Trump's Actions at Columbia are Straight out of the Domestic Abuse Playbook
Understanding the manufactured crisis about anti-Semitism at American universities.
A week ago, on Saturday March 8, Mahmoud Khalil was abducted by ICE agents. Khalil, a student activist who played a key role in negotiating with Columbia University during protests against the war in Gaza, has not been charged with a crime. But the Trump administration had ordered his student visa be revoked. Upon learning that Khalil has a green card—his wife is American—ICE announced that his green card was being revoked too. He was transported to New Jersey and then a Louisiana detention center, where he has been denied legal counsel. On Monday March 10, a US District Judge of New York halted the attempted deportation.
Mahmoud Khalil, via NBC
Khalil is now the face—and the first attempted deportation victim—of Trump’s promised crackdown on the pro-Palestinian activists at college campuses, who have been overwhelmingly non-violent, simply exercising their legally protected right to political protest. The purported rationale for the crackdown is these activists’ anti-Semitism. This is, however, the flimsiest of fig leaves: not only have the protests been by and large free of anti-Semitic sentiment, often focused on demanding the university’s military divestment, but they were undertaken in order to protest what the International Court of Justice has deemed a “plausible genocide” of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel. Nearly 50 000 Palestinians have perished. As a Jew whose ancestors perished in the Holocaust, I have witnessed these atrocities with horror and moral condemnation. “Never again” does not mean “never again for us” but rather “never again, for anyone”—or, at least, it ought to.
The Trump administration is withholding $400 million in federal grants and contracts until it secures compliance from Columbia with umpteen draconian demands, issued on Thursday night. These include the following: immediately placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years (a rare emergency measure implemented in cases where a department cannot function, involving direct oversight from university administration); banning masks on campus (since these can conceal student protesters’ identities); abolishing the university judicial board and empowering the university president to expel or suspend students; allowing NYPD on campus; and adopting a definition of anti-Semitism that erroneously conflates it with anti-Zionism. In addition to this, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security searched two student dorm rooms at Columbia, having presented federal search warrants. Another student visa has been revoked, and there has been a second arrest of a Palestinian student protester accused of overstaying her F1 visa. Things are moving quickly.
These measures are unprecedented in their attempt to exert authoritarian control over a university in the United States. They are terrifying and will have an immediate impact on other universities who have thereby been put on notice (officially or unofficially). They are also straight out of the domestic abuse playbook. As is often the case with authoritarian leaders, we gain important insights by looking to the abusive family dynamics they instinctively emulate and enact against the body politic. Here are three abusive techniques that Trump is employing:
1. Coercive control: First, and most obviously, Trump is holding Columbia hostage via threats, intimidation, and other coercive tactics. As many domestic abusers have discovered, you do not have to actually hit someone or otherwise inflict violence in order to control them: you only have to issue threats that will make them take action in order to forestall this, rather than exercising their right to resist, escape, or seek legal remedies. Cornell law professor Michael Dorf has explained why the withholding of federal funds at Columbia is surely not legal—but the institution appears to be playing ball, and looking to compromise, rather than taking legal action.
2. Financial abuse: A very effective and common way to practice coercive control is to withhold someone’s access to funds that are rightly theirs. This is exactly what Trump and co. are (again, illegally) doing at Columbia, and it puts other universities in the position of either obeying in advance or facing similar withholding of the funds that are crucial to the institution’s educational and research missions and daily operations. One of the biggest predictors of whether or not a victim of domestic abuse will leave is whether she has access to a car, a place to stay, and money to support herself and her dependents. Cutting off her access to funds is thus a very effective way to keep her at the abuser’s mercy. And so it will be with the institutions Trump is threatening.
3. Reverse Victim and Offender: Instead of acknowledging the true moral dynamics of the situation, many abusers attempt to depict their victim as the wrongdoer and themselves as either the victim or the victim’s protector. For example, an abusive husband may falsely accuse his wife of abusing him—including by filing police reports—or abusing their children, thereby painting himself as their children’s protector. This latter dynamic is what is going on with the Trump administration, where Education Secretary Linda McMahon is claiming that her department is “deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite U.S. campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless anti-Semitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year.” As someone close to these events, and as a Jewish professor at Cornell, this is an outrageous distortion. While it would be astounding if the protests were entirely perfect, with no individual protester ever having expressed an erroneous thought, that doesn’t mean they’re not essentially right, as The New York Times’ Lydia Polgreen argued when she went behind the scenes and actually did the reporting. The protesters are the ones on the right side of history. After all, they are protesting what United Nations experts have labelled genocidal acts on the part of Israel. Beyond that, many have pointed to a strong multi-ethnic and multi-racial coalition for justice for Palestine that has included Jewish students as well as Palestinian ones from the get-go, among countless others. On a personal level, I have been moved by reports of Seders held by those in the encampments, a breaking of bread by people united in their commitment to freedom and justice for all persecuted peoples.
Yes, there have been occasional terrible threats to Jews on campus recently, including at Cornell. It came from an individual with no affiliation with the movement to free Palestine, who merely pretended to be sympathetic to Hamas online in order to create a smokescreen. The Trump administration’s depiction of itself as a protector and defender of Jewish students thus belies its true purpose: persecuting those who have protested in support of Palestine. (It is also flatly absurd coming from a president who famously defended neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville as “very fine people,” notwithstanding their murdering the Jewish counter-protester Heather Heyer.) This reversal is a classic part of DARVO (“deny, attack, reverse victim and offender”).
In general, we would do well to remember: Trump’s tactics vis-à-vis universities are that of a domestic abuser. And, like it or not, compromising with domestic abusers is never the answer. It may keep you safe, or at least safer, for a hot minute. But, ultimately what they are after is submission of a kind that is incompatible with the freedom and autonomy we must demand on behalf of every human being—and, it behooves us now to recognize, every university.