One of the fundamental tactics of authoritarianism is to attack universities. After all, they foster free thought and inquiry, which are anathema to right-wing leaders who wish to crush dissent. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Florida has been a pioneer in this effort.

But no American leader has ever been as diligent in trying to crush higher education as Donald Trump. In particular, he has singled out Harvard, the nation’s most prestigious university, for punishment. Last week alone, Trump threatened to pull $3 billion in research funding from Harvard to send to vocational schools, issued an order intended to prevent the university from enrolling international students and directed the federal government to find “alternative vendors” for $100 million in contracts to the school.

“Harvard’s got to behave themselves,” he said. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.” 

Trump is saying that he is the country, and Harvard disrespects him because it won’t cave to his demands. Indeed, the school has taken a hard line against the president’s autocratic efforts, going to court and, so far, succeeding in at least temporarily stopping some of Trump‘s wishes.

The ostensible reason for Trump’s attacks on Harvard and other higher education institutions is that the universities are hotbeds of antisemitism. The administration points to pro-Palestinian protests on campuses last year. While many of the protests were peaceful, some were marked by antisemitic incidents.However, it wasn’t always clear whether those behind those incidents were students.

What is clear is that the antisemitism charge is simply a fig leaf for the administration’s goal of forcing universities to heel. After all, the Trump administration has plenty of people with ties to antisemitic organizations in its ranks.

Trump himself dined at Mar-a-Lago with notorious antisemite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes in 2022. Fuentes has said that “perfidious Jews” should be executed. He showed up at the dinner as a friend of Kanye “Ye” West, who has said he likes Hitler and “loves Nazis.” After the dinner, Trump said he wasn’t aware of who Fuentes was at the time and that the dinner was “quick and uneventful.”

What the administration is doing is simply looking for an excuse. Moreover, the attacks on universities, along with those on the nation’s leading law firms, serve as a kind of proof of concept.

The administration has taken on the most powerful institutions in the country, knowing that if it can make them bend to its will, then everyone else will have to. While the administration could undertake an investigation and, based on the results, penalize Harvard for violating civil rights protections for Jewish students, it has decided simply to punish Harvard as harshly as possible without any legal process. Should Trump succeed in this effort, that is very bad news for LGBTQ+ organizations.

“If the government can coerce the richest school in America without due process, it can crush a community college—or a civil-liberties nonprofit—without batting an eyelid,” Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), wrote in The Atlantic.

There are already hints that Republicans would like nothing more than to pull the tax-exempt status of nonprofits they don’t like. A measure in the budget bill in Congress would have allowed that to happen for any nonprofit that supported a terrorist organization. The language was ultimately pulled from the bill, but the vague language was an indication that it would be a cudgel for the right to brandish against any group it didn’t like. 

More importantly, Trump has also threatened to pull Harvard’s tax-exempt status. He doesn’t have the legal authority to do that, of course, but that won’t stop him. There’s nothing the right would like more than to start pulling the tax-exempt status of lots of organizations, including (if not especially) LGBTQ+ groups.

Even if Trump chickens out about looking at tax-exempt status, that doesn’t mean the administration can’t try other means to attack its opponents. It could initiate investigations, such as the one that Trump has called for against ActBlue, the Democrats’ biggest fundraising operation. The investigations are time-consuming, costly, and designed to beat the victim into submission.

Or the administration could go the religious liberty route. It could argue that some particular activity that an LGBTQ+ nonprofit engages in infringes on the rights of conservative Christians. As far-fetched as that may be, a court battle would be brutal. It’s one thing to be sued by another group. It’s an entirely different issue to have the U.S. Department of Justice put you in its crosshairs.

None of these has happened yet, and perhaps, with any luck, never will. At present, Trump is too focused on the whales to bother with smaller fry. Right now, the administration seems to think that if it can make an example of premier institutions, everyone else will fall in line.

But that doesn’t mean that the right’s taste for punishment won’t stop it from trying to make examples of others as well. Remember that Project 2025 wants to criminalize being transgender and defines pornography in such broad terms that being pro-LGBTQ+ could be against the law. For extremists, the battle will never be over until it has made everyone bend a knee to its vision of society.