How Trump caught big-government fans in their own trap

President Donald Trump is using every tool he has to challenge woke practices in America — and he has a lot of them. 

Notably, none of the mechanisms that the president is using were put in place by conservatives for leverage against progressive institutions. 

No, Trump is simply availing himself of the vast federal apparatus created by liberals on the assumption that an ever-more powerful and extensive federal government was synonymous with righteousness.

Now that someone is in charge who doesn’t agree with them and who is willing to use all the influence that the progressive state affords him, they are vulnerable to the centralized power that they’ve eagerly built up over decades. 

Expanding the federal government has been a progressive priority since the time of Woodrow Wilson, and now its tentacles — via federal funding and a skein of rules — reach into practically every corner of American life. 

Universities are particularly dependent on government and intertwined with it.

They are quickly learning how uncomfortable it is when their paymaster isn’t ideologically aligned with them and is willing to throw his weight around. 

A recent interview in the online publication Slate was headlined, “Colleges Are Getting in Line: An expert in higher-ed finance explains why every school in the US is vulnerable to Trump.”

“The power is essentially the same for every college in the country that gets federal funding,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “and it does not make a difference whether it’s public or private.”

“If the federal government is giving money to students for research, all that money can be taken away,” he said. “And that’s the leverage that the federal government has over the vast majority of higher ed. Some large universities can get well over $1 billion a year in total revenue from the federal government.”

The interviewer asked, “Did any leaders in higher education recognize ahead of this the vulnerabilities that came with this dependence on the federal government?”

Kelchen’s answer was basically, “no.”

Even if the Trump approach has been more aggressive than anticipated, it shouldn’t be news that federal money comes with strings. 

Universities already had to make all sorts of commitments to the feds to tap into funding. A University of Florida website says that among the assurances it has to make to the federal government are that it is in compliance with:

• federal discrimination regulations
• federal lobbying regulations
• federal regulations regarding promoting objectivity in research
• federal regulations regarding research misconduct
• Title VI of the Civil Rights Act
• Title IX of the Education Amendments
• Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act
• National Occupational Safety and Health Act
• FDA Good Laboratory Practices Act
• Drug-Free Workplace Act
• Smoke-Free Workplace Act

On top of this, the Obama and Biden administrations used federal dollars as the lever to coerce educational institutions into adopting their preferred policies on the handling of sexual-assault cases and trans students. 

Progressives put Chekhov’s proverbial gun on the table, assuming that it would be used only against someone else. 

The minimalist “night-watchman state” wouldn’t be able to do what Trump is doing (and not just with universities, but with disfavored law firms and with corporations beholden to woke ideas), or what his predecessors did in the other direction. 

Progressives can’t say they weren’t warned, even if it’s been a long time coming.

In “God and Man at Yale” in 1951, Bill Buckley wrote of the issue of public funding.

He warned that Yale was “working toward her own destruction, i.e. to the day when some future Yale president, fedora in hand, will knock at the door of some politician with palm outstretched. This day, of course, means the end of Yale as a private institution.”

If the academic establishment is now fully realizing the power that its federal patron has over higher education, maybe it should have made a little more time for libertarian critiques of government power all along.

Twitter: @RichLowry