Robert Reich: Americans are beginning to fear dissent. That's exactly what Trump wants.
I was talking recently to a friend who’s a professor at Columbia University about what’s been happening there. He had a lot to say.
When he needed to run off to an appointment, I asked him if he’d text or email me the rest of his thoughts. His response worried me. “No,” he said. “I better not. They may be reviewing it.” “Who’s ‘they’?” I asked. “They! The university. The government. Gotta go!” He was off. My friend has never shown signs of paranoia.
I relay this to you because the Donald Trump regime is starting to have a chilling effect on what and how Americans communicate with each other. It is beginning to deter open dissent, which is exactly what the US president intends. The chill affects all five major pillars of civil society – universities, science, the media, the law and the arts. In Columbia University’s capitulation to Trump, it agreed to require demonstrators to identify themselves when asked and put its department of Middle Eastern studies under “receivership”, lest it lose $400m in government funding. The agreement is already chilling dissent there, as my conversation with my friend revealed.
The Trump regime also “detained” a Columbia University graduate student and green card holder who participated in protests at the school. The administration’s agents have also entered dorms with search warrants and targeted two other students who participated in such protests. On Tuesday, an international student in a graduate program at Tufts University was taken into custody outside her off-campus apartment building by plainclothes homeland security agents, handcuffed and whisked away to a prison in Louisiana. She has a valid student visa. Her apparent offense? Putting her name to an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper that was critical of how the Tufts administration handled protests. Scores of other major universities are on Trump’s target list.
Trump’s attack on science has involved threats to three of the largest funders of American science – the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. Tens of thousands of researchers are worried about how to continue their research. Many have decided to hunker down and not criticize the Trump administration for fear of losing their funding. Philippe Baptiste, the French minister for higher education, has charged that a French scientist traveling to a conference near Houston earlier this month was denied entry into the US because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he gave a negative “personal opinion” about Trump’s scientific and research policies. The US Department of Homeland Security denies this was the reason the scientist wasn’t admitted into the country. Meanwhile, America’s major media fear more lawsuits from Trump and his political allies in the wake of ABC’s surrender to Trump in December, agreeing to pay him $15m to settle a defamation suit he filed against the network.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/31/americans-dissent-fear-trump
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