"Fascism, we know, sells itself by making its appeal to emotions rather than to reason, to the senses rather than the mind. Showmanship is fundamental to the fascist strategy, and the chief fascist argument is the parade..."
—Orson Welles, The Nature of the Enemy , January 22, 1945
“To have enslaved America with this hocus-pocus! To have captured the mind of the world’s greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!” These words come near the end of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, but for some they could have been written yesterday. The election of Donald J Trump as president has been called “unimaginable”, but the truth is many people did imagine the forces that have brought him to power, or versions of them; we just stopped listening to them.
"In 1944, an article called “American Fascism” appeared in the New York Times, written by then vice president Henry Wallace. “A fascist,” wrote Wallace, “is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.” Wallace predicted that American fascism would only become “really dangerous” if a “purposeful coalition” arose between crony capitalists, “poisoners of public information” and “the KKK type of demagoguery”. Those defending the new administration insist it isn’t fascism, but Americanism. This, too, was foretold: in 1938, a New York Times reporter warned: “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labelled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism’.”
"...American authoritarianism has always been entangled not only with patriotism, but with the country’s two most familiar belief systems: religion and business. “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” someone once observed, who might have added that it would also be waving a dollar bill. That person was not, as is often reported, Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, a furious satire of the idea that American exceptionalism might inoculate it against fascism. But Lewis’s novel does make a similar (if less pithy) observation, declaring that in America, fascism’s most dangerous supporters would be those “who disowned the word ‘fascism’ and preached enslavement to capitalism under the style of constitutional and traditional native American liberty”. American fascism will necessarily be shaped by capitalism – or, as Lewis memorably puts it, “government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits”.
It Can’t Happen Here lambasts the “funny therapeutics” of trying to “cure the evils of democracy by the evils of fascism”. Senator Buzz Windrip runs for president on a populist campaign of traditional values, making simplistic promises about returning prosperity (“he advocated everyone’s getting rich by just voting to be rich”). A newspaper editor issues futile warnings: “People will think they’re electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror!” Once in office, Windrip makes good his authoritarian threats, creating a private security force called the Minute Men and imprisoning his political enemies in “concentration camps”. As the midwest grumbles about secession, the administration decides to arouse “that useful patriotism which always appears upon threat of an outside attack” by arranging “to be insulted and menaced in a well-planned series of deplorable ‘incidents’ on the Mexican border, and declare war on Mexico”. Windrip was inspired by Huey Long, the charismatic populist from Louisiana who was assassinated in 1935 and to whom Trump has been frequently compared. Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946) told another tale inspired by Long’s rise and fall: “Just tell ’em you’re gonna soak the fat boys,” politician Willie Stark is cynically advised. “Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em mad, even mad at you. Stir them up and they’ll love it and come back for more.”
More recently, Roth’s The Plot Against America, set at the beginning of the second world war, imagines Charles Lindbergh winning the White House on a slogan of “America First”, the antisemitic platform he supported in real life. In fact, the phrase “America First” was originally associated not with Lindbergh, but with the 1916 campaign of Woodrow Wilson, and then echoed four years later by the first businessman to become president, Warren G Harding, who said during his campaign that “patriotic devotion” meant “to prosper America first, to think of America first, to exalt America first, to live for and revere America first”. Harding’s version of putting America first was to allow the rise of the Ku Klux Klan while creating a graft-ridden cabinet responsible in 1923 for the Teapot Dome bribery scandal, the worst corruption scandal in American political history so far – but then American history isn’t over yet.
The Plot Against America begins as Lindbergh wins the election, thanks to “carnival antics” that leave Republican leaders “in despair over their candidate’s stubborn refusal to allow anyone other than himself to determine the strategy of his campaign”. The president-elect heads immediately to Europe for “cordial talks” with Hitler, agreeing to peaceful relations. This leads to protests at home, but establishes “a new order in Europe”. Still, Americans insist that “America wasn’t a fascist country and wasn’t going to be” because the president and congress were “bound to follow the law as set down by the constitution. They were Republican, they were isolationist, and among them, yes, there were antisemites … but that was a long way from their being Nazis.” The story concerns the gradual erosion of norms and acceptance of oppression: “Now they think they can get away with anything. It’s disgraceful. It starts with the White House.” For all its brilliance, however, Roth’s Plot evades its own central quandary, which is that of history: what is the solution? Roth settles for an easy optimism, one of the US’s national hallmarks, in which American virtue asserts itself and Lindbergh literally disappears.
We call such facile resolutions “Hollywood endings” for a reason, but it’s also true that the dream factory has been the source of some of America’s most powerful stories about domestic fascism, including the one that Trump has named his favourite film, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). When Trump appeared at the Republican National Convention last July in front of a colossal picture of his own face, many were startled by his conjuring of fascist iconography. It seems more likely that he was visually quoting Citizen Kane’s invocation of fascism, in its famous scene of Kane holding a campaign rally with a giant self-portrait behind him; Welles’s satire appears to have been lost in translation. When Kane loses his bid for governor, brought down by a sex scandal, we learn that his newspaper had prepared two headlines, depending on the election outcome: either “Kane Elected” or “Fraud at Polls”. Trump has said he identifies with Kane, overlooking the fact that Kane destroys himself in his quest for greatness. Kane’s only friend says of him after his death: “He never believed in anything except Charlie Kane. He never had a conviction except Charlie Kane in his life.” It wasn’t intended as a recommendation.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-fascism-america
When Fascism Comes to America
by Bill Durston
April 3, 2025
Common Dreams
There's a relatively obscure quotation, sometimes attributed to the 20th-century American author Sinclair Lewis, that reads, "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
Although no one’s actually sure that Sinclair Lewis ever wrote or said this, his 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, centers around a flag-hugging, Bible-thumping politician named Berzelius (”Buzz”) Windrip. Despite having no particular leadership skills other than the ability to mesmerize large audiences by appealing to their baser instincts (and to bully those people who aren’t so easily mesmerized), Windrip is elected President of the United States. Shortly after Windrip takes office, through a flurry of executive orders, appointments of unqualified cronies to key governmental positions, and then a declaration of martial law, Windrip quickly makes the transition from a democratically elected president to a brutal, fascist dictator. The novel’s title, It Can’t Happen Here, refers to the mindset of key characters in the novel who fail to recognize Windrip’s fascist agenda before it’s too late.
The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done.
Written almost a century ago during the rise of fascism in Europe prior to World War II, It Can’t Happen Here is disturbingly prescient today. Buzz Windrip’s personal traits, his rhetoric, and the path through which he initially becomes the democratically elected U.S. president, and soon afterward, the country’s first full-fledged fascist dictator, bear an uncanny resemblance to the personality traits and rhetoric of Donald Trump and the path through which he has come thus far to be the 47th President of the United States, and through which he appears to be on course to become our country’s first full-fledged…. But no! It can’t happen here! Or can it?
Trump’s uncanny resemblance to the fictional dictator in Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel is disconcerting. The far more important concern, though, is the degree to which Trump resembles real-life fascist dictators, past and present. A study of notorious 20th- century fascist dictators, including Hitler and Mussolini, concluded that they and their regimes all had several characteristics in common. (The current regimes of Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, and Kim Jong Un in North Korea also share these characteristics.)
Fascist Dictators Encourage and Condone Violence Against Their Political Enemies
After losing the 2020 presidential election, Trump urged a large crowd of supporters on the morning of January 6, 2021 to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” After the violent assault on the Capitol had been going on for more than three hours, when Trump finally posted a video message urging the rioters to go home, he told them, “We love you, you’re very special.” On his first day back in office in 2025, he granted clemency to the more than 1,500 rioters who were charged with crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, including rioters convicted of assaulting police officers and rioters with past convictions for other violent crimes, including sexual assault.
At the beginning of his second term, Trump appointed Elon Musk, reportedly the world’s richest man and the CEO of companies that have received tens of billions of dollars in federal funding, to head the ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency,” with the power to summarily fire vast numbers of federal employees without cause and to potentially steer federal funding away from other companies and toward his own.
Fascist Dictators Promote Bold-Faced Lies and Other Propaganda
Some of Trump’s most notorious lies include his claims that he won the 2020 presidential election; that the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack on the Capitol was a “day of love;” and that the Ukrainians themselves, not the Russian invaders, are responsible for starting the war in Ukraine. The Washington Post catalogued more than 30,000 other demonstrably false or misleading statements that Trump made during his first term as president. Currently, a special team within the Trump administration is spewing out pro-Trump propaganda at a prodigious rate on social media, including a portrait of Trump wearing a golden crown with the caption, “Long Live the King,” via Elon Musk’s “X” platform.
Fascist Dictators Promote the Myth That Their Citizens Are Being Threatened by Scapegoats
Trump’s favorite scapegoats are undocumented immigrants whom he frequently refers to as “criminals,” “gang members,” and “killers,”and who he claims are stealing jobs and benefits from U.S. citizens. In fact, undocumented immigrants do the work that most U.S. citizens are unwilling to do; they pay far more in federal taxes than they receive in federal benefits; and, unlike Trump himself, they are convicted of committing serious crimes at a lower rate than the U.S. population as a whole.
The many grossly unqualified sycophants who Trump has nominated or appointed to key government positions in his second administration include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a favorite Fox News interviewee who has himself been accused of alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, and mismanagement of nonprofit financial funds, and who has spoken in defense of U.S. soldiers charged with war crimes; Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who seeds doubt concerning vaccine effectiveness and promotes other medical quackery; and FBI Director Kash Patel who endorses the “deep state” theory and who has previously described jailed January 6 insurrectionists as “political prisoners.”
Fascist Dictators Exhibit Flagrant Sexism
Trump boasted in a 2005 video recording about not only groping women and kissing them without their consent, but about an incident involving a married woman in which, in his own words, “I moved on her like a bitch.” He added, “I failed, I admit it, I did try and “f—k her.” Trump called Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during their final 2016 presidential debate; he has repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) as “Pocahontas;” and he entertained a joke during a 2024 campaign rally implying that past Vice President Kamala Harris once worked as a prostitute.
The list of common characteristics in the study of 20th-century fascist dictators and their regimes includes 14 categories in all, and Trump and his MAGA disciples have already exhibited characteristics in most of these categories. One common characteristic not mentioned in the study is the fact that all the 20th-century fascist dictators met ignominious ends—but not before they had caused enormous damage, including the deaths of millions of innocent people.
Questions about what fascism might look like when it comes to the United States of America and whether it can or cannot happen here are no longer merely hypothetical. Fascism has come to the USA. It is happening here. The question now is whether the people of the United States have the necessary critical thinking skills, moral compass, and political courage to reverse the rise of fascism in our country before further harm is done, or will we be like the characters in Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel; the people in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy; and the people in current day Russia, China, and North Korea and allow our system of government to devolve into a full-fledged fascist dictatorship.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bill Durston
Bill Durston, MD is a U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran of the Vietnam War, decorated for "courage under fire." After completing his military service, he became an emergency physician. He retired from working in the ER in 2014, but continues to volunteer as a preceptor at a student-run clinic associated with the University of California Medical School that provides free medical care to underserved members of the community.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/us/california-national-guard-trump.html
Appeals Court Lets Trump Keep Control of California National Guard in L.A.
A panel rejected a lower court’s finding that it was most likely illegal for President Trump to use state troops to protect immigration agents from protests.
Listen to this article · 6:17 minutes
National Guard troops were stationed in front of the Metropolitan Detention Center last week.Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times
By Charlie Savage and Laurel Rosenhall
June 19, 2025
A federal appeals court late on Thursday cleared the way for President Trump to keep using the National Guard to respond to immigration protests in Los Angeles, declaring that a judge in San Francisco had erred last week when he ordered Mr. Trump to return control of the troops to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
In a unanimous, 38-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the conditions in Los Angeles were sufficient for Mr. Trump to decide that he needed to take federal control of California’s National Guard and deploy it to ensure that federal immigration laws would be enforced.
A lower-court judge had concluded that the protests were not severe enough for Mr. Trump to use a rarely triggered law to federalize the National Guard over Mr. Newsom’s objections. But the panel, which included two appointees of Mr. Trump and one of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., disagreed with the lower court.
“Affording appropriate deference to the president’s determination, we conclude that he likely acted within his authority in federalizing the National Guard,” the court wrote, in an unsigned opinion on behalf of the entire panel.
NATIONAL GUARD
Read the ruling by the appeals court.
The ruling was not a surprise. During a 65-minute hearing on Tuesday, the panel’s questions and statements had telegraphed that all three judges — Mark J. Bennett, Eric D. Miller and Jennifer Sung — were inclined to let Mr. Trump keep controlling the Guard for now, while litigation continues to play out over California’s challenge to his move.
But the ruling also raised a potential hurdle for the next step. The Federal District Court judge, Charles Breyer, was set to hear arguments on Friday over a state request that he restrict what Mr. Trump can do with the 4,000 National Guard troops or 700 active-duty Marines his administration has deployed into Los Angeles.
But Judge Breyer put those arguments off in a brief hearing. He said that he was not sure whether he had jurisdiction over the case anymore, or whether a technical step taken by the appeals court meant that the case was still pending before that court. He requested briefs from both sides by Monday on that question.
After the appeals court’s ruling on Thursday, Mr. Trump praised the decision, saying in a social media post that it supported his argument for using the National Guard “all over the United States” if local law enforcement can’t “get the job done.”
Mr. Newsom, in a response on Thursday, focused on how the appeals court had rejected the Trump administration’s argument that a president’s decision to federalize the National Guard could not be reviewed by a judge.
“The president is not a king and is not above the law,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement. “We will press forward with our challenge to President Trump’s authoritarian use of U.S. military soldiers against citizens.”
The Trump administration had urged the appeals court to find that the judiciary could not review Mr. Trump’s decision to take control of a state’s National Guard under the statute he invoked, which sets conditions like if there is a rebellion against governmental authority that impedes the enforcement of federal law.
The appeals court declined to go that far.
Supreme Court precedent “does not compel us to accept the federal government’s position that the president could federalize the National Guard based on no evidence whatsoever, and that courts would be unable to review a decision that was obviously absurd or made in bad faith,” the appeals court wrote.
But, the judges said, the violent actions of some protesters in Los Angeles had hindered immigration enforcement, and that was sufficient for the judiciary to defer to Mr. Trump’s decision to invoke the call-up statute.
The appeals court also rejected the state’s contention that the call-up order was illegal because the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, sent the directive to a general in charge of the National Guard, even though the statute says any such edict must go “through” the governor. The court said the general was Governor Newsom’s agent, and that was good enough.
“Even if there were a procedural violation, that would not justify the scope of relief provided by the district court’s” order stripping Mr. Trump of control of the guard, the ruling added.
Judge Breyer’s temporary restraining order concerned only the National Guard and whether it was lawful for Mr. Trump to mobilize them under federal control. If he determines that he still has jurisdiction over the case, Judge Breyer may soon address a state request to limit troops under federal control to guarding federal buildings, and to bar them from accompanying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the workplace raids that sparked the protests.
That request centers on a 19th-century law, the Posse Comitatus Act, that generally makes it illegal to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Trump administration has argued that the troops are not themselves performing law enforcement tasks, but rather are protecting civilian agents who are trying to arrest undocumented migrants.
Mr. Hegseth suggested that he might not obey a ruling from the lower court, telling senators on the Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that he doesn’t “believe district courts should be setting national security policy.”
Conditions in Los Angeles calmed significantly over the past week, and Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles announced on Tuesday that she was ending the downtown curfew, a week after it had first been imposed. She said local law enforcement efforts have been “largely successful” at reimposing order.
California officials have said from the beginning that local and state police could handle the protesters, and that Mr. Trump’s decision to send in federal troops only inflamed matters. But speaking with reporters outside the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he felt empowered to send troops anywhere violent protests erupt.
“We did a great job. We quelled that thing,” the president said of the demonstrations in Los Angeles. “And the fact that we are even there thinking about going in, they won’t bother with it anymore. They’ll go someplace else. But we’ll be there, too. We’ll be wherever they go.”
Greg Jaffe contributed reporting.
A correction was made on
June 20, 2025
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the day President Trump responded on Truth Social to the appeals court decision. It was Thursday, not Monday.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
Laurel Rosenhall is a Sacramento-based reporter covering California politics and government for The Times.
See more on: National Guard, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Politics, Donald Trump, Governor Gavin Newsom
More on the U.S. Protests:
Graduation Amid ICE Raids: Nearly three-fourths of the students in Los Angeles public schools are Latino. Some families, and a few graduates, stayed away from graduation ceremonies out of fear of federal agents.
Detained Officials: In recent weeks, several prominent elected officials and a judge have been handcuffed, arrested or charged while protesting President Trump’s immigration agenda.
National Guard in L.A.: A federal appeals court will hear arguments to determine whether President Trump, against the wishes of Gov. Gavin Newsom, can keep using California’s National Guard to protect immigration enforcement agents and quell protesters in Los Angeles.
Protests vs. Parade?: Large crowds across the country gathered to protest the Trump administration on the same day as a military parade in Washington, D.C. Cable networks differed significantly in their coverage focus.
Protests Go Beyond Immigration: Voices at the demonstrations are often a mix that includes calls for more explicit support for racial justice, Palestinian freedom and socialist politics.
Trump's 2020 Do-Over: He was talked out of deploying the military to crush the George Floyd protests in 2020. He always regretted it.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/23/us/trump-news
Supreme Court Allows Trump to Deport Migrants to Third Countries
June 23, 2025
The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own.Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times
Where Things Stand
Deportation ruling: The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own, pausing a federal judge’s ruling that they must first be given a chance to show that they would face the risk of torture there. The pause allows the administration to send men held at an American military base in Djibouti on to South Sudan while their court case plays out. The court’s three liberal members dissented. Read more ›
Immigration crackdown: Florida is turning an abandoned airport in the Everglades into the newest — and scariest-sounding — local prison to detain migrants. The remote facility, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” will cost the state around $450 million a year to run, but Florida can request some reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Read more ›
Economic uncertainty: President Trump began to confront the potential economic blowback from his military strikes on Iran, which threatened to send oil and gas prices soaring as U.S. consumers already face significant financial strains. The prospect of higher energy costs appeared to spook even Mr. Trump, who demanded on social media that companies “KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN.” Read more ›
June 23, 2025
A federal judge in California temporarily blocked the Trump administration from cancelling grants to the University of California. More than $324 million in grants were cut after being blacklisted for conducting research on “‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ ‘inclusion,’ and other forbidden topics,” Judge Rita F. Lin of the District Court for the Northern District of California said. The termination violated the First Amendment, Judge Lin added. She blocked the administration from terminating any future grants from the university for similar reasons.
June 23, 2025, 8:47 p.m. ETJune 23, 2025
Judge blocks Trump proclamation barring Harvard’s international students.
Harvard’s campus in Cambridge, Mass.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times
For the second time in less than a week, a federal judge in Boston rejected efforts by the Trump administration to bar international students at Harvard, blocking a presidential proclamation that would prevent new students from abroad from enrolling at the school.
President Trump had sought to bar the students using a law designed to safeguard national security. In a strongly worded ruling on Monday, Judge Allison D. Burroughs sided with lawyers for Harvard who had argued that such presidential power was intended to be used against foreign enemies, not international students.
The judge’s order temporarily stops the presidential proclamation from going into effect. Judge Burroughs, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, issued a similar decision on Friday. In that ruling, she temporarily blocked another effort by the Trump administration to keep international students out of Harvard through other means.
In her ruling on Monday, Judge Burroughs noted that the issues at stake involved “core constitutional rights that must be safeguarded — freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech” and that free speech, particularly in the academic arena, “must be zealously defended and not taken for granted.”
She continued: “The government’s misplaced efforts to control a reputable academic institution and squelch diverse viewpoints seemingly because they are, in some instances, opposed to this administration’s own views, threaten these rights.”
She also chastised the government’s attempts “to accomplish this, at least in part, on the backs of international students, with little thought to the consequences to them or, ultimately, to our own citizens.”
Both of the judge’s orders will remain in effect until Harvard’s lawsuit over the enrollment of international students is resolved. In one section of Monday’s ruling, the judge attacked the logic of the Trump administration’s argument as “absurd,” and in another cited the administration’s “escalating rhetoric.”
White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Harvard, in a statement, said that it would “continue to defend its rights — and the rights of its students and scholars.”
The government’s moves against Harvard have thrown the lives of thousands of visiting scholars into temporary disarray.
But the ruling by Judge Burroughs preserves, at least for now, Harvard’s tradition of hosting international students, permitting about 7,000 Harvard students and recent graduates to continue studying and working legally in the United States.
Harvard’s leadership has accused the Trump administration of a partisan vendetta against the university, one of the nation’s wealthiest and most selective, as Mr. Trump continues to attack both elite universities and their ties with foreign entities.
After last week’s order, Mr. Trump issued a statement on social media indicating that talks were underway in an effort to settle the lawsuit.
The legal fight between President Trump and Harvard began in April, after the administration accused the school of promoting liberal thinking and submitted an intrusive list of demands to transform admissions, curriculum and hiring at the private institution to align with more conservative ideology.
Rather than complying, Harvard sued. The administration responded by freezing or canceling nearly $3 billion in federal grants and scientific research contracts with the university, in Cambridge, Mass.
A separate lawsuit from Harvard, also pending before Judge Burroughs in Boston, seeks to restore that funding.
The dispute over international students began in May, when the Department of Homeland Security said it was rescinding Harvard’s right to participate in the Student Visitor Exchange Program, a program through which international students are granted visas to come to the United States.
Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, said the action was necessary because Harvard had failed to comply with requests for information on misconduct by the university’s international students, a charge that Harvard denied.
The university sued the administration to preserve its right to enroll international students. Judge Burroughs temporarily blocked enforcement of the Trump administration’s order.
Undeterred by the judge’s orders, Mr. Trump issued the proclamation on June 4, invoking an authority granted by the Immigration and Nationality Act, a 1952 law banning entry to individuals whose presence would be detrimental to the United States.
The power can apply to immigrants with communicable diseases and criminal records, or who might be security risks. The president said he was using it against prospective students at Harvard because “Harvard’s conduct rendered it an unsuitable destination for foreign students and researchers.”
Ian H. Gershengorn, a lawyer for Harvard, argued during a court hearing last week that the law had been used fewer than 100 times since its passage. He said it had never been invoked against an American entity — except Harvard.
“It is important to recognize how broad and unprecedented this assertion of executive authority is,” Mr. Gershengorn wrote in a brief submitted in the case. “The president is claiming unlimited authority to leverage his power over the border as a means of targeting domestic activity that he disfavors.”
The proclamation claimed misconduct by foreign students at Harvard to justify the ban and accused the university of failing to police and report crimes. It also accused the university of “entanglements with foreign counties, including our adversaries,” specifically referencing donations to Harvard from Chinese entities.
Faculty members at Harvard have described any loss of international students as potentially devastating to the university. About 25 percent of students are from outside the United States.
School officials, in court documents, have described a “palpable sense of fear, confusion, and uncertainty on Harvard’s campus about the future of its international students” as well as worldwide travel disruptions affecting international students in the wake of the administration’s orders.
June 23, 2025, 8:47 p.m. ETJune 23, 2025
A federal judge has blocked President Trump’s proclamation that would bar international students from attending Harvard University. Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts scolded the Trump administration in her 44-page ruling for its efforts to punish Harvard, writing that “the government’s misplaced efforts to control a reputable academic institution and squelch diverse viewpoints” had threatened core constitutional rights, including freedom of speech and expression.
