Trump’s Latest Attack on Columbia Could Shut It Down Completely

Despite kowtowing and bowing its head, Columbia University is now the victim of more attacks from the Trump administration.

The Department of Education challenged the Ivy League school’s accreditation Wednesday, writing to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which accredits Columbia, that the university had violated civil rights law in its handling of on-campus protests supporting Palestine.

“After Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, Columbia University’s leadership acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students on its campus,” said Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a statement. “This is not only immoral, but also unlawful.”

“Just as the Department of Education has an obligation to uphold federal antidiscrimination law, university accreditors have an obligation to ensure member institutions abide by their standards,” McMahon noted.

The request itself does not revoke Columbia’s accreditation. However, the government urged the Middle States Commission to “take appropriate action” if Columbia failed to come into compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The university would be unable to operate without its accreditation.

The challenge comes as Columbia continues its fight to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding canceled by the White House in March on claims that university leadership had promulgated antisemitism.

But Columbia University has proven to be just one of many targets that the Trump administration has singled out in its quest to subdue criticism of America’s involvement in Palestinian genocide. Individually, the administration went after Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil, Palestinian student leaders at Columbia University who participated in the protests.

In April, a federal judge handed Mahdawi his freedom after he was arrested at what he thought was his citizenship interview, claiming that the uncharged scholar’s two-week detention was unfounded.

Last week, a district judge denied Khalil—a Columbia graduate student and green card holder—his request for a preliminary injunction to temporarily halt his deportation proceedings.

In March, the Trump administration raided what they called a Tren de Arauga gang gathering in Texas, arresting dozens of people at five in the morning.

Two months later, The Texas Tribune reports that none of the people they arrested had any gang ties or even criminal records, and that the “Tren de Aragua gathering” they busted was in fact a birthday party. Forty-seven people were arrested in total, including nine children, although it’s unclear if every person taken in was at the birthday party.

The ICE agents and Texas police who raided the birthday party even went so far as to attack the families with flash grenades, scaring them and their children.

“We all started shouting that there were babies—‘Babies, there’s babies,’” said one of the arrested men, who said he was celebrating the fifth birthday of his son and the 28th birthday of his best friend at a house they rented for the weekend. “They were like bombs, like boom.”

ICE also profiled one of the party attendees for his tattoos, based on a thoroughly debunked theory that Tren de Aragua members have specific ink.

“They told me to my face: ‘You know what those stars mean? Those stars are styled by gangsters in your country,’” he told the Tribune. “I said, no. I got these stars when—no kidding—I was starting to leave adolescence, started working. I got them because I liked them and I wanted to get them.”

While ICE has refused to name the detained Venezuelans, the Tribune identified 35 of them. Some were in ICE detention for weeks and were released with ankle monitors. One of the children was even kicked out of school due to missing too many days in detainment. Again, none were charged criminally.

“This is about something much bigger. If it happens to a person who is accused of being a (gang member) today, tomorrow it could happen to you and me,” said Migration Policy Institute director Muzaffar Chishti. “And if the alleged member of this gang does not have the right to contest [charges against them], how can you know I’ll have it? The next person will have it?”

ICE has been putting innocent people through hellish, traumatic arrest events for months now, as Trump, border czar Tom Homan, and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller march blindly ahead with trying to deport as many people as they possibly can, truth be damned.

Biden White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has decided she’s no longer a Democrat, pointing to the party’s “betrayal” of President Joe Biden for her rationale.

Instead, Jean-Pierre will become a registered independent, she revealed Wednesday.

The news came by way of the announcement of Jean-Pierre’s new book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, which is set to be published October 21.

“Jean-Pierre didn’t come to her decision to be an Independent lightly, she has served two American presidents, Obama and Biden,” her publisher, Legacy Lit, wrote in a press blurb for the book. “In 2020, she joined Biden’s campaign as a senior adviser, becoming Harris’s chief of staff and then, two years later, White House press secretary.

“She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision,” the publisher continued.

Independent promises to spill tea on the internal party drama that led to Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential nomination, as told by the Biden official most frequently positioned to defend his health and ongoing candidacy.

Swapping party affiliation is definitely an unorthodox way to market one’s upcoming book, but considering the wide range of texts focusing on Biden’s final hour that are already competing for bookstore shelf space, perhaps an unconventional approach is needed. Jean-Pierre’s will be one of many analyses of Biden’s tenure in the White House, with a particular focus on the historic end of his bid for reelection.

Last month, Axios’s national political correspondent Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper released Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, the culmination of interviews with more than 200 individuals attached to the Biden White House. Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, co-authored by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, was published April 1.

Chris Whipple, who examined Biden’s 2020 win, wrote a slim investigation called Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History. Another book, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, is the result of more than 300 interviews conducted over an 18-month period. It’s co-written by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, and is expected out July 3.

And Biden himself has promised to pen his own account, with plans to publish a book next year, according to sources that spoke with The Guardian.

But the decision to exit the Democratic Party comes at a particularly awkward time for Jeane-Pierre, who was the first Black and openly LGBTQ individual to serve as White House press secretary. She will be pulling her support from the only major LGBTQ-friendly party at a time when the Trump administration continues to attack and rescind gay and transgender rights, and weeks before she is scheduled to act as one of the grand marshalls of the New York City Pride march, alongside TV personality Michelle Visage, transgender activists Miss Major and Raquel Willis, and GLAAD executive DaShawn Usher.

Donald Trump’s tariffs on China have sent automakers scrambling to keep production lines moving—and their main solution is the exact opposite of what the U.S. president intended.

When Trump announced his sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on almost every country (and a few uninhabited islands) in April, he promised that “jobs in factories will come roaring back into our country.” Apparently, part of his goal was to make it so expensive to import certain products that companies would simply start manufacturing them in the U.S.

But so far, the opposite is coming true. Four major automakers are rushing to find a way to keep procuring rare-earth magnets, a key component of car motors, which are primarily made in China. Without the magnets, the companies fear car production could shut down in a matter of weeks.

Several carmakers, both traditional and electric, are considering moving part of the manufacturing process to China, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

This could include building electric motors in Chinese factories or shipping American-made motors to China to have the magnets installed, according to the Journal. Trump’s restrictions only cover the Chinese-made magnets, not finished parts such as a fully built motor.

“While efforts are under way to bolster supply chains and suppliers of these elements outside of China, this will take additional time and will not alleviate the immediate shortage of elements vital for automotive components used to produce vehicles here at home,” the heads of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation and MEMA, the Vehicle Suppliers Association, warned in a letter.

China had agreed to reduce export controls on rare-earth magnets as part of a 90-day tariff pause with the United States. Trump has since accused China of dragging its feet on license approvals for magnets, while broader trade talks between the two nations appear to have come to a total standstill.

Trump complained about the state of trade talks at 2:17 a.m. Wednesday. “I like President XI of China, always have, and always will, but he is VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!” he wrote on Truth Social.

Trump said he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone for over an hour on Wednesday, just to confirm that Putin will continue to carry out attacks on Ukraine.

“I just finished speaking, by telephone, with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia. The call lasted approximately one hour and 15 minutes. We discussed the attack on Russia’s docked airplanes, by Ukraine, and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides. It was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.”

The president is referring to Ukraine’s successful drone attacks on multiple Russian airfields over the weekend, which destroyed 40 Russian aircraft.

Trump then provided an update on Iran nuclear deal talks.

“We also discussed Iran, and the fact that time is running out on Iran’s decision pertaining to nuclear weapons, which must be made quickly! I stated to President Putin that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and, on this, I believe that we were in agreement,” Trump said, using much harsher language than he did in the first half of his post.

“President Putin suggested that he will participate in the discussions with Iran and that he could, perhaps, be helpful in getting this brought to a rapid conclusion. It is my opinion that Iran has been slowwalking their decision on this very important matter, and we will need a definitive answer in a very short period of time!”

Trump is displaying much more trust and deference toward Putin here than he was just days ago, when he wrote that the Russian president was “playing with fire” by continuing to attack Ukraine.

The president continues to waffle in his support of Putin, oscillating between praise and rebuke all while getting nowhere closer to actually ending the war in Ukraine.