Opinion Column: Trump vs. Khalil at Columbia
The president’s refusal to respect the norms of a campus visit has been par for the course during his presidency.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
By Jason Stanley
March 16, 2025
Donald Trump’s speech at Columbia University on Tuesday received disproportionate attention because of where it took place: a hallowed institution of higher learning. One would have thought less remarkably a “town hall” (moderated by Chris Wallace, a kind of neo-shill for Fox News) in front of a small audience of likely Trump voters in a battleground state during a campaign.
But here we are. Preservationists will note that these things do matter to the preservation of democratic norms — which is to say, they generate a kind of record about their fashioning that is a first step in making a room for matters that holds space for us all, and by that, setting conditions of possibility for a democracy to reemerge again, and hopefully flourish.
In this case, what is notable is that the sitting president of the United States refuses to accept the most basic norms that give substance and value to towering institutions of American higher learning like Columbia. What the president wanted was probably not to teach us anything. It was the spectacle-dominated Trump acolytes thrilled by another rattling charge.
Presidential visits to campuses with students and faculty present are fairly standard for politicians of both parties over the past half-century or so. Well before Mr. Trump’s campaign, such campus visits served as a routine strategic consideration for any presidential candidate aiming to discredit the other party’s standard-bearers as unfit for high office by revealing them as doctrinaire, unnatural or otherwise unworthy of public office.
Campuses shape as many people as they can to disagree with every passing political wind — no easy feat, since it requires the student to swallow some rather bitter pills along the way. Over the last 50 years of history in American politics, campuses have preserved their sovereignty in areas of content and approach in matters political. This is true whether or not students and faculty welcomed the guest of the day. So when right-wing political candidates and right-wing media outlets would inevitably sometimes try to brand state university faculty as soft on communism, fascism or political radicalism in general, their accusations often advanced understanding of politics as higher education did.
But to claim this isn’t Trump trafficking in a longstanding binary defamation peddled by the Right for generations isn’t doing him a favor for the sake of historical truth.
Lately, however, a pattern has emerged. President Trump avoided such settings during his campaign, but he’s fortified himself concealed behind bullet-swept perimeters whenever he touches university campuses in his capacity as a ruler, saying one thing (to Chris Wallace) and allowing his supporters to say another altogether, though without any regard for campus standards. His campaign adhered strictly to the logic of the Fox News debate setup, which meant that the audience was a friendly one.
But as in his dealings with the media — and everything else that is just beyond his tight control — his integrity and composure once he leaves for his sojourn at Columbia will be entirely subject to dictatorial impulses of his own choosing.
At Columbia, it wasn’t the answers Mr. Trump gave — many of which were beside the point — but his rudeness that patiently revealed the case for humility in consequence to insights of the past. His willingness to suddenly throw questions to foreground his own views whenever he feels like revealing a more interesting version of the same tells us that to tell us that Mr. Trump sees the world and communicates with others in the same way.
To his credit, Mr. Trump felt it necessary to grant a sensitivity to issues of the Palestinians as an alternative to a simpler and near-universal right-wing view against an eternal enemy that, in the minds of many Americans, are only half human. In practice this translates to a politics that has offered disproportionate economic advantages to or greater strategies against Israel — a state that is a favored recipient of untold billions in U.S. military and aid funding annually.
After the speech Mr. Trump was treated by a number of on-campus groups: Jewish Voice for Peace, the Palestinian solidarity group and the Students for Justice in Palestine, received rapturous rounds of applause as they lobbied for Mr. Trump’s departure, echoing a larger New York City coalition’s request to vacate the campus premises.
All of this is truer than true.
So who was receiving this speech? Who was in the audience? And what did his presence do to the students of Columbia? But this much we know about the audience at Columbia, who attended by choice: As expected, most were older than students at Columbia, and it is clear they were there because they are fans of Mr. Trump.
Their demonstration of approval for Mr. Trump attests to a mindset and mores that is living proof of democracy’s limitation: a democracy overwhelmed by wealth and power that win out at the ballot box. And when the president is campaigning, this diminishment of democracy is the same limitation and structure of power that prevents the fulfillment of democratic aspirations. Trump’s appearance on campus did more than other steps that dull our democracy to political triviality. It distorted more than just our college experience — it reveals how money and loyalty oppose wisdom and the search for the truth about ourselves.
Recall that in 2009, a roomful of very young, highly gifted and diverse crowds gathered during a rally in defense of a community academic center organizing under extreme duress against demolition by a dictatorsial mayor. Those folks weren’t exactly long in the tooth, nor could you say that they were in an especially comfortable living standard.
We somehow find ourselves at a point where the precious two-party system of the United States requires us to overlook familiar and ongoing incivities in unconscionable thrall to another laborious election cycle. Meanwhile, the dark reality of climate change continues to reveal its scarring designs for our landscapes, as the Koch brothers and the Republican Party continue in their quest to ignore altogether the signs of such precarity.
History won’t be kind to us for this.
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University, specializing in epistemology, social philosophy and philosophy of language.
How does President Trump’s disregard for the basic norms of a campus visit and his relationship with the media compare to his behavior with the media during his campaign?
Leave a Reply