Maybe the third time will be the charm.
Columbia University obviously subscribes to the belief that Friday night is the best time to put out bad news.
How else to explain the fact that, at 8 p.m. Friday, it announced that its interim president had quit?
If members of the Board of Trustees hoped nobody would notice, they’re more delusional than advertised.
The resignation of Dr. Katrina Armstrong is yet another bombshell development in the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities violating the civil rights of Jewish students, with Columbia a serial offender and top test case.
The announcement gave no reason why Armstrong is returning to the medical school or why she is being replaced by Claire Shipman, co-chair of the trustees.
Shipman, a former television journalist, will be Columbia’s third president in a year.
The first, Nemat Shafik, was overwhelmed by campus chaos after the Hamas terrorist invasion of Israel and the Jewish state’s response, and fled to London.
Then again, no explanation for the latest change was needed.
Numerous reports show Columbia mired in internal turmoil over the White House plan to strip it of at least $400 million in federal grants and contracts unless it makes changes that will subject disruptive students to arrest and provide responsible oversight to two departments that are hotbeds of antisemitism.
Armstrong’s sin was that she tried to play for two teams at the same time.
She initially promised the White House that Columbia would forbid demonstrators from wearing masks, then said the opposite to faculty members.
She later reassured the White House she would keep her initial promise, but her credibility was ruined.
So now she’s gone, and Shipman is left to clean up the mess.
If she fails to implement the reasonable demands, she will plunge Columbia into a legal war it can’t win and could cost it billions of dollars in lost federal aid over several years.
That would demolish its standing for a generation and set the stage for other schools to suffer similar penalties.
The Friday night drama at Columbia ended yet another consequential week in Donald Trump’s dynamic second term.
It marks the ninth week since he took the oath, but if your scorecard is based on mainstream media news coverage, you probably believe it was an utter disaster.
Don’t be fooled.
There was important progress on key areas of Trump’s agenda, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying the US has revoked more than 300 student visas, mostly for supporting Hamas.
Anti-Trump resistance
The media, of course, celebrates each time a federal judge blocks Trump from acting, especially when it involves his deportation of illegal criminal aliens.
The right way to see most of those decisions is that berobed activists are abusing their authority to join the resistance and tie Trump’s hands.
Most of the cases will end up in the appeals courts or the Supreme Court, which are generally less political.
For most media, the top story was the continued bleeding from the White House’s self-inflicted wound of Signal-gate.
The administration’s inability to put the story to rest is giving leftist outlets a rare jolt of joy.
They’re pumped with the adrenaline of being on death watch, with their hope being that one or more of the participants in the botched communication over the attack on the Houthis will be shown the door.
Their top target is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who sent the detailed texts that, if not technically “war plans,” are close enough to set off alarms.
The runner-up target is Mike Waltz, the national security adviser whose office somehow included Jeffrey Goldberg, the virulent anti-Trumper from The Atlantic magazine, in the list of chat participants.
“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump said earlier last week.
Vice President JD Vance, sensing the media fervor for a scalp, took Waltz to Greenland with him Friday and told reporters they would be disappointed.
“If you think you’re going to force the president of the United States to fire anybody you’ve got another think coming!” Vance said.
“We are standing behind our entire national security team.”
He and Trump understand that giving the media beasts one scalp will only whet their appetite for more.
First major fumble
Although legitimate questions about the leak remain, including whether participants were using private or government devices, the real reason Dems and the media are so hot for the story is that the incident marks the administration’s first major fumble.
That it came in late March illustrates how relatively successful Trump’s start has been.
With so little to seize on, Dems and their media shills are desperate for a soapbox and this one will do until a better one comes along.
Meanwhile, a fair assessment of other events last week turns an honest scorecard far more positive than negative.
One big development was the long interview on Fox News with Elon Musk and seven top people from his DOGE team.
Bret Baier wanted them to address charges that they don’t know what they are doing and are chopping costs without regard to the impact on ordinary Americans.
Musk set the stage by noting the most important numbers: The federal government is spending $7 trillion this year, and nearly $2 trillion of that is borrowed money.
That’s outrageous and a formula for serious trouble, which is why he aims to cut the borrowing in half, to $1 trillion.
That would reduce overall spending by about 15%, which Musk called “quite reasonable” and said it could be done “without affecting critical programs.”
Proving waste & fraud
One by one, his team cited examples of enormous waste and fraud, a common one being that federal operations are hobbled by computer systems that are often outdated and incompatible.
One agency alone has 27 chief information officers.
The retirement system is maddeningly slow because documents have been stored for nearly 70 years in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania.
The informative interview lifted the veil on DOGE, and put names and faces on the historic effort.
Another important story that big media ran from was the congressional testimony of the heads of PBS and NPR.
Trump has targeted their public funding as part of the overall retrenchment and also because they largely echo the leftist views of the legacy media.
Dems, of course, defended the arrangement, but Republicans did an excellent job of exposing the bias.
NPR boss Katherine Maher especially came across as deceitful in denying any partisan slant despite a slew of her own posts in 2018 where she called Trump a “fascist” and “a deranged sociopath.”
And she claimed not to know that 87 staffers in Washington were registered Dems, while there are zero registered Republicans.
The upshot was that the hearing made a solid case that funding of more than $500 million should be cut.
Count that as low-hanging fruit for the DOGE team!