Photo: Joey Palumbo/Vermont Public
On the last day of April, a federal judge ordered the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, a senior at Columbia University, from Immigration custody in Vermont. Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident for ten years, had been arrested during a citizenship interview on April 14 and spent more than two weeks in Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans. Born in a refugee camp in the West Bank, Mahdawi participated in protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza last year; as with fellow Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, the government is seeking to deport him on grounds that he poses a national-security threat. Outside the courthouse, Mahdawi, who appeared poised with impeccable hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a keffiyeh, addressed a gathered crowd: “I am saying it clear and loud to President Trump and his Cabinet: I am not afraid of you.”
I’ll admit, watching the video, my heart leaped. Mahdawi, one of the principal targets of Trump’s campaign of retribution and ostentatious use of executive power, could have been forgiven for relishing his safety and leaving the scene. Instead, he’d resisted the seductions of self-preservation with open defiance.
The same cannot be said for many of the country’s most powerful people and institutions, who have responded to Trump’s attacks on civil liberties with cowardice and compliance. In Trump’s first 100 days, elite universities have scrambled to fulfill the White House’s wishes, investigating and disciplining student protesters, dismissing faculty, and rolling back DEI initiatives. Big-law firms, meanwhile, have made humiliating bargains with the White House to avoid retaliation and preserve access. And Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, is preparing to surrender to a direct attack on the free press by settling Trump’s spurious lawsuit against 60 Minutes, apparently to garner favor for a pending merger deal.
Meanwhile, in official Washington, a Vichy-like fog has settled. Capitulation is the norm, and paranoid self-censorship a daily rite. Most Republicans have reacted to Trump’s onslaught with stupid, smiling satisfaction. GOP members of Congress have proposed putting Trump’s face on the $100 bill and Mt. Rushmore; California’s Darrell Issa has nominated him for a Nobel Prize. On social media, Republican officials circulate slick pro-administration propaganda videos like pornography. Some contain footage from El Salvador’s deadly CECOT (Terrorism Confinement Center), where undocumented immigrants have been sent without due process. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted one of these videos in late March, writing, “If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.”
The less overtly sycophantic in the party, those one might expect to value democratic norms, have been quiet. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a Trump critic, recently seemed to ask, implicitly, for sympathy. Discussing the administration before an audience of constituents, she said, “We are all afraid … I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” Fair enough. Any Republican who opposes Trump is likely to face an Elon Musk–funded primary, at best.
On the other side of the aisle, after months of playing dead, some Dems have found their voice. In April, Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to inquire after the well-being of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a constituent wrongfully deported to CECOT; several Democrats followed suit.
But cowardice is a hard habit to break. As members of the caucus locate their spines, party leaders seem to be working against them. California governor Gavin Newsom, for example, has expressed anxiety that too much focus on immigration will distract from the Democrats’ best issue: Trump’s disastrous trade war. In late April, The Bulwark reported that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was actively discouraging Democrats from taking further trips to El Salvador. (Jeffries has since denied this.) In the Senate, Chuck Schumer also seems to be dragging his feet. Last week, he described the caucus’s response to Trump’s ongoing shakedown of Harvard, saying, “We sent him a very strong letter just the other day asking eight very strong questions.”
What accounts for this state of affairs? Back in January, the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory led many powerful actors to assume the public wouldn’t tolerate too much obstruction; some imagined Trump, having won outright, would govern more magnanimously, win over opponents, and consolidate a popular majority. Instead, Trump took his cues from the Florentine secretary: It is safer to be feared than loved.
In a certain sense, the response from elected officials isn’t complicated. Republicans want to keep their jobs and Trump’s affection; Democrats are overcautious about keeping moderates inside the tent, taking the advice of centrist bloggers and quants.
At the same time, the White House has self-consciously raised the stakes of dissent: Deporting green-card holders is just the opening salvo. In late April, the FBI arrested a Wisconsin judge, claiming she had obstructed the detainment of a migrant in her courtroom. “Some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said. “And they are not.” With respect to the deportations to El Salvador, Trump has said more than once that “homegrown criminals” are next. Since he took office, at least three American citizens have been swept up in the deportations. All were under the age of 8. The message is clear: This could be you.
We assume we know what courage looks like; likewise cowardice. But the type of courage Mahdawi and other young people have displayed of late has often been received as recklessness. The students of the pro-Palestine movement last year were castigated for their lack of caution, tarred as antisemites, disciplined by their own universities, and even blamed for the Democrats’ failure to defeat Trump. What they objected to has been called a genocide by Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied territories. Yet they’ve been made to pay for staking the clear moral claim. It isn’t difficult to see why: Their courage ups the tempo, inspiring a volatile mix of urgency and shame. Courage accuses the cowardly, and many of us are cowards.
Pope Francis, who died the day after Easter, once said, “Openness to God makes us open towards the marginalized of this world, and gives us the courage to leave the confines of our own security and comfort to become bruised, hurting and dirty as we joyfully approach the suffering other in a spirit of solidarity.” To be courageous for the sake of others, we must face what is fragile and vulnerable in ourselves.
This can all sound a little dramatic. There was much talk of courage, of tyranny, barbarism, and fascism in the first Trump term, and it was tempting then, as it is now, to smirk. But fear of overreaction, of taking Trump too seriously or appearing oversincere in our dissent, is its own kind of trap. It requires courage to see the world as it is, despite others’ efforts to make light of their own cruelty. We can’t give in to cowardice masquerading as savvy.
It’s no simple thing to take a stand. It’s clear the Trump White House aspires to take down anyone who moves against them. Yet the students of the pro-Palestine movement are still showing up: at UCLA, at Dartmouth, at Columbia, and elsewhere. In Vermont, Mahdawi’s speech was greeted with chants of “No fear! No fear!” When the crowd quieted, he responded, “And if there is no fear, what is it replaced with? Love. Love is our way.”
It is often the privileged, the safest people on earth, who are least capable of courage. They fear, as Brecht put it, that “to displease the possessors means to become one of the dispossessed.” We can be honest about this worry: We all have something to lose. Solidarity is always a risk, but the alternative is suffering alone.
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