Donald Trump threatens schools and businesses to pay the tributes he demands or suffer the consequences. Trump is a bully when it comes to perverting government powers for illegitimate partisan purposes. Some leaders recently have succumbed to such efforts and paid the piper, while others have resisted.
Private entities such as media companies dependent on FCC clearance, law firms reliant upon access to government buildings like court houses and requiring security clearances to defend clients, and universities reliant on government research funds are being victimized for political retribution, while other institutional leaders stand by traumatized and fearful. The leaders of Harvard and law firm Paul Weiss, represented by the same Trump-friendly lawyer, Richard Burck of Quinn Emanuel, took opposite paths in dealing with the same adversary Donald Trump. Can they both be right?
Trump’s allies threaten to cripple these enterprises even though the Constitution is on the side of his victims. The draining, long appeals process endangers an enterprise’s perishable assets in the loyalty and well-being of its constituents, ranging from customers, employees, and clients to partners, researchers, and students.
Paramount paid $16 million to the Trump Library fund to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against it, following itsCBS’s 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year, which her then-campaign rival, Trump, did not like. Six months earlier, Disney agreed to pay an equal amount for an ABC broadcast to which Trump objected to. In both cases, as there was no misconduct, there were no apologies offered and no admission of guilt, in an effort to protect their reputations by refusing contrition for their journalism.
Similarly, several law firms such as Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps, and Kirkland & Ellis were threatened by Trump to have access to federal buildings and government security clearances cancelled and their clients were threatened with commercial repercussions if they continued to do business with the firms. Some firms settled preempting a White House executive order. Given their clients’ needs for such access and their clients’ fiduciary duties to their shareholders, they made concessions in the way of offers of legal work that was already covered by the existing donated time and for causes these firms already long addressed. Thus, the concessions gave Trump an illusion of victory and a dignified path for retreat, truly winning nothing. While their peer firms, such as Jenner Block, Perkins Coie, and Wilmer Cutler, are rightly celebrated for resisting similar Trump threats, the nature of the business mix of these litigation-focused firms had less flight risk of corporate transaction lawyers.
Some universities, such as Columbia, have made concessions while others, such as Harvard, have resisted federal government intrusion into private strategic decisions and freedom of academic expression. Harvard, like other universities, had governance failures and had shown an indifference to pockets of antisemitism, which had not been properly addressed. The Harvard of today is very different than the Harvard of two years ago in the eyes ofinternal critics such as Steven Pinker who salute Harvard’s progress against ideological filters. Even the Anti-Defamation League’s assessment of antisemitism on campuses has shown marked improvement at Harvard – with the school, led by a Jewish president and a Jewish board chair, now no worse than the average U.S. university, if not better than both. But Trump still brandishes the specter of institutional antisemitism, among other false accusations, to try to seize government control of Harvard’s admissions, faculty staffing, and curriculum decisions for its own political biases.
Harvard has been fighting Trump’s unconstitutional intrusion into the strategic decisions of a private enterprise and winning four times in a row in federal lawsuits against Trump. After losing multiple court rulings to Harvard, Trump’s threats against the university appear to be imploding. Last week, after his fifth court loss, this one permanently blocking his halt of international visas to Harvard students, Trump tried to declare victory with a conciliatory tone on his Truth Social posting “They have acted extremely appropriately during these negotiations, and appear to be committed to doing what is right.”
Yet still billions of dollars of research grants are at risk on top of the confiscatory new tax provisions targeting the endowments of such wealthy schools, costing billions more. Late last month, Harvard’s president and provost confirmed to major donors that talks with the Trump White House had resumed. Trump also hinted that a deal with Harvard was imminent, but some Harvard faculty worried about the terms of a prospective deal appearing to look like capitulation, while others worried that the university’s battle over purist principles of academic freedom was quixotic and too costly.
Both Garber and Paul Weiss managing partner Brad Karp have been criticized for their different approaches to conflict with Trump.
The context was different between such cases. Paul Weiss attracted White House vindictiveness when its chairman Brad Karp attempted to rally the legal community to defend peer firms which had been previously targeted. Initially, the legal community not only failed to defend peers targeted by the White House, but firms, such as Sullivan Cromwell, benefited from such disputes for commercial and partisan purposes. Isolated, Karp had to fortify his firm and mollify Trump with face-saving concessions while gaining numerous new clients during this period of distress. Only later did several hundred mid-sized law firms come to support large firms under the White House attack.
By contrast, hundreds of colleges and universities rallied immediately to the defense of Harvard and 60 other schools under attack from the White House. An immediate wave of a hundred schools catalyzed a massive collective statement of defiance of such intrusion into campus life.
The victims are not just collegial organizations such as law firms and universities. The nation has seen many icons of American enterprise victimized in the same way Paramount/CBS and Disney/ABC were attacked. Various firms such as Amazon, Delta Airlines, Coca-Cola, Walmart, Harley Davidson, AT&T, Ford, GM, Merck, and Bank of America were wrongly attacked by Trump for partisan reasons, many for merely speaking the truth about the devastating consequences for Trump’s reckless tariffs, along with other revenge trade practices. Trump even told Harley riders to buy foreign made bikes instead of Harley when the company had to close one US factory and open one in Asia to import bikes in the EU due to EU retaliatory trade barriers in reaction to Trump tariffs. The silence of the business community to such White House overreach has been deafening.
While the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce have spoken up, it’s time for other influential but more cautious organizations, like the Business Roundtable, to learn the lessons the universities taught the law firms. The difference receptions that Garber and Karp have received make clear that the most effective way to deal with Trump is through collective action but if abandoned by peers, leaders can make needed cosmetic concessions to allow their adversary a dignified path for retreat. Leaders must learn this wisdom.
