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academic freedom
Teaching Social Justice Journalism at Trump's Columbia University
The university at large has sold out our students, but the university is not all of us. There are hundreds of faculty on this campus dedicated to the right of our students to learn, debate, protest, research, and report without fear.
Nov 16, 2025
On September 17, 2025, one month before I was to teach my annual social justice reporting class at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, the campus lowered its flag to half-mast in honor of far-right pontificator Charlie Kirk.
Nobody deserves to be murdered, as Kirk was, but to honor a man of his white supremacist, Christian nationalist, and misogynist beliefs was to spit in the face not only of all the women on campus, but of students and staff of color; the queer and trans students and employees whose identities he characterized as “abominations“; the Muslims whose religion, he said, “is a sword being used to slit the throat of America“; the immigrants he insisted will “replace us” with their “anti-white agenda”; and the Jews he accused of controlling America’s institutions.
Columbia did not have to lower that flag. President Donald Trump ordered federal institutions to do so, but the university is private, not part of the government. No, lowering the flag was a choice.
That Columbia made such a choice is nothing short of astounding, given that its past two years of capitulations to the Trump administration have rested upon the school’s promise to protect its Jewish students and staff from antisemitism. As our current acting president, Claire Shipman, wrote to the university community this past summer in classic Orwellian double-speak:
While Columbia does not admit to wrongdoing… the institution’s leaders have recognized, repeatedly, that Jewish students and faculty have experienced painful, unacceptable incidents, and that reform was and is needed.
So why honor a man who espoused Nazi conspiracy theories?
I bring this up because this flag business was only the latest example of the groveling submission Columbia’s trustees have shown toward this country’s proto-authoritarian government since the 2023 student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza gave Republicans the idea of using accusations of antisemitism to attack liberal arts colleges.
Allow me to illustrate with a brief history of this groveling.
The First Year of Capitulation: 2023
In 2023, not long after the horrific Hamas attack on Israeli citizens and Israel’s insanely outsized retaliatory slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, Columbia called in the police against our nonviolent student protesters, locked down the campus for the first time in history, and suspended both its own and Barnard undergraduates, most of them teenage girls, in punishment.
That same year, Columbia’s administration allowed Trumpian Christian nationalists to define who was antisemitic and who wasn’t. It succumbed to and accepted the right-wing false narrative that the campus was rife with Jew haters. And it refused to stand up for the Palestinian, Muslim, Arab, and Jewish students who were being harassed, threatened, and doxxed on and off campus for protesting Israel’s murderous policies.
The Second Year of Capitulation: 2024
In 2024, Columbia groveled even more. It kept the campus locked down (as it does to this day). It put in place so many rules governing protests that it effectively squashed the ability of students to voice their opposition to Israel’s genocide, or even to the government of President Donald Trump. And it refused to offer any support to Palestinian students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi when they were arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in violation of their First Amendment rights, or when their visas were revoked.
Other universities have not been so cowardly. For example, when Bard College student and Afghan refugee Ali Sajad Faqirzada, who had fled the Taliban regime with his sister, was arrested and detained by ICE at his asylum hearing this October, Bard president Leon Botstein offered him instant support. He contacted the student’s family, mustered local officials to help the family, and sent a letter to the government advocating for Faqirzada’s release. He also issued a statement vowing to stand up for Faqirzada and informing other Bard students of their rights. These were the kinds of morally sound actions we have yet to see from any of our presidents or trustees at Columbia.
The Third Year of Capitulation: 2025
In 2025, after Trump and his minions snatched $400 million away from Columbia, crippling the ability of our scientists and medical researchers to do their work, the university’s capitulations plummeted to even greater depths.
It suspended and even expelled anti-war students for having protested on behalf of slaughtered and starving Palestinians by occupying the campus library.
It agreed to comply with Trump’s ban on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) by no longer using “race, color, sex, or national origin” when hiring anyone or even when admitting students, thus giving in to the Trumpian goal of creating a university largely filled with white, heterosexual, Christian men.
Columbia ought to haul itself up before the OIE for the act of lowering its flag for antisemite Charlie Kirk.
It put the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department under special provost supervision or receivership.
It agreed to pay more than $200 million over the next three years in blood money to the Trump administration to restore our funding. (Is it a surprise that my colleagues and I had our salaries frozen this year? And what will Trump do with our school’s money—build a villa in Gaza?)
Columbia also agreed to pay a further $21 million to—in the words of the White House PR machine—“resolve alleged civil rights violations against Jewish employees that occurred following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.” I am sure not a penny of that money will go to Palestinian employees and students whose family members were wounded or killed in Gaza, or who suffered from Islamophobic harassment from other students and outsiders. Nor is it likely that any of that money will be given to the many Jewish students who were manhandled, arrested, and punished for protesting genocide.
Columbia made other concessions as well, too numerous to list here. But among the most egregious was its incorporation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates any criticism of the state of Israel with hatred of Jews. This set off alarms among many of our faculty members, Jewish and otherwise, who know that scholars have long rejected the IHRA definition as restricting free speech and academic freedom, and as nakedly antidemocratic.
Yet, in a summer letter to Columbia’s faculty and staff, president Shipman not only proudly announced the school’s incorporation of IHRA, but made it clear that any of us who don’t comply with that definition could be brought before the University’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) and censored or even fired.
Under that directive, Columbia ought to haul itself up before the OIE for the act of lowering its flag for antisemite Charlie Kirk.
Adding insult to injury, Columbia’s Task Force on Anti-Semitism, a committee of professors who spearheaded the dubious claim that our campus was riddled with anti-Jewish sentiment, offered not a peep of objection to the campus lowering of that flag. When I asked one of the Task Force’s architects why, he told me that the committee “does not issue statements.” The hypocrisy of a university that forms a task force against antisemitism and then honors a man like Kirk is, to put it mildly, mind-boggling.
Faculty Fight Back
Columbia’s faculty members have hardly remained silent in the face of all these capitulations. Many of us, including a large cohort of Jewish professors, have protested, rallied, held vigils, and met with our rapid rotation of presidents, as well as with the school’s trustees, to try to urge academic integrity for our campus and protect our students’ right to debate, question, and protest.
One of the most recent of these faculty actions occurred on September 29, when a group of professors, most of them Jewish, gathered at the sundial in the center of campus to speak out against this adoption of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. I joined to watch and listen, while the crowd around them grew.
The speakers explained why the IHRA makes it impossible for them to teach classes on the history of Israel and Palestine, on Islam, or even on Middle Eastern history in general, and leaves any of us who teach anything someone might deem critical of Israel vulnerable to being punished for discriminating against Jews—even if we are Jewish.
One of the speakers, Professor Emeritus Marianne Hirsch, a scholar of trauma and memory, pointed out the real-life dangers in IHRA’s conflation of criticism of Israel with the hatred of all Jews:
This conflation has made [IHRA] the preferred definition of the Israeli state, the Trump administration and authoritarian forces throughout the world who seek to silence those who stand in solidarity with Palestine. The IHRA definition has been cited as the basis for reporting international students, Trump’s travel ban, defunding universities, arresting protesters, and even targeting human rights organizations.
Hirsch then added, “Please note that the incorporation of IHRA was not part of Columbia’s deal with the Trump administration.”
In other words, its incorporation of IHRA was a preemptive concession. Like lowering that flag for Kirk, it was a choice.
Big Brother Is Watching
To top off all these concessions, Columbia made a truly chilling move. Last summer, it agreed to appoint an “independent monitor” to play the Orwellian Big Brother role of watching to make sure that we faculty comply with all of the above rules. The agreement states that this monitor, chosen jointly with the Trump administration, will have access to “all agreement-related individuals, facilities, disciplinary hearings, and the scene of any occurrence that the monitor deems necessary,” as well as “all documents and data related to the agreement.”
The reaction of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the closest thing we have to a union, was swift and dramatic. Calling the appointment of this monitor an unprecedented disaster, AAUP issued the following statement:
Allowing the government to monitor and ultimately dictate decisions about the hiring of faculty and admission of students is a stunning breach of the independence of colleges and universities and opens the door for the ideological control this administration so eagerly craves. This is an extremely dangerous precedent that will have tremendous consequences for the sector.
When You Give a Bully What He Wants
In a clear-eyed assessment of what Columbia’s concessions really mean, several authors at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia wrote this last August:
The settlement is an astonishing transfer of autonomy and authority to… an administration whose disdain for the values of the academy is demonstrated anew every day. It will have far-reaching implications for free speech and academic freedom at Columbia.
The authors went on to say in academic jargon what many of us had been saying all along: When you give a bully what he wants, he only demands more. “Indeed,” they concluded, “the settlement itself gives the administration an array of new tools to use in the service of its coercive campaign.”
It makes me wonder what comes next. Flags with Trump’s face on them all over campus? Forced pledges of allegiance to him? After all, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein did it. Why not Donald Trump?
“Afflict the Comfortable and Comfort the Afflicted”
For now, however, we faculty are stuck with Columbia as it is. In my case, this means that I must teach social justice journalism not only under the cloud of the Kirk aftermath, with professors and employees being fired or chased out of the country for daring to criticize that purveyor of hate, but with the IHRA sword of Damocles dangling over my head.
Social justice journalism is essentially about covering the ways in which the powerless are oppressed by the powerful—that is, a manifestation of Joseph Pulitzer’s mantra that journalism should “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” This means that just about every topic my students will cover flies in the face of all that the Trump government wants to suppress and might well come up against Columbia’s new rules, too.
What if one of my students should want to cover the deportation hearings for Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi, for instance? Or a speech by our former student, the once-imprisoned Mahmoud Khalil? Will even a mention of a Palestinian activist be deemed antisemitic now? Will quoting someone who criticizes Kirk or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be grounds for expulsion? Can we report on Planned Parenthood or transphobia, the ICE persecution of brown and Black immigrants, the ongoing climate catastrophe, environmental racism, violence against women, or Islamophobia? Can we talk about social justice at all?
Such students represent the generation that is going to have to claw back capitulations and hold onto integrity in the face of truly hard times.
However, the aspect of teaching that worries me the most is how Columbia’s capitulation will affect my students’ trust in one another. I don’t want anyone to be afraid that someone will snitch on them and get them punished, suspended, expelled, bullied online, deported, or otherwise silenced. I want to foster a culture of camaraderie and trust in my classroom, not suspicion and fear.
But students are afraid. Just a couple of weeks ago, I spoke on a campus panel to a group of young women undergraduates of color, several of whom are international students. They told us that (with reason) they’re afraid to protest, post anything political, or speak out at all. They’re afraid that their visas will be revoked, their degrees and futures whisked away. They’re afraid of being kidnapped from campus and disappeared by ICE.
This makes me worry that my students, too, will censor themselves out of fear, a dangerous scenario indeed. A journalist who is afraid to publish the truth or question power can’t be a journalist at all.
That said, there is nothing like sitting in a classroom full of journalism students to give one hope. It’s uplifting to know that there are still young people out there who want to be reporters, who are dedicated to evidence-based facts, who have compassion for the downtrodden and still see journalism as essential to upholding democracy. Such students represent the generation that is going to have to claw back capitulations and hold onto integrity in the face of truly hard times.
So, yes, the university at large has sold out our students. But the university is not all of us. There are hundreds of faculty on this campus dedicated to the right of our students to learn, debate, protest, research, and report without fear.
The task now is to keep up their courage—and our own fight.
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Now Is the Time to Show Our Collective Power
Let’s stand together and go on the offensive to create a social democratic vision for higher education and other universal public goods now under assault by Trump and his right-wing allies.
Nov 03, 2025
There is no question that the contemporary system of higher education in the United States was facing several crises (commodification of education, access and affordability, faculty precarity, violations of academic freedom, the “rationality crisis”, administrative bloat, etc.—what we generally refer to as the neoliberalization and corporatization of education) before the Trump administration began its assault on colleges and universities in 2025. Trump’s Executive Orders (EOs) related to education have magnified these crises. At the very least, he has forced those of us working in higher education to seriously reflect on what needs fixing. I point to these EOs as an illustration of intent to destroy colleges and universities as public goods by his administration, supporters, and surrogates, including Chris Rufo and Marc Rowan, two of the most notable agents who are not shy about using the authoritarian playbook. They are deliberately pushing the limits of legal and constitutional mores and precedents to achieve their goals. This should not be a controversial interpretation of intent, considering how transparent the expression of the authoritarian turn has been and continues to be when it comes to higher education and, well, everything else.
Their goal, and the goal of at least some elements of the capitalist class, is to dismantle the administrative state as part of the long-running backlash against FDRs New Deal programs that were rooted in the progressive ethos that government should directly serve the needs of the people. The construction of an enemy is crucial in executing the backlash. Today, the targets are, though not exclusively, teachers and what they do in the classroom, college and university professors, immigrants, transgender people, and the working class writ-large. Collectively, it’s time for faculty to show their power, moving beyond the lines of defense they have already established, creating networks of solidarity across industrial sectors, all while conducting political education about how the system works and who benefits under capitalism. It’s time we start to engage in discussing different tactics and overall strategies that include, but are not limited to, building the capacity for strike actions in collaboration with unions nationwide.
The good news, and perhaps to this end, is that Trump’s attacks have galvanized organized opposition from within higher education institutions. A bevy of coalitions led by faculty have taken the lead in pushing back against not only the Trump administration’s Education Department, but also against internal, administrative pressure to comply. The City University of New York (CUNY), the largest urban university system in the United States, led by faculty, has evolved to become one of the leaders in the national call for mutual academic defense compacts across the US. Galvanized by recent attacks on academic freedom and the weaponization of antisemitism by political and administrative actors, the CUNY Alliance to Defend Higher Education is one of the many initiatives that have popped up across the country.
These coalitions have developed under the strain of what feels like daily attacks against the mission of higher education and all its community members, particularly the most vulnerable. This opposition is grounded in the idea that faculty governance should dictate how colleges and universities operate as institutions of higher education focused on the pursuit of truth in the interest of the public good.
Mobilizing the working class means promoting a long-term, positive vision for public higher education.
At the core of this idea is the material reality that faculty, or faculty labor power, as Clyde W. Barrow has explained, is the sole "producer of value": without faculty, there are no students, no knowledge being produced and taught, therefore no colleges and universities. Historically, administrators—from Board of Trustees, Presidents, Vice Presidents, Provosts, and Deans, what I call the Administrative Elite—are called upon to play a supportive role in the governance of colleges and universities. The employment relation between administrators and faculty is fundamentally a managerial one, where administrative dictates carry the implicit and at times explicit weight of exerting discipline against the perceived violators of college rules, regardless of governance structures and safeguards. To be sure, there are more guardrails against administrative overreach if faculty and staff are protected by a contractual bargaining agreement (CBA) backed by a strong union presence in the workplace. But as we have seen at CUNY and elsewhere, even a CBA cannot stop administrators from acting with McCarthyite impunity.
Colleges and universities, whether public or private, are creatures of the state. Either through regulatory means executed by the state or federal governments or both, through accreditation, or through fiscal dependency, institutions of higher education are subject to the political-economic imperatives of elected politicians and wealthy donors. In turn, they communicate their interests through formal and informal channels directly to boards of trustees, chancelleries, and college and university presidents with the goal of influencing how faculty do our jobs, placing limits on the range of what they deem to be acceptable actions and behavior. To be sure, given the diverse nature of higher education institutions across the country, the Administrative Elite will impose limits to the extent that they are called upon to do so by their respective institutional decision-making hierarchy. While there are well-meaning administrators in positions of power, some who intentionally rise through the ranks of faculty, they are nevertheless subject to the demands placed on them within this hierarchy, oftentimes placing them at odds with competing interests between the state government, politically motivated dictates, and students and faculty, particularly during moments of crisis. We cannot assume that this Administrative Elite will side with faculty and student interests if threats against their institutions are framed as existential. And we cannot convince them to do the “right thing” if their overall material interests are aligned with the dominant political and managerial hierarchy that rules over them.
This brings us to the question of faculty governance. The modern system of faculty self-governance, which dates back to the rise of the modern university in the early 20th century, rests on the assumption that faculty occupy a distinct and “professional” status in American society as intellectuals. The rise of the modern university also coincides with the rise of “corporate liberalism”, within the capitalist state, and the emergence of the corporate university. Historically, the corporate university evolved to adopt the logic and methods of the market as guiding principles which, as Larry G. Gerber has explained, deprofessionalizes and undermines faculty governance.
Since the 1970s, one manifestation of the “market model” that Gerber identifies is the increasing number of precarious employment in the form of “contingent” faculty and the simultaneous decrease in the number of tenure-track faculty lines at colleges and universities. Contingency in employment is one step towards deprofessionalization. The advantages of having a deprofessionalized workforce, as far as managers are concerned, is that workers become vulnerable and more easily subject to employer disciplinary actions. In this case, it also leads to weak faculty governance structures because faculty are already bursting under the full weight of teaching loads, pressure to research and publish, and serve in various committees, leaving no time to participate extensively in governance structures. Some faculty may continue to adjust to the constant juggling of work demands placed on them, while others tune out, keep their heads down, and carry on.
From a broader, social, political, and economic perspective, some faculty may carry on their work under the belief that they are professionals, distinct and separate from other workers who contribute their labor to maintain our workplaces in order. Here, for example, I am thinking of janitorial staff, clerical workers, and safety and security staff. One of the most successful accomplishments of the neoliberalization of the university system is getting us to believe that we are all individuals, working for our own benefit, separate and apart from other workers in a system that commodifies our experience. In other words, the logic of the market obliterates the social relations necessary to produce knowledge. It also produces the belief that as professionals, faculty, in whatever rank, are part of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), defined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977 as “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”
Christopher Newfield recently captured the consequences of this neoliberalization process. Referring to the current political climate, he says:
Academics are not well prepared for this moment. This was unfortunately foretold by the Ehrenreich prophecy: the PMC was too subservient to capital and its representatives to build an independent power base, in the teeth of disapproval. Not a class but a contradictory class position, academics have a diverse membership that lacked a class interest in aligning with the noncollege working class, in spite of such an interest held by many individual members. They also failed to build organizational power for themselves; instead, they bonded with senior managers and their superiors through academic senates and status-based private bargains, in a stable PMC-capital overlap of interests.
Newfield suggest that,
[W]e must work step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities. If we do, we’ll be of real use to our knowledge allies—government scientists,public health advocates, local news journalists, community researchers, theater company directors, et al.—in building the self-governing knowledge systems we need to block authoritarian implosion and get a future we want.
As uncomfortable as it may make some individuals who identify and occupy the class position of the PMC, one conclusion that I suggest we draw from Newfield’s observation and analysis is that we must engage in anticapitalist politics within the university and, by extension, at the state level. There’s a reason why Trump deemed this word to be a threat to national security, conflating it with the word anti-fascist.
As the Trump administration continues to exert pressure using the full weight of the federal government, the Justice Department, and compliant Administrative Elites, we must move forward with a clear agenda for improving the system of higher education we have inherited. And I would argue that we must do so in collaboration with labor across different sectors and with the full acknowledgement that education in general and higher education in particular are public goods worth preserving and expanding. We must create the conditions so that the cost of attacking our communities is so high that they’ll at least think twice before doing so. It’s time for New York City labor unions, for example, to exercise their power and work strategically to overcome the legal and ideological limitations that have held them back for decades. For nearly 60 years, as New York State employees, we are prohibited from striking. It’s time we challenge the Taylor Law, which has been hindering our ability to mobilize New York’s working class, and reflect on any lessons to be learned from the 2005 TWU strike.
Mobilizing the working class means promoting a long-term, positive vision for public higher education. At CUNY, that positive vision should include the democratization of the governance structures and decision-making processes, allowing for community, faculty, and student representation and voting power within the Board of Trustees (BoT). As the institution’s policy-making body, CUNY’s BoT is made up of 17 members, with the vast majority being political appointees (ten appointed by the Governor and five by the Mayor), and only two representing the direct interests of faculty and students (the Chairperson of the University Faculty Senate and the Chairperson of the University Student Senate). Maybe it is time to reflect on and rethink what faculty governance means, in practice, under the existing neoliberal regime where administrators have so much power over university governance.
As part of a democratic and representative discussion, a key question to be addressed is what would a decommodified version of education look like? How can we decouple a college credential from the process of teaching and learning that can inspire students to view a diploma as more than a ticket into the labor market? A crucial component of this positive vision would also include providing full, government-funded free tuition for students and the infrastructure necessary to support their education. The Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union representing faculty and staff at CUNY, has already taken steps towards achieving this vision.
In the short term, we are bracing ourselves for the Trump show of force to come down on the city, as he has promised, if Zoran Mamdani is elected as our new Mayor in New York City. We need a strong coalition of groups to not only resist but to put forward a positive vision of the city we want. One of these coalitions is already taking shape aiming to “protect and prepare” for the onslaught that is sure to come.
Statements and resolutions are important, at the very least, to set the record straight about which side we are on and where we stand in a time of crisis. But they cannot replace organized, strategic actions that will have a positive impact on our workplaces and our communities. Moments of struggle can bring out the best, and worst, in people. We saw that during the Covid-19 pandemic. Let us not wait but be proactive in this fight. Let’s stand together and go on the offensive to create a social democratic vision for higher education that affirms the value of knowledge and truth-seeking for the benefit of the public good.Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's Billionaire Ballroom Is a Perfect Symbol of the Second Gilded Age
The new robber barons are having their names etched into the pediments of the giant new ostentatious ballroom President Donald Trump is adding to the White House.
Oct 23, 2025
In the first Gilded Age, which ran from the 1890s through the 1920s, captains of American industry were dubbed “robber barons” for using their baronial wealth to bribe lawmakers, monopolize industry, and rob average Americans of the productivity of their labors.
Now, in a second Gilded Age, a new generation of robber barons is using their wealth to do the same—and to entrench their power.
The first Gilded Age was an era of conspicuous consumption. The second is an era of conspicuous influence.
The new robber barons are having their names etched into the pediments of the giant new ostentatious ballroom President Donald Trump is adding to the White House.
Trump is now literally taking a wrecking ball to the White House—sending parts of the East Wing’s roof, the building’s exterior, and portions of its interior crumbling to the ground.
They already own—and influence—much of the news Americans receive. And they are eager to promote their views.
Marc Benioff, the billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce, told the New York Times that Trump should send the National Guard to San Francisco. (After his remarks drew condemnation from many of the city’s civic leaders, he apologized. He seems about to get his wish nonetheless.)
Marc Rowan, the billionaire chief executive of Apollo Global Management, is the force behind Trump’s recent “compact” calling on universities to limit international students, protect conservative speech, require standardized testing for admissions, and adopt policies recognizing “that academic freedom is not absolute,” among other conditions. The Trump regime dangled “substantial and meaningful federal grants” for universities that agree.
(It didn’t work. Seven of the nine universities approached rejected the deal.)
Billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of Blackstone, is also shaping the Trump regime’s campaign to upend American higher education. Schwarzman has emerged as a key intermediary between Trump and Harvard University.
Other of America’s new robber barons are rapidly consolidating their control over what Americans read, hear, and learn about what’s occurring in our country and the world. They include Jeff Bezos; Larry Ellison and his son, David; Mark Andreessen; Rupert Murdoch; Charles Koch; Tim Cook; Mark Zuckerberg; and, of course, Elon Musk.
Perhaps the new robber baron’s most lasting impression on the US government will be the lavish White House ballroom Trump is constructing—a 90,000-square-foot, gold-leafed, glass-walled banquet room that will literally overshadow the so-called People’s House.
It will not be an assembly hall, dance hall, music hall, dining hall, village hall, or town hall. It will be a giant banquet and ballroom designed to accommodate 650 wealthy VIPs.
Trump claims that the East Room, the largest room in the White House, is too small. Its capacity is 200 people. He doesn’t like the idea of hosting kings, queens, and prime ministers in pavilions on the South Lawn.
Trump’s real intention is to have the White House resemble Versailles.
Potential billionaire donors have already received pledge agreements for “The Donald J. Trump Ballroom at the White House.” In return for donations, contributors are eligible for “recognition associated with the White House Ballroom.”
Their names will be etched in the ballroom’s brick or stone edifice.
Trump last week hosted a dinner at the White House for the project’s donors, which included representatives from Microsoft, Google, Palantir, and other companies, as well as Schwarzman, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and other billionaires.
Meredith O’Rourke, a top political fundraiser for Trump, is leading the effort, paired with the Trust for the National Mall, an organization that supports the National Park Service.
The trust’s nonprofit status means donations come with a federal tax write-off.
Construction began Monday. Trump is now literally taking a wrecking ball to the White House—sending parts of the East Wing’s roof, the building’s exterior, and portions of its interior crumbling to the ground.
It seems fitting that in this second Gilded Age—an age of conspicuous influence and affluent access—the People’s House will be replaced by the Billionaire’s House.
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