Across
two administrations, the language of civil rights and legality has been
steadily repurposed into an instrument of coercion. What began under
President Joe Biden as an ideological campaign to enforce pro‑Israel
conformity on U.S. campuses evolved, under President Donald Trump, into a
national system for disciplining political and cultural dissent. Both
relied on the same bureaucratic mechanism—the Office for Civil Rights
(OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education—and the same guiding idea:
that any federally funded institution can be forced into compliance by
redefining civil‑rights enforcement.
Biden’s Politicized Civil‑Rights Apparatus
In 2023 the White House launched the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,
jointly coordinated by Vice President Kamala Harris,
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, and advocacy groups such as the
Anti‑Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC)
(White House, 2023). Soon after, the Department of Education’s Office
for Civil Rights issued a series of Dear Colleague Letters
warning universities that they risked losing Title VI funding if they
failed to “protect Jewish students,” explicitly invoking the
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of
antisemitism, even though it is not codified in federal law
(U.S. Department of Education, 2023).
Universities
reacted quickly. Many suspended or banned student groups such as
Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace,
effectively transforming protest and expression into potential
civil‑rights violations (Politico, 2023).
Biden’s
position reflected political loyalty rather than moral principle. In
his widely reported January 2025 interview with
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, the president acknowledged that Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “convinced him” that
indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza was justified by analogies to
Dresden and Tokyo. His resigned comment—“What could I say?”—showed both
awareness of civilian deaths and unwillingness to intervene
(New Republic, 2025; New York Times, 2025). Domestically, the same logic
underpinned his use of civil‑rights enforcement to silence critics of
Israeli policy.
Trump’s Expansion of the Machinery
Trump inherited these tools and rapidly broadened their reach. Through executive orders such as Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit‑Based Opportunity and Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism,
his administration fused Title IX onto the existing Title VI framework
(White House, 2025). OCR investigations soon targeted not only alleged
antisemitism but also supposed “reverse racism” and
“un‑American gender identity.” Within months more than fifty
universities were under review for “DEI discrimination” (NPR, 2025).
Using the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership
as guidance, Trump extended these audits to cultural and informational
institutions—museums, PBS, NPR, the National Endowment for the Arts, and
even the National Park Service. Federal grants were frozen or clawed
back under claims of “civil‑rights non‑compliance”
(Center for American Progress, 2024; Artistic Freedom Initiative, 2025).
What started as partisan campus policing became a government‑wide
culture purge in which defunding replaced legislation as the main means
of control.
Vanishing Transparency and the Managed Spectacle
Both
presidents curtailed press accountability. Biden held only 36 formal
press conferences over four years—the lowest number of any modern
president—and revoked hundreds of journalist credentials (Axios, 2024;
American Presidency Project, 2025). Managed appearances and written
statements replaced unscripted questioning, leaving major policies
uncontested in public.
Trump
did not restore openness; he re‑engineered it. His method was volume
and simulation: daily “interviews” with sympathetic hosts, influencer
livestreams, and heavily edited highlight reels. The effect was
omnipresence without accountability—a spectacle that served as political
camouflage for administrative secrecy.
The Structural Lesson
The
line from Biden to Trump shows continuity, not rupture. Biden
demonstrated that civil‑rights statutes could be manipulated to penalize
dissent; Trump proved that the same laws could police identity,
education, and culture. Once such reinterpretations are bureaucratically
normalized, every future administration inherits the habit of coercion.
The
slippery slope from moral panic to authoritarian bureaucracy was built
one step at a time—each step justified as pragmatic or necessary,
whether cynically political or bureaucratically expedient. Once those
tools exist, they invite expansion.
The
larger lesson is this: when laws are repurposed to silence the dissent
of one group, the door opens to their misuse across multiple domains.
Each administration that bends the law for its own political ends makes
it more likely that the next will bend it further. Legal
reinterpretation does not guarantee authoritarianism, but repeated abuse
of legal instruments steadily increases its odds.
To
treat Trump’s consolidation of executive control as a partisan
aberration is to ignore its origin. The present regime of coercive
legality is bipartisan—an accumulation of moral panic and political
convenience. No manipulation of law for ideological ends is benign. Each
distortion widens the precedent for future suppression, until nearly
every federally funded domain becomes vulnerable to political screening.
Behind the rhetoric of “civil‑rights protection,” “anti‑woke reform,”
or “national unity” stands the same structure: an unaccountable state
that governs by spectacle and legal compulsion.
References
American Presidency Project. (2025, September 18). Presidential news conferences: Comprehensive data set. University of California, Santa Barbara. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/presidential-news-conferences
Artistic Freedom Initiative. (2025, April 6). United States of America UPR 2025: Artistic freedom and federal funding. https://artisticfreedominitiative.org
Axios. (2024, July 3). Biden’s media evasion: Fewest press conferences of the last six presidents. https://www.axios.com/2024/07/04/biden-media-interviews-press-data
Center for American Progress. (2024, December 31). Project 2025’s distortion of civil‑rights law threatens Americans with legalized discrimination. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025s-distortion-of-civil-rights-law-threatens-americans-with-legalized-discrimination
NPR. (2025, September 4). How Trump is using civil‑rights laws to bring schools to heel. https://www.npr.org/2025/09/04/nx-s1-5500262/trump-civil-rights-schools-students
Politico. (2023, October 30). Jewish leaders to Biden officials: “We’ve never seen anything like this.” https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/30/jewish-organizations-cardona-antisemitism-action-plan
The New Republic. (2025, January 16). Biden just gave away Netanyahu’s whole game—and it’s bad. https://newrepublic.com/post/190365/joe-biden-benjamin-netanyahu-gaza-bombs
The New York Times. (2025, January 17). Biden says he urged Netanyahu to accommodate Palestinians but was “convinced otherwise.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/world/middleeast/biden-interview-gaza-netanyahu
U.S. Department of Education. (2023, November 6). Dear colleague letter on shared ancestry and ethnicity discrimination. Office for Civil Rights. https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/offices/list/ocr/letters/colleague-202311-discrimination-harassment-shared-ancestry.pdf
U.S. Department of Education. (2024, May 6). Dear colleague letter: Protecting students from discrimination based on shared ancestry. Office for Civil Rights. https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/colleague-202405-shared-ancestry.pdf
White House. (2023, May 24). Fact sheet: Biden‑Harris Administration releases first‑ever U.S. national strategy to counter antisemitism. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/05/25/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-releases-first-ever-u-s-national-strategy-to-counter-antisemitism
White House. (2025, January 21). Ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit‑based opportunity (Executive Order 14189). https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-illegal-discrimination-and-restoring-merit-based-opportunity
