The Situation: Stand With Perkins Coie!

The Situation yesterday vented its spleen at the coming revocation of protective status for Ukrainians in the United States. 

After writing yesterday’s column, I got on a flight to Argentina, where a friend is getting married. While I was in transit, President Trump issued an executive order directing all agencies to “review all contracts with [the law firm] Perkins Coie or with entities that disclose doing business with Perkins Coie.”

Notice here that Trump is not merely seeking to penalize a law firm, he is seeking to punish anyone who does business with that law firm—what’s called a secondary boycott.

If the name Perkins Coie doesn’t mean much to you, or it means just a Seattle-based big law firm, that’s probably a good sign you’re not deep in the right-wing fever swamp information ecosystem. 

And if you’re not, you might be wondering: Why would the president be issuing an executive order targeting a particular law firm, entitled “Addressing Risks from Perkins Coie LLC”?

You will find the answer in the first paragraph of the order, which announces its retaliatory nature in the order’s very statement of “Purpose”:

The dishonest and dangerous activity of the law firm Perkins Coie LLP (“Perkins Coie”) has affected this country for decades. Notably, in 2016 while representing failed Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS, which then manufactured a false “dossier” designed to steal an election. This egregious activity is part of a pattern. Perkins Coie has worked with activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification. In one such case, a court was forced to sanction Perkins Coie attorneys for an unethical lack of candor before the court.

Shortly after I arrived in Buenos Aires this morning, the administration issued a remarkable statement terminating $400 million in grants to Columbia University—and threatening a lot more than that:

Today, the Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Education (ED), and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced the immediate cancellation of approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students. These cancellations represent the first round of action and additional cancellations are expected to follow. The Task Force is continuing to review and coordinate across federal agencies to identify additional cancellations that could be made swiftly. DOJ, HHS, ED, and GSA are taking this action as members of the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. Columbia University currently holds more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments.

Anyone who doubts that protecting Jewish students at Columbia from antisemitism was not at the top of the list of concerns animating the administration here should read these two documents side by side. Specifically note the inclusion of the name George Soros in the Perkins Coie order. Antisemites around the world have singled out Soros among all philanthropists who support causes they dislike for demonization, and Trump here names him as though a law firm merely working with groups funded by the man warrants a secondary boycott directed against its clients by the U.S. federal government.

And then he complains about harassment of Jewish students at Columbia—and threatens $5 billion in retaliation.

Far be it from me to defend the climate for Jewish, particularly Orthodox Jewish, students on American campuses. I have no doubt that various universities have a genuine problem under civil rights laws with respect to the environments they have tolerated, sometimes even encouraged. And if the administration had taken appropriate action to enforce those laws, I would actually have supported it.

But this is not that. It is a broad assault on the university as such, an attempt to intimidate other universities, and part of a much broader pattern of intimidating and attacking the foundations of cultural power that does not pay fealty to Trump. And as the demagogic reference to Soros in the administration’s action the previous day shows, it has virtually nothing to do with protecting Jews.

Indeed, I’m sure the Jewish students who work in scientific labs that will shut down if this actually happens, the students who will lose financial aid, and the junior faculty whose contracts will not be renewed as a result of this will all be cheered to know that they lost their jobs or their ability to attend Columbia in the service of preventing their own harassment.

Perkins Coie and Columbia University are, respectively, a big law firm and a wealthy and powerful university. These are entities capable of protecting their own interests, as I’m sure they will. There will be litigation, and these plaintiffs will not need pro bono representation.

Nor are they victims that people are going to take to the streets to defend. Nobody is going to man the barricades chanting, “Stand With Perkins Coie!” but perhaps they should. It is critically  important to recognize how dangerous these actions are and how they relate to the administration’s ongoing attempts to seize power. 

They are part of a broad pattern of the administration attacking a wide array of the sources of power of its perceived or real opponents. These include the attacks on the bureaucracy; the attacks on the press, which include the explicit retaliation against the Associated Press and Reuters, playing favorites with friendly media, and the firings of individual Voice of America reporters perceived as unfriendly; the blizzard of attacks against the many organizations that provide development assistance in foreign countries; the firings of military officers; and, of course, the attacks on our allies.

What all of these pushes have in common is that they are all attempts to intimidate potential opponents by punishing those who have stood up to Trump in the past or are doing so now.

Taking on the rival sources of power is critical to any would-be authoritarian. Vladimir Putin couldn’t consolidate his power until he sublimated the country’s oligarchs to his will, which he did with a deft brutality. Victor Orban also took on a university, one created by none other than George Soros. Getting the press under control has long required the attention of the would-be dictator. And the independence of bureaucratic actors has been a thorn in many a dictator’s foot; just think of how Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan used the attempted coup against him to purge the bureaucracy.

Trump wants to send a message to law firms to be afraid of what he can do to your business. He wants to send a message to universities to be careful about what dissent they tolerate in the name of academic freedom. And what better way to do this than to make an example of the law firm that commissioned the “Steele Dossier” and a university that allowed pro-Palestinian demonstrators to create an atmosphere in which being openly Jewish was quite scary?

There is nothing new here. The novelty lies only in this happening in a democracy as consolidated as this one in which people have such strong expectations that guardrails will hold.

And in that respect, there is one good piece of news: Nobody has ever managed to deconsolidate a democracy like this one before. The rival sources of power faced by Orban or Putin were not nearly as deep-rooted or numerous as they are here. Trump here is trying something very hard, and he is picking fights with organizations that can punch back.

With each one of these fights, Trump chips away not merely at the power-base of his opposition but at his own political strength. Each time he loses, it weakens him a little bit. The question is whether he is weakening the opposition faster than he is weakening himself. 

None of this is to say that his ultimate failure is written in the stars. It is anything but. But it is actually a good thing that is picking powerful enemies, along with the Haitian migrants and the probationary government workers. These are hard fights, and they are existential for the entities in question, which means they will fight hard.

So yeah, “I Stand with Perkins Coie!”

It’s a weird slogan, but what the heck? We live in weird times. 

The Situation continues tomorrow.