Donald Trump tries to bully everybody who does things he does not like. The fact that he does not try to bully Nayib Bukele shows that El Salvador's president is doing exactly what Trump wants.
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Donald Trump has no problem with bullying, cajoling, threatening, or harassing anybody who doesn’t give him what he wants… whether that’s women in department store dressing rooms (or anywhere, really), law firms, China, NATO, ABC News, judges, or anybody else, for that matter.
On Tuesday, it was Harvard University’s turn.
Under the guise of wanting to fight antisemitism on college campuses, Trump has been on a crusade to bend some of the country’s top universities to his will by forcing them to make changes to how they operate.
And that’s what this is really about – exerting power over a bastion of liberalism that could be part of an anti-Trump resistance.
Any university that refuses risks losing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in federal funding that is primarily used for important research.
Many of them have yielded without putting up a fight.
For Harvard, however, Trump’s latest set of demands proved to be too much.
In a letter to the administration, the university’s attorneys note that these demands not only violate the First Amendment but also require “unsupported and disruptive remedies for alleged harms that the government has not proven through mandatory processes established by Congress and required by law.”
In addition, the letter also objects to the government’s coercive tactics.
“No less objectionable is the condition, first made explicit in the letter of March 31, 2025, that Harvard accede to these terms or risk the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding critical to vital research and innovation that has saved and improved lives and allowed Harvard to play a central role in making our country’s scientific, medical, and other research communities the standard-bearers for the world,” they write.
Predictably, the administration almost immediately froze $2 billion in federal funds for Harvard.
But Trump didn’t stop there.
In true mobster-like fashion, he also threatened the university with revoking its tax-exempt status and taxing it as a “Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting “Sickness.”
What does it mean? Who knows; but it is clearly a threat.
But why are we telling you this? After all, it’s not exactly news when Trump tries to blackmail or coerce someone to get what he wants.
That’s right, and this article isn’t actually about that.
Instead, it is about Trump not coercing someone… and that someone is El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
If the US president had any interest in bringing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man his administration illegally deported to El Salvador, back to the US, then he could surely compel his counterpart to produce him.
Just about everybody knows this. Trump does, Bukele does, and the Supreme Court — which ordered the administration to make this happen — does.
Instead of exerting pressure on El Salvador, the president is throwing up his hands and saying: “Well, shucks, I guess there is nothing I can do about it,” which is the clearest evidence that he would rather allow Abrego Garcia to remain unjustly incarcerated than right a wrong.
So, the next time Trump uses the power of his office to bully somebody else, you should ask yourself why he doesn’t bother to say one word, which would surely be enough to get Bukele to return Abrego Garcia to his family.
In this case, his inaction speaks louder than words.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
