Appeasement

I tend to avoid clichéd, simplistic comparisons to the 1938 Munich Agreement and Britain’s disastrous appeasement of Adolf Hitler. Not only because today’s situation is different (we can’t compare Vladimir Putin to the Nazi chancellor, and Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia), but also because the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s negotiation strategy toward Germany still divides historians. Revisionists maintain that Chamberlain bought the United Kingdom—which was still unprepared to fight the German Wehrmacht—much-needed time to rearm.

Nevertheless, successive British governments in the 1930s did placate Hitler, and appeasement by different sectors of UK society remains a legitimate reference point. Consider the behaviour of certain English elites, such as the aristocrats and intellectuals collectively known as the Cliveden set. That influential entourage, led by Viscount and Viscountess Astor at Cliveden, their country estate, played an outsized role in the English press, and in the conduct of the country’s foreign policy. Their tolerance—or carelessness—toward the anti-Semitic psychopath in Berlin deeply tarnished the reputation of British high society.

Today, Donald Trump is being similarly appeased. He is not yet a fascist in the same way as Hitler or Mussolini. Nor has he been completely appeased by the American establishment, having been impeached twice by the House of Representatives and repeatedly condemned by the mainstream media. But some liberal elites have engaged in a genuine movement to placate Trump, or at least Trumpism, even before his second term began.

Now this appeasement is spreading among—and even turning against—those very elites, including major law firms, prestigious universities, and Democrats like Senator Chuck Schumer. The most emblematic consequence is the Trump administration’s cancellation of $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University, supposedly as punishment for the university having failed to protect Jewish students against anti-Semitic threats during pro-Palestinian protests on its campus in 2023 and 2024. Clashes between pro- and anti-Israel students tested the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the “right of the people peaceably to assemble.” That is where the university clearly failed in its fundamental and essential obligation to protect freedom of expression.

Columbia suspended several organizations, including the Palestinian-sympathizing Jewish Voice for Peace, thereby displaying a blatant indifference toward a Jewish group that was keen to “condemn any and all hateful or violent comments targeting Jewish students.” I make no excuses for the verbal excesses of Hamas supporters during the demonstrations, nor do I condone the January 19, 2024 chemical attack on pro-Palestinian protesters by pro-Israel students. But by summarily suspending these groups, the university lost a unique opportunity to reassert its support for the principles of academic freedom, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression.

Instead it took a wrong turn, acting without considering what would happen if Trump returned to the presidency for a second term. When a House of Representatives committee summoned Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, on April 17, 2024, it had already humiliated the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT. Instead of defending the university’s historic commitment to freedom of speech, Shafik kowtowed to the committee members—namely to Representative Elise Stefanik, a devoted Trump admirer who has stood out for her contorted intellectual reasoning. The transcript of their exchange reveals just how much Shafik conceded, including Stefanik’s fallacious argument that criticizing Israel and expressing solidarity with Palestinians after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack necessarily constitutes antisemitism.

The April 17 hearing would have been a good time to turn the tables and push back on hypocritical, simpleminded Trumpism by reminding Stefanik of an evening at Mar-a-Lago, in November 2022, when two anti-Semites—Nick Fuentes and Kanye West—dined with the former, and soon-to-be again, president of the United States. Fuentes had participated in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 that was challenged by left-wing counter-protesters. Trump, we should remember, had said of that incident that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

I was not privy to the content of the conversation at Mar-a-Lago. Fuentes could have been politeness personified, and one never knows what an idealistic and passionate young man like him might come up with. But I do know that some of his most memorable statements include,  “We need to eradicate the Jewish stranglehold over the United States of America…We need Christians running America, not Jews…The enemies of Christ have no future in this world.”

And also, “There is an occult element at the high levels of society, and specifically among the Jews…They are evildoers. They are people who worship the false gods…These people that are suppressing the name of Christ and suppressing Christianity, they must be absolutely annihilated when we take power.”

So here we are: Trump is in power, and Columbia University, hoping to reclaim government funds, is bowing down to him. Isn’t that appeasement?