Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have a great show for you today. Wesleyan University's own Michael Roth stops by to talk about how
universities can push back against Donald Trump. But first we have Harvard professor and How Democracies Die author Steven Levitsky here to talk about why he's a little more optimistic about Trump failing after a year into his presidency.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Steven, thanks for having me back.
Before we were.
Talking and you were talking about how you're more optimistic now than you were say in March. I think we were all pretty freaked out by the Trump two point zero.
Talk to me about why you're more optimistic now.
Well, first of all, it's Trump has done a tremendous amount of damage, and we were seeing the beginning of it March and that continued almost done, abated and unchecked for nine months. And it's done damage to our society, to our culture, to our institutions, to the US State, to the world, particularly the US standing in them. So twenty twenty five was a terrible year. It was worse than I anticipated, and I've been a pessimist for years. What makes me less pessimistic is the fact that Trump
is weakening politically. For he began to he has suffered defeats, some defeats in the courts, He's suffered some defeats at the ballot box. Public opinion is gradually but importantly shifting against him, and he's suffered defeats within the Republican Party, which is a bad side for him. And the principal reason why Trump was able to do as much damage as he did in twenty twenty five is he had
ironclad Republican support. He could not have done even a fraction of what he did had he not had ironclad support in the Republican Party. Basically, the willingness of the entire Republican Party leadership to abdicate their oversight role in Congress and to just let him, in many cases, just
flat outbreak the law or violent the constitution. There are signs that that is beginning to change, but in particular, it's clear that he's overreached, he's made mistakes, and that he is beginning to really count in terms of public opinion. And one thing we know about autocrats is they do a lot more damage when they have majority support than
when they don't. And so somebody like Bukele and Alsalvador with eighty eighty five percent support can do much much more damage than a president who's at forty one or thirty nine. And Trump is entering a territory where he could still do a lot of damage, but his ability to impose his will without contestation political contestation, media contestation, societal contestation that's being reduced.
Right after Trump got reelected, my brother called me. He said, you know, even Hitler had to be popular, like do you can't just do unpopular stuff. Obviously, I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler because they're wildly different. But there has not been a ton of like care in Trump two point zero.
No.
I think that they overestimated their support. I think they were overconfident and they overreached. Trump had not faced any serious contestation in the Republican Party for years, not for several years, and I think they've taken all of that forget. I think they over all of us kind of overblew the fact that he won the popular vote, which he had never done before, and they took that as a mandate which never existed. You're right, they've done a series.
Almost all of their major policies are things that the public either is indifferent to or as opposed to, and that's that's hurting them. It's not hurting them the way that it would have hurted a politician in the old days. Because Trump has a thirty five percent base that's very hard to chip away at. But at this pace he's he's going to continue to decline towards that thirty five percent floor.
They're sort of intractable.
Right.
It's bad politics, so you can get away with it if you control the security forces. You can be like Nicola Baduro in Venezuela and have an eighteen percent approval rating and fail and fail and fail and fail, and still still stay in power if you control the security forces. And you know, Trump has taken some initial steps towards politicizing our security forces in really really dangerous directions, but he's not at the point where he can just do whatever the hell he wants and rely on repression.
Part of it was that it's just not that easy to go from democracy to authoritarianism, right, I mean, there's just there's sand in the gears.
Democracy is particularly hard to kill one because the nature and the strength of our institutions. We have a constitution that's not easy to push over. We have a very independent and judiciary. We have federalism, which, as we've seen, matters a lot, and we have a highly professionalized armed forces, which, despite Trump's attempts, is not easy to policis. We also have a much much more vibrant society, a much wealthier, better organized society than say elsalvad or Russia or other
places where democracy has been has been crushed. So Trump has undermined democracy. I would argue he's sort of pushed us mildly over the line into what I would call competitive authoritarianism. But because of the strength of our institutions, in the strength of our society, every step of the way, he is going to be pretty contested, and actually consolidating something like Putin style rule is going to be really difficult. I'm curious when.
You could talk about the importance of that Jimmy Kimmel moment Trump wanted to cancel Kimmel. I mean, what are the moments when you look back at twenty twenty five, where you feel like the critical mass was able to sort of push back against him.
Very very difficult to isolate the turning point. We still know for sure that it's going to be a turning point. Ultimately, I think the election outcome is going to be very very important. The response to the initial Libration Day tariff move was also that was sort of the first blow. He never really recovered politically from our public opinion, from that.
But you're right, you know, other than Harvard and a couple of other cases, very few elite actors in American society pushed back on Trump in the first nine months, and that's one of the reasons why we're in this mess. The level of elite abdication, from Supreme Court justices to senators, to business people to media owners, to law firms, the university presidents has been really, really consequential. And initially, initially obviously Disney was also giving in, but I haven't seen
the definitive account of why that was reversed. But the public outcry and the public mobilization in response to that, I think was significant, and Disney's decision, whatever the basis of his calculation, to kind of reverse course. Yeah, pretty important move.
I want you to say more about that the elites, because from that moment when you had those billionaires at the inauguration, to Sherry Redstone canceling Colbert to just at every point we saw billionaires, millionaires, senators. I mean, we just saw such a level of craven I was kind of shocked.
It was shocking. I was shocked as well. In fact, one of the reasons why, even though I've obviously been writing for years about Trump's authoritarianism, one reason why I was always relatively confident in US democracy was again that we have such a wealthy, well organized, well connected society that's not dependent on the government the way they say Russian oligarchs are, and that have the resource, We have the muscle in our society to push back easily against Trump,
and we didn't do it. We didn't do it at the top. So had you asked me prior to Trump's selection whether it's a positive or negative that We've got eight nine hundred billionaires and more than twenty million millionaires in this country, I would say that's a good thing, because Trump cannot buy all these folks off, and they're going to provide resources for the opposition, and the signal that Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg and Tim Cook and all these guys is said, from the moment Trump got elected
was really really powerful because people looked at many many men of your citizens looked out and said, And Columbia University is another case. If the most powerful law firm, the most powerful media comme, the most powerful CEOs, the most powerful Ivy League universities, if they can't push back on Trump, what chance do the rest of us have. It was a very very demobilizing signal from the very very beginning, and hugely consequential. I think we're still trying
to figure out exactly why that happened. It doesn't always happen. We can point to countries and even the United States in the first Trump administration where elites have been a little more responsible and put some money and some and some Kurds on the line and took on Trump. I'm still trying to explain why that didn't happen this time,
but it was hugely consequental. We would not be in the mess we're in today had it not been for the behavior of our elite people who knew better, people who had private speak very differently, but who were unwilling to stand up.
Yeah, I mean it just seemed like the most craven calculus largely. I mean there were other things, but you know, we want to do business.
Really, the whole project of twenty of Project twenty twenty five man very clear to business owners that if you want, if they wanted to continue making money over the next four years, they had to be on good term for Trump. And they did it.
Yeah, it was sort of equal parts.
They understood Trump, these organizations like the Heritage Foundation, so they were able to sort of put in place a kind of intellectual not intellectual, but a kind of structure behind his basest instincts.
Right. Yeah, every government and in every political regime is a coalition and a confluence of different forces. But two of the major players in this government are on the one hand, Trump and his loyalists, his appointees, who are just simply hacks who depend entirely on him and do his bidding. Trump has no ideology, his very authoritarian instincts, but it's hyper pragmatic. People can sort of figure out how to please him pretty easily and then aligned with him.
I mean, Heritage is somewhat different and people like Stephen Miller and Russ Vaught are much more ideological. There are ideological authoritarians in this government who do have a project which is pretty similar to draws quite a bit on Victor Orbon in Hungary and others, which is not to politicize the state just to get rich and to make sure nobody questions you when you pursue your goals like Trump.
I mean, these guys really do see this country's public and private institutions as being corroded by choose your term, cultural Marxists or leftists or socialists, and they have a project of packing this country's institutions with basically ethno nationalists and purging left liberal ideas from this country and kind of rolling back the steps that this country's taken towards
multiracial democracy over our lifetimes. It's a radical authoritarian agenda, but it's coherent, and Trump doesn't live and die with that. It's an alliance talk us through sort of.
If you look at the broad sweep of American history, what do you think it is?
Multiracial democracy is a really hard thing to pull off. I'm talking about a democracy in a diverse society in which the rights of individuals of all ethnic groups are protected equally. We've had that on paper since nineteen sixty four or sixty five. We tried it in the aftermath of the Civil War. It triggered a very, very violent, very authoritarian reaction that resulted in nearly a century of
authoritarianism in the US South. So our first experiment with multiracial democracy in the late eighteen sixties was violently and thoroughly derailed. We attempted it again with the Civil Rights Revolution in the fifties and sixties. On paper, we got there in nineteen sixty four sixty five, and that began, along with the massive wave of immigration that we experienced also since the mid nineteen sixties, began a long, slow march to a country that was much more diverse and
much more egalitarian than ever before in history. And that was a pretty radical experiment. I don't think any country has ever achieved a truly multi racial democracy. Yet what certainly never happened is you've never had a democracy in history in which the long dominant ethnic majority loses that dominance and loses that majority. And that's what the United
States is experiencing in the twenty first century. That's a big deal, and it turns out it's a bigger deal, I think than most of us expected, certainly including me. I think fundamentally there are a lot of things going on. There's never one cause of a political crisis or a political conflict. It would be ridiculous to suggest that there was.
But I think the principal source of our conflict in the twenty teens in twenty twenties is a reaction to the pretty significant steps that we've taken towards multi racial democracy over our lifetimes, to the challenges, the unprecedented challenges to racial and gender and social hierarchies that we've experienced just in our adult lifetimes.
And that's why they're so obsessed with South Africa.
Right, What else explains that? Right? These guys are I guess ethno nationalists is a polite way of putting it. There are other ways of putting it. They're pretty white supremacist.
Right, because the South Africa stuff never made any sense to me really. I mean, I know that a lot of billionaires in Trump's orbit are from South Africa, but that makes more sense if you think about it in the way of white people worried that their stuff is being taken away.
Their status is being taken away. They're dominant status. I mean, white coasts are doing fine in this country. But the days in which all of this country's political leaders, all of the top CEOs, all of the judges, all the football coaches, all the university presidents, all the TV talking heads, all the people you watch on television commercials, if anyone watches televit commercials anymore, all of those people when we
were kids were white. Those days are gone, and that's what's being reacted to.
That's why there's so much talk about the fifties and nostalgia, and those are sort of code words.
I think so. And of course it's not just race. Gender. Hierarchies have also been seriously challenged. Hierarchies that were in place for two centuries, for generation after generation after generation after generation after generation suddenly in one generation having seriously challenge.
So you think it's just a sort of like overturning row. These are the kind of pushbacks to the arc of progress.
I think that's a big part of what's going on. Sometimes we don't appreciate, I think how much progress we've made since the middle of the twentieth century. If you care about things like racial, social, and generar equality. But yeah, again, there are other things going on, the underlying economic issues, growing inequality, declining social mobility, all those things matter a lot. But fundamentally, I think this is a reaction towards towards our steps towards equality.
Yeah.
I talked to someone who's like a straight journalist who was in Europe covering the disastrous Trump witkof negotiation with Russia and Ukraine, which has completely gone off the rails if it ever was on the rails, And this person told me there was so much anxiety in Europe about
creeping authoritarianism. And my friend said, but I told them Trump is not popular here, but the Europeans it does feel like they have a whole other level of anxiety about us, which I feel like after the twenty five elections, we see a way out of this.
What do you think, Well.
First of all, there's always going to be a bit of a lag between public perceptions elsewhere in the world and sort of how we're seeing things in the day to day here. But this is obviously a very big deal. The United States, for better or worse, probably better and worse. Was the leader of the Liberal world it has been since World War Two, and it really sort of picked up that role again after the fall of Blin Wall.
The US was in an increasingly multipolar world. I mean, for the nineteen nineties, we had it easy because the liberal West was hegemonic in the world. But that wasn't gonna last forever. And with the emerges, the slow rise of China and the resurgence of Russia as an aggressive anti liberal power, this became a more difficult, scarier world. And the United States was the military, economic, and ideological
leader of the liberal West. And Donald Trump threatened to switch sides, to leave the liberal team and join forces with the bad guys. And if you are anybody, including America, the liberals in the United States, and I mean liberalism in a classical sense to include a large number of even Reagan Conservatives, if you're a liberal and you see the leader of the liberal West switching side to the
other team, that's really scary. What Europeans have had to conclude is even in the best case, even if twenty five elections portend, you know, relatively good news of the United States second time around, after we brought back Trump, after everything, the Europeans know that they can't rely on us in the best case scenario where we're vulnerable to
the flip flop between reasonable governments and unreasonable governments. So the days of being able to rely on the United States as a leader of the liberal West.
I think we're over so interesting. Will you please come back?
Oh?
Sure, happy to.
We have exciting news over on our YouTube channel. This second episode from our Project twenty twenty nine.
Series is out now.
It's a reimagining where we examine what went wrong with democrats approach to politics and how we can correct it and deliver changes to help people's lives. The first episode dove into the very sexy topic of campaign finance reform, and our second episode deals with an even sexier topic, antitrust and regulation. We look at how antitrust and regulation can protect American citizens and make America thrive in an
era of rampant corruption and predatory crony capitalism. We talk to the smartest names in the field like Lena Kahn, Elvero Bedoya, Elizabeth.
Wilkins, and Doha Mecki.
Republicans were prepared for when they got the levers of power. We need Democrats to be too, so please head over to YouTube and search Mollie John Fast Project twenty twenty nine, or go to the Fast Politics YouTube channel and find it there and help us spread the word. Michael Roth is a president of Wesleyan University. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Michael Roth, Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
You are a president of the closest thing I have ever come to college, Wesleyan University. I wanted you to come on for any number of reasons, but what I really wanted to talk to you about first was you have been one of the very very very few brave college presidents who has talked about how important education is and democracy. So I would love you to start by talking about what it took to be brave like that, and why you decided to make that calculus and how it's gone.
Well, you know, I had no idea it was brave, frankly right. If I had, I probably would have kept my mouth shut. I thought, everybody knows if you're in the college and world, and if you're in education, that education depends on freedom. If you interfere with you believe people to think for themselves, express themselves. I mean, of course there's always some pressure listener or that. But you know, basically, if you're going to experiment and discover things about yourself
in the world, you have to have freedom. Everybody knows that. I mean, it's not like college presidents didn't know that. Professors know, their teachers know that. But when the current president got elected, suddenly people said, I can't say that, And everybody knows. We've been saying this for so long. Everybody knows that you learn more when there are people in the room who don't share your opinion and it
don't come from the same background as you. And we all know that you learn more in a diverse environment, and that you learn more when people feel they belong to the same endeavor, they're on the same team. I've been saying this stuff for a long time, but everybody else stopped talking. It seems so almost everyone. And it's like those old If Hutton commercials where somebody whispers and it seems very loud because everyone has stopped talking about
that case the stock market, in this case democracy. You know, many of my fellow presidents, certainly my students, that they're to the left of me. My progressive credentials are, let's say, uneven. It seems so obvious that if we don't stand up for democracy and education, our educational values and our political possibilities will be vastly diminished. So I've been saying that as often as I can, because I really do believe the threat is profound right now.
I think it's very interesting that the Trump administration has in this second term really focused on education, and I wonder if you could explain to us why you think that is.
It's been the case for a long time that people who want to centralize power, people who are prone to tyrannical rule, whether they're in this country or anywhere else in the world, they feel, and rightly so, they need
to control educational institutions and cultural institutions. Fascists knew this, but even people who take over like monarchies know that if they don't coordinate their power into civil society, into places like education and entertainment, even things like the law firms and certainly journalists, that if they don't get those things in line, the chances of centralizing power is greatly reduced.
For the current administration, they also thought well, colleges and universities have tilted so far to the left over the last say twenty years, or so, and that that has been a subject discussion that many people won't object if we attack them for being too elitist. I mean, you can't attack the State University of Iowa or you know, the branch campus of the University of Connecticut for being elitist. But if you attack Harvard and Penn and Princeton and
so on, people say, yeah, those bathroards. You know, I didn't get it. I didn't get in Harvard. I'm glad of getting smacked. That was it not a hard decision, I think to go after them. And I think this president actually has you know, there has so many chips on his show. He must have more than two shoulders. He has so many chips on his shoulders because he feels like they've never really respected him. And so there's
a kind of personal dimension to this. But I think politically, people who aspire to be tyrants, people who aspire to central power want to control education because education is a place where independence thinking can take off. It should be and tyrants or people who want strong central power object to that. And last time, the first Trump administration, there
are lots of things that got in the way. We keep hearing this, right, there is the general said no, you can't do that, or the chief of staff has gotten the way, or a lot of people said protected. They said they protected the Trump in prison, Trump from his worst instincts. That's what education does. It gets in the way of people who are trying to push other people around. At least that's part of what it should do, because it says, well, well that what you're saying isn't true,
or you haven't considered this other argument. These are the things people in education say. So the administration said, we have to stop that. And what we really want I have to say, I was so surprised by this. I'm embarrassed.
I surprised, I was.
What we really want is loyalty. We want the college's universities to say, we will play ball and we will express the views that don't get you upset with us. We are going to be loyal like this Compact for Excellence. It's really just a loyalty of I'm shocked at how many educational leaders fall over themselves to express loyalty to
a regime they despise. I do think they despise the regime, but they're so afraid of it because it's so powerful that they wind up expressing loyalty or at least being silent when disloyal people are punished.
I have a lot of schools side on.
I know there's been pushback, and I think I've been really proud to see a lot of pushback. And some schools, like the schools that have conservative backing right that are in states like Texas where the state government has gone completely insane, have gone along with stuff. But have you seen it in other places where you've been surprised?
Well, I think with the compact, very few schools have accepted that as a general program. I've described it in an essay as you know, basically a loyalty program, you know of a kindly get it at Sam's cloud or with an airline. And most schools have said no to parts of that. And so the administration's mo has been to try to strike separate deals with very important schools, very wealthy schools, schools with extraordinary research profiles, and sometimes
with hospitals that depend on funding. And these schools have made deals with the administration. And I can't say I blame them because they're in a hard spot.
I need you to explain why they're in a hard spot.
Well, because it's if you're the president of university and you have a hospital attached to the university and there are lots of patients getting their medication for clinical trials that are supported with federal research grants, and they freeze the grant, the patient's medication goes away.
Yeah, we're talking tens to hundreds of millions of dollars dollars that could not be made up to philanthropy.
That's right.
The research universities have gotten extraordinarily dependent on the federal government because the research done there is so good for the United States. Right, It's not like they're just giving these schools money because these schools are nice or something. They're giving researchers money who do a lot of work in exchange for the support they get so that we can make discoveries about diabetes, or about average space, or about cancer research in Alzheimer's. And so that ecosystem has
survived many transitions. You know, over the last sixty or seventy years, publicans democrats like ohsaw this ecosystem as being one of the great strengths of the country. This administration seems not to care about that side of things, That is that it's one of the great strengths of the country. If those folks don't express loyalty, if they don't align their research priorities with the administration, they will get their funding cut.
And so the leaders of those schools are in the hard place because they have all these scientists who can't actually do their work unless they have grand funding. And then you have countries like Canada or networks like the European Union offerings they will give you money. Come to Canada and do research, Come to the Europe and do research. China is funding its scientists like nobody's business. I mean,
they're really investing heavily. So people are afraid of that, and then they're afraid of being targeted by right wing influencers. They're afraid of being an object of ridicule among the kinds of folks who are well connected with this administration. That said, there are some people who are speaking out.
Basically it could be pretty conservative and still think that this assault on education, which I think is an assault on civil society more generally, that that's just so against the American commitment to basic freedoms that we've had for a couple of hundred years. Unevenly applied, for sure, but still is a great conservative argument to be made and is being made against the centralization of power in the Thirdero government generally, and especially in the White House in particular.
You know, maybe this week we see some more Republicans willing to express that view, which is a view they had long held. But if you're disloyal to this president, he will try to find a way to make you pay a price, as we've seen over the last several months, and many people in higher education seem to say, well, why don't I just wait and see? And that I do think is shameful.
Yes, I want to go back for a minute. This is very unpopular what Trump is doing. Trump sort of took a page from Victor Orbond, went for the universities, decided these annoying liberals have always annoyed me. Anyway, let's go, let's just crush the universities. What we've seen, and again, I've been surprised at how hard it's been for a
lot of institutions to push back. Now that we see that this is so wildly unpopular, that voters hated, that even conservative voters hated, and we're seeing numbers that Republicans don't want to identify as MAGA anymore. I mean not huge numbers. When you think about that and you look at the sort of landscape, does it undermine the bravery that these people are responding to the popular you know, pushback?
I mean, talk to me about that.
I think we just need allies to remind people that democracy can be destroyed and that rights can be quickly eroded. And people get used to seeing soldiers in the street. Lots of things will change. If you get used to the government intervening in the classroom, lots of other things will change. And people have got used to this. People
have said, here's my red line. You know, if we can't choose the clients we're going to defend without getting punished by the federal government from a law firm, that's the red line. But that people have crossed that line, and once that happens, people get used to this. You can't offer the care that your doctors want to offer to trans people because the federal government doesn't like that kind of care. Once you accept that, it get used
to accepting that, lots of other things will change. So I think it's worthwhile reminding folks that these traditions and principles of local autonomy, of institutional autonomy, not because we have to separate ourselves from the government. I get money. I think the money part has always worked because the recipients of the grants haven't been independent enough to do their experiments to pursue truth. I mean, and that's so really important. We don't want that the educational output of Hungary.
We don't.
We don't. And what happens when centralized tyrants get power. If rietarians get power, the intellectuals flee, they try to get out, and they take their science elsewhere. And we don't want that to happen here. And so if people are beginning to say, well, I can speak out now because it looks like it's not as he's not as
powerful as he was three months ago, I'm delighted. My goal is simply to have people recognize how important are freedom of speech, freedom of association, academic freedom to teach how you see fit professionally. These are things that we should we should really fight for. And the federal government, it was elected in the way it was and they have certain powers. I don't want to violate the law, but I do think the government should obey the law.
And so you know, when ICE agents don't obey their own rules or don't obey the laws of the land, I think we should call them out. But I also recognize that Trump won the election and there are consequences to that, but the consequences should be kept within the boundaries of the Constitution. And I feel like at least what I think I've been I see myself as trying to have done is just remind people of what's when the government, already very powerful, violates its own rules.
Some of what has happened has that the ADMIN has figured out ways in which the universities are vulnerable. Yes, a good example Harvard has a ton of foreign students, and foreign students need more federal support than American students. And we see that when it comes to the hospital systems. Right, So you have a university that has a hospital, and the hospital is relying on both federal grants and the
problems mushroom. If we ever get out of this thing, which I think we're pretty likely to be able to get out of it, what are the things that when we look to federal regulation that can protect academic institutions from presidents who are ambitious in this way in the future. Do you have thoughts on what that would look like? Just from my own edification.
The universities have used legal arguments against the overreach of the administration, and most of the time in the courts they have been successful. But this takes a long time and it's very expensive, and the federal government can just continue to litigate forever. I do think codifying what's at stake with academic freedom and the independence of researchers and teachers to do as they see fait professionally that they should do, that's really important. I think the chances of
getting that enshrined in statute are extremely challenging. It's existed for a long time by convention or by just norms that this administration has violated. Reminding people how much we lose when we close our borders to ambitious, thoughtful people who want to come here and make their way in
the world. That we lose, we lose so much by the country of their contributions that when the Nobel Prizes released recently in a number of Americans is astonishing, but the percentage of those Americans who actually came to this country within a generation or two is staggering. And that's great about America actually is that we become a home for people who didn't think this would be their home,
and then they do extraordinary things. So I think making sure that the polititization of the visa process should be prevented at all costs. There will always be legitimate national security concerns about in the visa process. We don't want to admit terrorists, we don't want to admit spies, and those things have to happen. But the basic thing that we should see, and this is that our due process
protections are so vital to our integrity as institutions. And when a president comes in and says I'm getting rid of all those things, and about my administration did some of that in their title line work. They said, you've got to, you know, change the way you adjudicate claims of sexual harassment sexual assault on college campuses. You won't have due process actually for people who are accused at
every school. Kind of found a way to comply. We now know that when you just do away with due process, the people most likely to suffer in the long run will be the most vulnerable people. And so standing by our due process protections that people are innocent to proven guilty, that you shouldn't politicize criminal or civil disputes, and as best we can to defend the local freedom to pursue
education and economic development without regard to political affiliation. And in universities, that will also mean that we need to have more conservative voices on campus. We need to be less of a monoculture on colleges universities. I mean, the trum administration has made that argument, and so I find it awkward to make it too. I've been making it
for ten years. But I do think we have a lot of improvements higher education can make and being more accessible, being more open minded, and being even more open to students from around the world who want to learn here and contribute to the country. But we're a long way from that right now. I think we're playing defense against a White House that is really overreaching in ways that bode ill for the future of the country.
Michael Roth, thank you, thank you, thank you.
You're welcome.
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