Frederick Deknatel is the Executive Editor of Democracy in Exile, the DAWN journal.
What Donald Trump billed as "the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history" has, as feared, instead been a chaotic and relentless assault on the country's governing institutions and American democracy itself. Dismantling the federal government, defying federal courts and the rule of law, disappearing immigrants and legal residents, trying to take over universities—welcome to America's new "golden age."
Trump, who always speaks in bombast, has compared his first 100 days to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's in 1933, even as Trump's sweeping tariffs and trade wars risk sinking both the U.S. and global economy. While FDR passed 15 pieces of major new legislation in his first 100 days in response to the Great Depression, including new banking regulations and ambitious public works projects that became central to the New Deal, Trump has passed no major legislation yet, signing just five minor bills into law. That is fewer than any president in their first 100 days since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953.
Instead, Trump's first 100 days have been defined by the blitz of 139 executive orders he has signed, many to remake the federal government in the image of Trump and his cronies. While many executive orders have been challenged in court, they represent how Trump sees executive power—expansive and wielded unilaterally by him, without Congress or any respect for the Constitution's separation of powers.
To take stock of the chaos and abuses of power in Trump's second term so far, Democracy in Exile reached out to DAWN's non-resident fellows, many of them scholars and academics who have seen firsthand the Trump administration's attacks on universities, academic freedom and free speech. They identified what they see as the most dangerous element of Trump's first 100 days.
Trump's populist regime craves a world that mirrors its dark vision for a new American republic: a global order that cements whiteness at the apex of political hierarchy.
- Sean Yom
Trump's Noxious Ethnocentrism
American democracy has fallen under ferocious assault from the Trump administration. A feckless, populist elite has deployed illiberal tools in the pursuit of untrammeled power. Escalating executive overreach, policing university education, violating judicial constraints, shearing public services, curtailing press freedom and arbitrarily deporting legal residents—these are the tried-and-true strategies of autocrats everywhere. Yet the most disturbing aspect of this democratic backsliding is about race. Trump's populist regime craves a world that mirrors its dark vision for a new American republic: a global order that cements whiteness at the apex of political hierarchy.
Much of Trump's social base comprises a shrinking white demographic roiled by racialized anxiety. That more than half of American children under five years old are not white stokes fear; that the rest of the world is mostly non-white but increasingly prosperous stirs outrage. The ongoing dismantling of U.S. foreign aid resonates with those incensed that their tax dollars are flowing to distant lands populated by brown and black peoples. So too has Trump's erratic trade warfare, waged disproportionately against Asian countries demonized as exploiting the American industrial class—the "Yellow Peril" trope all over again. Anti-immigration crackdowns have banked on racist jingoism that channels eugenics in accusing too many foreigners of polluting America's once-pure people. So too have visa revocations for more than 1,500 students, some targeted merely for supporting Palestine and whose collective presence on campuses and in classrooms is framed as existentially imperiling American society.
This circles back to Gaza in a dreadful way. It extends beyond Trump's authoritarian efforts to satisfy right-wing Zionist fantasies by forcing universities to criminalize pro-Palestinian protest or attempting to deport foreign students for criticizing Israel. Much as preserving whiteness has always anchored how many American elites saw the rest of the world, U.S. policy toward Gaza now channels the worst parts of Orientalism and imperialism. Trump's horrific solution to the Palestinian conflict entails ethnically cleansing Gaza while allowing Israel to annex the West Bank. This echoes the centuries-long premise that the only safe spaces for Western civilization, which Israel's boosters now claim to defend, are those emptied of its barbaric natives so that enlightened white settlers can build shining cities upon hills. For this administration, Palestinians are the dusky "others" to the Judeo-Christian "self," which also means the sovereign Palestinian state must be terminated.
Herein lies the noxious ethnocentrism that, however encoded in appeals to regional security or geopolitical stability, rests upon deeply racialized presumptions that some people are more deserving of basic rights than others. This appalling idea links the contemporary U.S. stance on Palestine with its democratic retreat at home, and it will continue to guide American foreign policy under the Trump administration.
—Sean Yom is an associate professor of political science at Temple University, a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
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The Inevitable Cost of Ignoring—and Enabling—Human Rights Abuses
It has not taken the first few months of the second Trump administration to demonstrate the weaknesses and failures of human rights frameworks. For decades, countries including but not limited to the United States have flouted human rights for political aims, while limiting punitive measures for violations to select groups and countries, typically in the Global South. The U.S., which has often championed itself as a bastion of rights and freedoms, is not even a state party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This is the same country, after all, that interned more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II; turned away thousands of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust; sustained the Apartheid government in South Africa; and ignored the Rwandan genocide. It was under the presidency of liberal darling Barack Obama that a 16-year-old American citizen was killed in Yemen by an American drone.
It is not, then, that surprising to see the acceleration of illiberal trends at home, including individuals with legal status in this country being detained and deported, and American citizens being questioned and detained—essentially, the end of due process. The U.S. government's acceptance, across political parties, of countless human rights abuses abroad not only affected people from those countries but created a broader tacit permission structure for human rights violations.
Is it any surprise that the U.S. would eventually arrest and detain people based on flawed, and often nonexistent, "evidence" of supposed crimes or terrorism? If so, why, when the U.S. has supported Israel's policy of administrative detention of Palestinians, including children, for decades? Is it impossible to believe the U.S. would support mass detention of such prisoners in what are widely known as torturous conditions? Why, when the U.S. has done little to intervene in the inhumane detention of tens of thousands of political prisoners in countries like Egypt and Syria?
While unclear just how far the current administration will go in slashing norms and violating the rule of law here in the U.S., it was inevitable that the freedoms and rights long ignored for the world's most marginalized people would be increasingly ignored for the most marginalized in America. Who might be next?
—Yara M. Asi is an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Global Health Management and Informatics, a visiting scholar at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, and a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
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Whither American Academia
One of the chief characteristics of Donald Trump's first 100 days in office has been his attack on American universities. Why this obsession with institutions of higher education and what does it reveal about the Trump regime?
All aspiring autocrats hate universities. Trying to subdue them comes straight out of the authoritarian playbook. In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that "capturing neutral referees" is an early move by all aspiring autocrats. Who are these referees, and what role do they play in political society? They are the institutions that hold power accountable, that seek to protect the rule of law and that aspire to provide a level playing field for everyone: the courts, judges, law firms, the media and civil society organizations, such as colleges and universities. Trump has targeted these institutions for the same reason: they pose an obstacle to his power grab. His goal is to replace these referees with allies and loyalists.
Historically, American universities have been independent institutions. It is precisely because of this independence, defined by free speech and academic freedom, that these academic institutions have been able to thrive, earning the envy of the world. American universities also possess a degree of political power. They help shape a core set of democratic attitudes, beliefs, norms and values that are foundational to how American citizens relate to their government. In other words, American higher education profoundly shapes American political culture—and this is a main reason why Trump wants to subdue it.
Furthermore, universities have granted young people the freedom to mobilize, to think critically, to protest and to hold power accountable. This has been a hallmark of American universities for the past 60 years. Think of the debates and the political mobilization that took place around the Vietnam War, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and, more recently, the Gaza encampment movement. They all occurred at universities.
When Ronald Reagan first ran for governor of California, he threatened to shut down the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley—"to clean up the mess at Berkeley," as he put it, from "beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates." Richard Nixon famously called students protesting the Vietnam War "bums," and in one of his White House tapes, said that "the professors are the enemy." Neither Reagan nor Nixon, however, threatened the educational integrity and institutional autonomy of American higher education. This distinction belongs exclusively to Donald J. Trump. It stands out as a signature aspect of his first 100 days in office. If he is not stopped, a pillar of American democracy that is revered across the globe will cease to exist.
—Nader Hashemi is the director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, an associate professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and a non-resident fellow at DAWN.
It was inevitable that the freedoms and rights long ignored for the world's most marginalized people would be increasingly ignored for the most marginalized in America. Who might be next?
- Yara M. Asi
The New Red Scare
In 1957, the Supreme Court of the United States issued one of its first comprehensive rulings on academic freedom. Written as the last embers of the Red Scare were still smoldering, the court's judgment in Sweezy v. New Hampshire affirmed, in the words of Chief Justice Earl Warren, that:
"The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any straight jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation… Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust."
Today, the embers have been reignited. The great scare today is the claim that antisemitism is pervasive on American campuses, fed by "woke" academic policies and the massive student protests last spring against Israel's genocide in Gaza.
What has become obvious is that the Trump administration's real target has little to do with these purported abominations. Jewish presidents of American universities, such as Alan Garber of Harvard and Michael Roth of Wesleyan, have stated that the crackdown on American universities has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism, and everything to do with a war on civil society. Comparisons to the authoritarian handbooks of Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey are now routine.
Even though universities such as Columbia and Harvard had already imposed their own punitive sanctions against student protesters and suspended academic programs alleged to be critical of Israel, the recent demands by the new Trump administration have deemed these efforts to be insufficient. It is withholding billions of dollars in federal research funding from scores of universities unless even harsher measures are imposed against equality initiatives, free inquiry and dissent.
The pushback from some American universities has started in the courts. Harvard has filed a constitutional challenge to the White House in federal court in Massachusetts, claiming that the Trump administration has violated the First Amendment by seeking to restrict its programs and what can be taught in the classroom. One of its core arguments is that the federal government has presented no rational connection between its professed concerns about antisemitism and the freezing of medical, science and technological research. In response, the White House stated that it was considering the revocation of Harvard's tax-exempt status, which would severely dent its ability to attract donations and devote its endowment to scholarship.
If Donald Trump decides that this is his political line in the sand, then the constitutional litigation against his attacks on higher education may well be decided by the Supreme Court. The question will become whether the court will be as brave as it was almost 70 years ago. Moral panics may not repeat themselves in history, but they certainly rhyme.
—Michael Lynk is Professor Emeritus of Law at Western University in Ontario and a non-resident fellow at DAWN. From 2016 to 2022, he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.
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Standing Up for Gaza, and Standing Up to Trump
The brazen authoritarianism and kleptocracy of the Trump administration—and supine response from the would-be opposition party—have provoked a righteous anger on display in rallies and town halls around the country. That anger could be nurtured into a mass mobilization that puts the brakes on America's descent into fascism. Or it could be coopted by the same unwitting enablers who greased the skids for today's authoritarian abuses. This administration can test out extrajudicial detentions and expulsions on immigrants and student protestors because it knows elected leaders across the aisle have largely bought into the manufactured panic over both. Last year, dozens of Democrats in Congress proudly passed a law to restrict due process for immigrants, and 133 Democrats supported a House bill that outlawed campus protests against Israel but fortunately sputtered out for procedural reasons.
But the continuity of events between this administration and what preceded it is not only a story of moral lapses. Just as there was little surprise that politicians who staked their careers on compromising with fascists quickly proved unsuited for resisting fascism, the leaders with the backbone needed to meet this moment have been equally consistent in their principles and revealed themselves well ahead of Trump's second inauguration.
There is a close overlap between the elected officials who fought the Biden administration's bloody Israel policy and the members now trying in earnest to push back against the Trump administration's authoritarian overreach. First into the breach to visit the U.S. resident illegally shipped to an El Salvador prison camp was Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who was a leading voice for restricting arms to Israel last year. The colleagues who followed his lead and began visiting detainees, and are now drawing crowds in Republican congressional districts across the country, largely fit the same pattern. Almost all raised their voices about Gaza and worked to cut arms to Israel.
Politicians who can't stand up to the Israel lobby probably don't have what it takes to stand up to Trump and the oligarchs backing him. The onus is on them to prove us wrong. Until then, we know where to look for leadership.
—Harrison Mann is the Military Affairs Fellow at DAWN. He is a former U.S. Army major and executive officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East/Africa Regional Center who resigned in protest at his office's support for Israel's war in Gaza.
