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Welcome to Trump’s Mafia State

“Nice university you got there. Shame if something happened to it.”

NYT - April 21, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
By M. Gessen
Produced by Vishakha Darbha

In this episode of “The Opinions,” the columnist M. Gessen argues that when it comes to America’s institutions, President Trump is taking a page out of a Soviet-style playbook.

LISTEN: 12:51
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/opinion/trump-universities-mafia-state.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20250421&instance_id=152993&nl=opinion-today®i_id=202482046&segment_id=196424&user_id=aefba20d5c5a2325e3b605c8de89028d

Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

M. Gessen: The Trump administration has threatened universities — at this point, I hesitate to say how many high-profile universities — with pulling their federal funding, which in this case means pulling research grants. Some of them amount to more than $2 billion, as in the case of Harvard, unless they submit to various demands.

News clip 1:?The administration wanted Harvard to limit activism on campus, end DEI programs, and change the school’s governance.

News clip 2: President Trump also threatening to revoke the university’s tax exempt status, accusing the school of pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired sickness.

News clip 3: Harvard’s president wrote a letter in response saying the school quote will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights by agreeing to the terms.

In effect, these demands are to place the university under direct federal oversight.

The pretexts that the administration is using have to do with D.E.I. and antisemitism. The real reasons, I think, are anti-intellectualism and greed, and the fact that Trump is building a mafia state.''

Now, a mafia state is an absolutely centralized system in which one person, the patron, the don, distributes money and power.
And so in order to build a mafia state, such an aspiring patron needs to strip other agents of their money and power.

Some universities are actually quite wealthy, so they are to some extent independent financial centers and they are centers of independent, intellectual and political power. And that’s what Trump is really going after.

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