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Donald Trump<\/strong> has been in office for only about two months, but his administration is on a supercharged march to exert complete control over both the media and academia. So much of this is right out of Project 2025, which involves concentrating executive power while castrating the judicial and legislative branches. I predicted<\/a> last month that the latter two might be something of a bulwark, as they were last time, against Trump\u2019s worst instincts. This time, however, that doesn\u2019t seem to be the case: Congressional Republicans will seemingly rubber-stamp just about anything Trump wishes, while Democrats appear increasingly powerless<\/a> against the GOP\u2019s groupthink. Only the courts<\/a> and the cratering<\/a> financial markets have provided some checks on Trump\u2014and he has unsurprisingly decided to ignore both.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why I\u2019ve spent so much time lately thinking about how we can protect the norms and institutions we still have. Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse<\/strong> appeared on my podcast<\/a> last month to argue that Democrats should fight the \u201ccorruption\u201d and \u201cchaos\u201d of \u201cTrump and his creepy billionaires\u201d by \u201chang[ing] together with persistent and relentless focus on the real danger we are facing.\u201d That call for solidarity isn\u2019t just applicable to Democrats; it also applies to the media and the university system, which Trump is targeting through a process of divide and conquer.<\/p>\n Trump has slapped networks like CBS and ABC with lawsuits<\/a>, and in a recent speech, he called<\/a> broadcasters \u201ccorrupt\u201d and described their work as \u201cillegal\u201d\u2014labels we have to assume apply to any entity that covers him critically. (ABC News settled with Trump for $15 million in December, also paying an additional million for his legal fees.) \u201cI believe that CNN and [MSNBC], who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party,\u201d Trump said. The administration has also gone to war with the White House press pool, banning<\/a> the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One for not calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The idea, in other words, is to separate different outlets from one another with either lawsuits or bans. Otherwise, their combined power might present a serious obstacle.<\/p>\n The Trump administration is taking a similar tack in its assault on universities. Most notably, it has singled out<\/a> Columbia University over the pro-Palestinian protests that took place on campus last year, attempting to disappear Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil.<\/strong> (Khalil remains in a detention center in Louisiana.) Trump\u2019s administration has also pulled<\/a> $400 million in federally funded grants and contracts to Columbia\u2014a move that dovetails with Elon Musk<\/strong>\u2019s baseless crusade to rid the NIH of \u201cwokeness,\u201d which has potentially endangered clinical trials. Eventually, Trump will make his way to other universities, but the goal is to separate them all by making an example of one. To justify all of this, the Trump administration has said it is trying to eliminate DEI and combat antisemitism\u2014and has even published<\/a> a list of 60 colleges that are under scrutiny for the latter. (Meanwhile, the president seemingly has no problem with Musk\u2019s straight-armed salute<\/a>.)<\/p>\n