coins are usually created without a use case other than being tradable and convertible.” It should come as no surprise that some meme coins are tied to right-wing politics. Elon Musk named his Department of Government Efficiency after his favorite meme coin, dogecoin (which, in turn, was indeed named after an actual internet memein which doge is slang for a Shiba Inu dog).
So, to go back to my opening analogy—this isn’t even like Joe and Hunter Biden starting a company from the White House. A company is a real thing. It makes a product or provides a service. It files papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It pays taxes. It employs people. Assuming that it’s a good corporate citizen and that it exists at least in part to solve some problem or offer the public some innovation, it contributes to the general welfare.
Not so a meme coin. It’s just a hustle. It may make certain investors rich, but it does the world no good whatsoever.
So stop and think about this. First, Trump, preparing for the presidency, purportedly busy thinking about how many millions of people he’s going to deport and how he’s going to bring “Jina” to its knees and how he’s going to hand eastern Ukraine to Putin and how he’s going to cut Meals on Wheels, for Chrissakes, takes time out from all that to stop and think: Now, how can I profit from returning to the White House? So he launches, naturally, the griftiest Christmas present ever.
It starts out great. Then its value drops by 90 percent. So in April, while he’s illegally deporting legal U.S. residents to El Salvador and roiling the world’s financial markets, he stops and takes the time to think: Hey, what happened with my meme coin? I had better figure out a way to goose this grift. So he comes up with this dinner. As well as showing just how tawdry his mind is, how he just automatically and intrinsically thinks it’s his right to make a buck from the presidency, it’s unspeakably corrupt. (One small silver lining here is that after peaking Wednesday at almost $15, it’s now under $12.)
Who knows who these “investors” are? Will we ever know? Inevitably, on May 22, people will be invited to that dinner. Will we know the guest list? Will the list be sanitized? Will a few Russian oligarchs be among the top 220 but send surrogates to keep their identity hidden?
This doesn’t create the “appearance” of corruption or set up the “potential” for conflict of interest. It is corruption, and it’s a standing conflict of interest. Patently, and historically. Chris Murphy is right: This is the most corrupt thing any president has ever done, by a mile.
What are the others? Watergate? It was awful in different ways, but of course Trump is worse than Richard Nixon in all those ways too. Teapot Dome? Please—a tiny little rigged contract, and it didn’t even involve Warren Harding directly, just his interior secretary. Credit Mobilier? Run-of-the-mill bribes by a railroad company, again not involving President Grant directly, just his vice president.
And yes, I’ve been thinking this week of the Lincoln Bedroom scandal. In 1995–96, the Clintons invited a lot of people to spend a night in the famous chamber. Many of them made large donations to the Democratic Party. It was unseemly. But it wasn’t illegal. And it certainly didn’t line the Clintons’ personal pockets. But if you were around at the time, you remember as I do the swollen outrage of Republicans about how relentlessly corrupt the Clintons were.
Today? Crickets.
Finally: Before we leave this topic, I want you to go to GetTrumpMemes.com and just look at those illustrations of Trump. There’s a big one in the middle of him with his fist raised, echoing the image from his attempted assassination. Then off to the right, there’s Trump seated at the head of a dining table.
In both, he looks about 50. The artist has airbrushed a good quarter-century off his face, in terms of jowl fat and wrinkles and accumulated orange pancake. And in the dominant, middle image … what do we think Trump’s waist size is, about 46, 48? This Trump is about a 34. Maybe even a svelte 32. It’s hysterically funny. These are probably the most creepily totalitarian images of Trump I’ve ever seen, and yes, I understand, that’s a big statement. But even Stalin’s visual hagiographers didn’t try to make him look skinny.
I digress. Let’s keep our eyes on the real prize here. This May 22 dinner is a high crime and misdemeanor. A president of the United States can’t use the office to enrich himself in this way, from potentially anonymous donors for whom he might do favors. This is as textbook as corruption gets.
New York Times and Washington Post, put your best investigative reporters on this and place their stories on your front pages. MSNBC, hammer on this—you haven’t been. Democrats, talk about this every day, several times a day. Do not let Trump’s sewer standards jade us. Make sure the people know.
Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe asked why Trump and Melania are attending the funeral of Pope Francis, since the two men disagreed about almost everything. He thinks it is Trump’s way of consoling his Catholic base. The Pope and Trump exchanged harsh words. The Pope was a man of faith who called on the faithful to welcome immigrants. Trump hates immigrants. The Pope called for mercy and compassion. All Trump can give is hatred and vitriol.
Cullen writes:
There’s a great scene in “The Godfather,” when all the other Mafia bosses attend Don Corleone’s funeral.
Ostensibly, the Godfather’s rivals are there to show respect, but there’s the unmistakable reality they are not mourning a death so much as relishing an opportunity.
The image of Donald Trump sitting near the body of Pope Francis conjures the image of Don Barzini nodding to Corleone’s family as he calculates in his head how many of Corleone’s soldiers and contacts he can peel off now that the Godfather is dead.
Why, on God’s green earth, would Donald Trump deign to attend Pope Francis’ funeral? To show respect? To mingle with other world leaders? To get his mug on television?
In the aftermath of the pope’s death, Trump was uncharacteristically gracious, posting on social media that Pope Francis was “a very good man.”
Trump called that very good man “disgraceful” in 2016 after the pope dismissed Trump’s proposal to build a wall between the US and Mexico. The pope said that anyone who only thinks about building walls instead of bridges “is not Christian.”
Trump, whose base includes millions of evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics, hit back, saying, “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.”
For all the kind words he showered on the pope in the immediate aftermath of the pope’s death, it’s hard to imagine Trump disagreed with the less than charitable assessment offered by Roger Stone, the Trump advisor who avoided 40 months in prison after Trump commuted his sentence for lying to Congress to protect Trump.
Stone, displaying the compassion of a viper, said this of the pope: “His papacy was never legitimate and his teachings regularly violated both the Bible and church dogma. I rather think it’s warm where he is right now.”
So gracious.
But, give Stone this much: at least he was honest.
Trump’s platitudes ring hollow indeed. But the death of Pope Francis offers Trump and MAGA Catholics the prospect, however unlikely, of replacing a progressive voice in the Vatican with someone more ideologically in tunewith the more conservative voices within the church in the US.
Either way, Trump, who describes himself as a non-denominational Christian, won the Catholic vote, decisively. The pope’s criticism of Trump when it came to the environment, the poor and especially immigration doesn’t appear to have dissuaded the majority of American Catholics from voting for Trump.
The 9-member US Supreme Court that has been deferential to Trump’s unprecedented claims and exercise of executive power is comprised of six Catholics, only one of whom, Sonia Sotomayor, is liberal and regularly rules against Trump. (You could argue there are six conservative “Catholics” justices, given that Justice Neil Gorsuch, now an Episcopalian, was raised and educated as a Catholic, and voted with the five other conservative Catholic justices to overturn Roe v. Wade.)
Thomas Groome, a professor of theology at Boston College, acknowledges that conservative Catholics in the US have been a boon to Trump, and suspects Trump show of respect to Pope Francis and the institution is keeping with his transactional approach to pretty much everything: that the conclave of cardinals who will elect a new pope will reward Trump with someone who thinks more like him.
Highly unlikely, says Groome.
“Francis appointed about two-thirds of the cardinals who will select his successor,” Groome said. “Trump may be hoping he’ll get a reactionary, a right-wing pope. But I don’t think that will happen.”
Groome said he was more concerned about Trump’s reaction when the president realizes that, following Vatican protocol, he won’t get the best seat in the house at St. Peter’s Basilica.
“My understanding is he’s been assigned to sit in the third row,” Groome said. “He’s not going to like that.”
Still, gripped by Christian charity, and influenced by an enduring belief in redemption, Groome holds onto the remote, infinitesimal chance Donald Trump could, on the way to Rome, have a Road to Damascus conversion, that some of Pope Francis’ empathy could somehow rub off on him.
“St. Paul fell off his horse,” Groome said. “Maybe Donald Trump will, too.”
Robert Reich has been a champion of democracy throughout the Trump era. An economist, he knows that we are crippled as a nation by escalating income inequality. He describes here how Viktor Orban provided a model for Trumpism and what we should do to resist our headlong plunge into oligarchy, authoritarians, and ultimately full-blown fascism. h/t to Retired Teacher, who called my attention to this article.
Reich writes:
Friends,
A few days ago I had breakfast with my old friend John Shattuck, who, as president of Central European University in Budapest, saw firsthand how Viktor Orbán took over Hungary’s democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state.
When Trump was elected in 2016, Trump endorsed Orbán, and Orbán started attacking universities — forcing the Central European University out of Hungary.
John believes Trump is emulating Orbán’s playbook. (Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”)
Orbân’s playbook has 10 parts, according to John:
One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all party dissent.
Two:Build your base by appealing to fear and hate, branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.
Three: Use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.
Four: Use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate — especially if you don’t win a majority.
Five:Centralize your power by destroying the civil service.
Six: Redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree. Weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Demonize anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.”
Seven: Eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. Target opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties such as denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, and criminal penalties like prosecution.
Eight: Rely on your oligarchs — hugely wealthy business and financial leaders — to supervise the economy and reward them with special access to state resources, tax cuts, and subsidies.
Nine: Ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.
Ten:Get the public to believe that all this is necessary, and that resistance is futile.
John noted that Orbán’s influence now reaches across Europe.
In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.
Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies.
Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orbán playbook but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.
In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.
In Germany, the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government. Viktor Orbán, Elon Musk, and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20 percent of the vote, and polls show that 71 percent of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past.
Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orbán model. A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.
What lessons can be drawn from all this?
John believes that the best way to respond to Orbán’s right-wing populism is by building coalitions for economic populism based on health care, education, taxes, and public spending.
He points to historical examples of this, like the American Farmer-Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers, and Black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century. Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.
John says that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause.In the Orbán playbook, the national flag was hijacked by the authoritarian leader. John believes that the flag of American democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, a society built on human rights and freedoms, and international alliances and humanitarian values.
When these soft-power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up — to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.
John urges that we pro-democracy anti-Trumpers move quickly with protests, lawsuits, and loud resistance. He says that those who believe Democrats should just play dead and wait for the 2026 midterm elections are profoundly wrong. Speed is essential.
I was struck by John’s optimism. He believes that the U.S. is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism. We are 30 times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and our diversity is the source of our economic and cultural strength. The U.S. has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.
Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls.
National polls show that70 percent of Americans today see democracy as a core American value.Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, John says, but it’s essential — and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy.
For two and a half centuries, Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law.
These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025. Americans across the country are beginning to resist. John believes American democracy will emerge stronger for our efforts.
Jill Underly was recently te-elected as State Superintendent of Schools in Wisconsin. She is an active member of the Netwotk for Public Education and attended its last two meetings. She released the following statement after two courts hacked away at Trump’s threat to withhold funds from schools that taught diversity, equity, and inclusion
MADISON, Wis. (WISCONSIN DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION PRESS RELEASE) – State Superintendent Dr. Jill Underly today issued a statement following two federal court rulings that limit the Trump administration’s ability to withhold critical school funding over an unclear certification form and process.
“Our top priority in Wisconsin is our kids and making sure every student has the support they need to succeed. The past few weeks, school leaders have been scrambling to understand what the impact of the U.S. Department of Education’s order could be for their federal funds, forcing them to take their eye off what matters most.
“Today, two separate courts reached a similar conclusion: the USDE’s new certification process is likely unlawful and unconstitutionally vague. That is a welcome development for our schools and communities who, working in partnership with parents and families, are best positioned to make decisions for their communities – not Washington, D.C.
“We are closely reviewing today’s rulings and will continue to stand up for Wisconsin schools, and most importantly, our kids.”
Fremont High School students in Oakland Unified use restorative justice circles to welcome newcomers, get to know each other and build bridges between different cliques and ethnic groups.
Credit: Tatiana Chaterji / Oakland Unified
Top Takeaways
Trump executive order challenges the concept that race-neutral policies can be discriminatory.
Administration said focus on equity in discipline has harmed student safety, while advocates say it’s an excuse to roll back civil rights protections.
Experts say executive order threatening to withhold funding from schools doesn’t have much bearing on California schools — for now.
The Trump administration has taken aim at a key assumption of federal civil rights enforcers and California’s school discipline strategy: that large racial disparities are a red flag for discrimination.
Trump’s executive order, released Wednesday, attacks the concept of disparate impact — the idea that a policy that may seem neutral actually harms a racial or ethnic group. The order calls this approach to discipline, championed by both the Biden and Obama administrations, a “risk to children’s safety and well-being in the classroom.”
“Their policies placed racial equity quotas over student safety — encouraging schools to turn a blind eye to poor or violent behavior in the name of inclusion,” U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.
The previous Trump administration rescinded Obama-era guidance from the Department of Education, which warned it would initiate investigations based on reports of racial disparities in discipline.
The executive order takes this a step further by threatening state agencies and districts that fail to comply with the Trump administration’s “colorblind” interpretation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which protects against racial discrimination.
The introduction of the California School Dashboard, the state’s school accountability website, raised public awareness of suspension rates and other indicators of school performance. The dashboard designates the performance of every district and every school as well as their student groups — including racial groups — in one of five colors. No statewide student group’s suspension rate was red, designating the worst performance, but 674 schools — 7% of 9,671 schools — had that designation. They may have been designated for state assistance to determine the cause of high suspension rates. They would also have to commit to lowering suspensions as part of their district’s annual accountability plan.
Suspensions in California have dropped dramatically over the last decade, but disparities remain: 8.6% of Black students were suspended in 2023-24, compared with 2.7% of white students.
California has also taken action and banned schools from suspending students solely for “defiance.” Many advocates claimed it was a “catch-all” justification to punish students, particularly students of color, for smaller infractions, like refusing to take their hat off. The state banned the practice for K-3 students in 2013, expanded it to K-8 in 2019 and, this school year, expanded it to high school students.
Los Angeles Unified School District pioneered this policy to reduce suspensions. In 2013, its school board passed the School Climate Bill of Rights. A district spokesperson said in a statement to EdSource that the district follows state law and district policy regarding student discipline.
“Race is not a consideration in the application of student discipline policies at the district,” the statement said.
Carolyn Gorman, an analyst with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, says California is at risk of losing funding for schools with its policies on willful defiance that reference disparate impact.
But other experts disagree.
Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said the executive order is no surprise. “I expected them to write about it, but it’s so vague, it’s important to wait for the guidance to see, really, what they are trying to say.”
“It’s one of those threats that I would advise districts to ignore,” said John Affeldt, managing attorney at Public Advocates.
Affeldt points to recent court rulings that blocked Trump from enforcing an executive order he signed in January that promised to withhold funds from schools that have diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies.
It is not illegal to simply have a racial disparity in discipline statistics, Affeldt notes. Instead, disparities serve as a red flag that triggers an investigation to examine whether certain policies or practices are discriminatory and violate civil rights.
Daniel Losen, a civil rights attorney, education researcher and former director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, called the executive order “fear-mongering — making up unproven harms to discourage folks from considering the possibility that maybe their school policies are inequitable.”
“They are hoping that people think that looking at racial differences is unlawful, even though the law requires that we address disparate impacts” of education policies, he said. “And those regulations, which have been in effect since the ’60s, have not been rescinded.”
Those sharp disparities, he wrote, “also raise the question of how we can close the achievement gap if we do not close the discipline gap.”
Sixth grade teacher Thomas Courtney said he is concerned about the message that an order from the country’s highest office sends to teachers about addressing racism. He worries that it may reinforce a perception among a largely white workforce of teachers that students of color are to blame for the rise of misbehavior in classrooms.
“The scapegoat is brown and Black children and the fact that they’ve been getting away with murder in your classroom — that’s how this is going to be interpreted,” said Courtney, who teaches humanities and English at Millennial Tech Middle School in San Diego.
He worries some teachers will read the order and say, “I can finally write suspensions on all those Black kids causing all these problems in my class.”
Looking at discipline through the lens of disparate impact tends to highlight one glaring fact: Black students — boys in particular — are far more likely to be disciplined.
“It’s historically egregious that it is Black males in particular who get referred much more often, suspended much more often, expelled much more often,” Affeldt said.
Order is an ‘opening salvo’
This executive order may have little immediate legal effect, but experts expect to see much more from the administration on the topic of discipline.
“If they say, do not treat kids differently based on race, that should be fine. But they could go further to say that the Office of Civil Rights can investigate only individual circumstances, and cannot assume a disparate impact based on suspension data,” said Petrilli, of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
“They could go looking for principals who would say they did not discipline students because of mandates to reduce the number of suspensions,” he said.
Or they could find teachers who say that restorative justice in lieu of suspensions, without staff training and administrative support, doesn’t work. As Brian Foster, a retired California teacher, wrote in a comment to EdSource, “When there are no real consequences to bad behavior, it spreads. Behavior is excused and pushed right back into the classroom unresolved, degrading the real learning of all other students.”
Courtney, who wrote a commentary for EdSource on the topic, worries that this executive order could represent an “opening salvo” in an effort to turn the practice of restorative justice into a politically toxic concept, as critical race theory was. Restorative justice focuses less on punishment and more on strengthening a school’s culture through righting wrongs, solving disputes and building relationships.
Affeldt also expects to see more from the administration on the topic of disparate impact — both inside and outside of schools. He says conservatives have been pushing for a case that would outlaw disparate impact theory. He calls it a “moonshot” for the movement to get a case that would invalidate California’s take on racial discrimination.
“That’s a real stretch,” Affeldt said, “but that’s their game plan, and they’re trying to tee it up.”
EdSource reporter Mallika Seshadri contributed to this story.
The Trump administration claims that it wants to reduce federal intervention into the nation’s public and private institutions. But it intervenes forcefully in both public and private sectors to punish anyone with different views. It has threatened to withhold federal funding for research from universities unless the targeted universities allow the federal government to supervise its curriculum, its hiring policies, and its admissions policies. And he threatened to stop the funding of any K12 school that continues DEI programs.
The Trump regime has created a nanny state.
From Day 1, Trump made clear that he would ban practices and policies intended to diversity, equity, and inclusion. He threatened to withhold federal funding of schools that ignored his order to eliminate DEI. He has taken complete control of the Kennedy Center, so as to block DEI programming, and he has appointed a woman with no credentials to remove DEI from the Smithsonian museums.
Who knows how the African American Museum will survive Trump’s DEI purge.
ABC News reported that a federal district judge has halted the DEI ban, at least in schools associated with one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, the NEA.
The Trump administration’s attempt to make federal funding to schools conditional on them eliminating any DEI policies erodes the “foundational principles” that separates the United States from totalitarian regimes, a federal judge said on Thursday.
In an 82-page order, U.S. District Judge Landya McCafferty partially blocked the Department of Education from enforcing a memo issued earlier this year that directed any institution that receives federal funding to end discrimination on the basis of race or face funding cuts.
“Ours is a nation deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned,” Judge McCafferty wrote, adding the “right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs is…one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes.”
“In this case, the court reviews action by the executive branch that threatens to erode these foundational principles,” she wrote.
The judge stopped short of issuing the nationwide injunction, instead limiting the relief to any entity that employs or contacts with the groups that filed the lawsuit, including the National Education Association and the Center for Black Educator Development.
