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Our last meeting, on April 1, seems like it was years ago.

That day, we had glimmers of hope: Cory Booker was wrapping up his speech on the floor of the Senate, making the case, a plea, for a “moral moment,” even as we began our discussion of resistance.

A little closer to home, the last voters were casting their ballots in the most expensive judicial race in Wisconsin history—one marked by the extraordinary intervention of Elon Musk, who spent $20 million dollars to try to swing the election, not only by running a round-the-clock ad campaign, but also actually (and manifestly illegally) paying two voters a million dollars apiece in an attempt to pump up Republican turnout. Musk’s millions fared no better than a Cybertruck at the beach: Susan M. Crawford, the Democratic-backed candidate for the state Supreme Court, trounced the hard-right candidate, Brad Schimmel.

Though some of us were distracted by Booker’s oratory and the results that began to trickle in from Wisconsin, we tackled the question of resistance, and what it takes to get people to resist. We had read a short piece about resistance in wartime France, Martin Blumenson’s “The Early French Resistance in Paris“; part of the point of reading the piece was for us to think about the array of sometimes serious, sometimes banal issues that motivate people to resist; part of the point was how the resistance was in part fueled by the loutish, clueless insensitivity of the German occupiers:

If some people drifted into the work that as yet had no name, others were driven to it by what the Germans did. There was no dramatic event, no symbolic incident, but instead a series of minor irritations that gradually rubbed the French the wrong way (Blumenson, “Early Resistance”, 66).

Donald Trump and his cronies seem hellbent on emulating the German occupiers in this, as in many other regards. Insults to the dignity of the American people are a daily occurrence; worse, the cavalcade of assaults on the things that have actually made America great continue.

“Liberation Day”

On April 2, a day he bizarrely called “Liberation Day,” Donald Trump slapped tariffs on everyone and everything and everyplace, including, infamously, the Heard and McDonald Islands, home to a few penguins and zero people, and the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is best known as the home of a joint U.S./U.K. military base on the island of Diego Garcia. Stock markets reacted badly, not from sympathy to our flightless avian friends or our military personnel in the Indian Ocean, but to the specter of an all-out trade war with our biggest partners. Things weren’t helped by the incoherence of Trump’s tariffs nor by the idiocy of the justifications for these tariffs.

It took James Surowiecki, a financial journalist, less than no time to figure out how the tariffs had been calculated—and to post his analysis on X:

Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us. So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.

It’s not always clear what will make some of our fellow Americans react to the havoc that Trump has inflicted on our country. But our erstwhile trading partners elsewhere struck back. Stock markets, predictably, plunged. If the abstract notion of a tariff had apparently left many Americans indifferent, the dawning realization that just about every business in America has a stake in international trade, and that every mom-and-pop operation that sells just about anything depends on at least one Chinese supplier began to cause some serious grumbling, and persuaded a scattering of Republicans to call for limits on presidential tariff authority.

I won’t go on to recap everything that’s happened; I’ve reached April 2, and I’ve already spent more words than I ought to have. What I do want to say, though, is that while there have been horror stories since our last meeting (the economy, the arbitrary arrest of green card holders, the forced exile of people deprived of due process, the arrest of a judge, attempts to squelch dissent within the federal government, Signalgate and its offspring, and so on), there are also signs that the minor and major irritations caused by the regime’s brutish actions are destroying the regime’s credibility. One sign was the massive turnout for protests on April 5 (some photos here; another sign is the shift in public opinion measured by national polls.

Trump’s approval ratings have crashed.

As CNN put it, “Trump’s 41% approval rating is the lowest for any newly elected president at 100 days dating back at least to Dwight Eisenhower – including Trump’s own first term.” And it’s not just CNN’s polling; every major poll shows a dramatic decline for Trump.

One of the most striking aspects of these polls is people who agree with Trump on some issues reject his regime’s methods. (The NYT/Siena Poll is particularly revealing on this. Take one example: 54% of people broadly agree with Trump’s anti-immigrant position; 52% also disapprove of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia expulsion to a Salvadorean prison.)

So what’s going on? One guess is that lots of people still do believe in basic rights and do not believe that “anything goes” to reach policy objectives. In other words, many (even most) people still have values.

It’s not just the polls

This isn’t just happening with public opinion, either. The record of resistance so far has been mixed and often disappointing (thanks, Columbia University!), but we’re beginning to see serious pushback from some universities (I never thought I would cheer for Harvard, but here we are), some law firms, many federal judges, and even small businesses. People are taking risks to defend what they think is right or to stave off what they think is wrong.

Understanding why people do and don’t take risks

In our previous discussions, we’ve tried to think about what democracy itself is (Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Pericles); why civic virtue matters (Montesquieu’s “Troglodyte Letters”); and the nature of (and slowness) of resistance (Blumenson).

For this meeting, the readings focus on responses (good and bad) to Trump. These include:

• Columbia University’s announcement that it had caved to regime’s demands
• Harvard’s reply to the regime’s demands (spoiler: it didn’t cave)
• The American Association of Colleges and Universities’ (AAC&U) “Call for Constructive Engagement“
• Judge Wilkinson’s opinion for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in the Abrego Garcia Case
• The letter Paul Weiss Chairman Brad Karp sent to Paul Weiss staff justifying a deal with the Trump regime
• An “Open Letter to the Legal Community Regarding the President’s Attacks on the Legal Profession and the Federal Judiciary” from state attorneys general

The nature of civic virtue

These responses—both courageous and cowardly—reveal something essential about resistance and civic virtue. We see a stark contrast between those who stood firm (Harvard, the federal judges, state attorneys general) and those who folded under pressure (Columbia, Paul Weiss). Neither group forms a monolithic bloc ideologically. Those who resist often disagree on policy, politics, and priorities. What unites them isn’t partisan alignment but commitment to fundamental values—due process, academic freedom, the rule of law, integrity of institutions. Similarly, those who capitulate don’t necessarily share politics but often share justifications: pragmatism, institutional survival, or claims of neutrality.

As we examine these readings, let’s consider these questions:

• What makes some institutions hold firm while others capitulate?
• What rationalizations enable people to abandon their proclaimed values when tested?
• How can we recognize, resist, and debunk these justifications for inaction?
• How do we nurture civic virtue in a polarized society?