Earth to Barnard College: Enough

The pro-Palestinian mob is back in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. So are the Hamas-friendly chants of “intifada revolution” and posts about “resistance until return.” So is the bullying and violence.

On Wednesday afternoon, dozens of masked demonstrators — it isn’t yet clear how many were students — forced their way into Barnard College’s Milbank Hall, pushing past an employee so forcefully that he wound up in the hospital. What followed was a six-hour sit-in to demand the reversal of punishments for students who had been disciplined for violating campus rules.

That included two students who were expelled from Barnard after they had forced their way last month into a class on modern Israel and “handed out antisemitic fliers, including one of a Jewish star being stomped by a jackboot,” as The Times’s Sharon Otterman reported. In that incident, the professor, Avi Shilon, told The Times that he invited the demonstrators to join the class instead of disrupting it — a remarkably humane gesture in the face of such bigotry. They refused.

At Barnard, the demonstrators demanded to see Leslie Grinage, a dean, who agreed to a meeting on the condition that students unmask themselves and show their IDs. They, too, refused. The college then gave protesters a 9:30 p.m. deadline to clear out. They ignored it for over an hour. Some then marched out the front door banging a drum. The police, who were present on the campus, did not arrest them. Others slipped out through a first-floor window.

Laura Rosenbury, Barnard’s president, called the sit-in “completely unacceptable” in a statement; after the expulsions for the classroom disruption, she had vowed “decisive action to protect our community as a place where learning thrives.” But the pablum rings hollow given the many hours wasted offering the demonstrators mediation with faculty members. After more than a year of incessant disruption, intimidation and rule-breaking by pro-Palestinian protesters — not to mention lasting reputational damage these protests have done their schools — the only question Rosenbury, Grinage and other administrators need to answer is why the police weren’t called in to clear out the sit-in within minutes, and why the protesters didn’t spend the night in jail.

Where’s the board of trustees? Where’s the adult supervision?

Enough. The students involved in this sit-in need to be identified and expelled, immediately and without exception. Any non-students at the sit-in should be charged with trespassing. Face-hiding masks that prevent the identification of the wearer need to be banned from campus. And incoming students need to be told, if they haven’t been told already, that an elite education is a privilege that comes with enforceable expectations, not an entitlement they can abuse at will.

Kicking out the students involved in Wednesday’s sit-in would make the point refreshingly plain.

In little over a month, President Trump has signed over 70 executive orders and has done more than 150 things worthy of an entry in the Times Trump tracker. Some days it feels as though there is too much news to monitor — even for reporters, let alone the average reader.

This feeling of overwhelm is exactly what the strategy of flooding the zone is supposed to do: inundate people with so much activity that they will miss important developments or even tune out from the news completely.

That was the plan, anyway. It turns out that, broadly speaking, Americans have not lost the plot just yet. A majority of Americans said they were familiar with 14 of 17 news stories that took place in Trump’s first month in office, according to a new survey by YouGov.

The survey, which was fielded Feb. 14 to 18, shows that Americans are most informed about the U.S.A.I.D. shutdown, Elon Musk’s claims of fraud, federal government layoffs and Trump’s ban on transgender athletes from women’s sports.

The story line that people said they knew the least about? The controversy over the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York.

News consumption tended to track along partisan lines, with Republicans more likely to have heard about the Israel-Hamas cease-fire, the transgender athlete ban and Ukraine negotiations, while Democrats were more likely to have heard about ignoring orders from federal judges and attempts to drop charges against Adams.

There are other indications that people are still paying attention. House Republicans are going back to angry voters in their home districts, frustrated that Congress hasn’t done enough to curb the Trump administration’s excesses. And consumer confidence nose-dived this month as fears over tariffs and economic instability began to take hold.

If people are paying attention and many of them are unhappy, why hasn’t there been more of a public response to the past month of mayhem?

One reason could be that Americans just aren’t quite sure how they feel yet, despite being reasonably informed about these stories. It might take a while for voters to make a firm decision about which Trump moves are OK and which are real problems.

Another explanation could be that after Jan. 6, two impeachments and multiple civil and criminal indictments, what else is there to do if you are mad at Trump? This time around — unsurprised by him yet unsure of what’s next — people aren’t looking to take the streets; they’re looking for leadership.

I first started keeping a close eye on Mitch McConnell in 1997, long before he began his record-breaking 18-year run as the Senate Republican leader. Back then, he was known as “the Darth Vader of campaign finance reform,” the Senate’s biggest booster for the free flow of money into politics. This put him at loggerheads with his Republican colleague John McCain, a key champion of reforming the political money swamp. For years, a common narrative cast the taciturn, brooding McConnell as the dark nemesis of the loquacious, sunny McCain’s crusade to clean up politics.

Which is to say that for literal decades, playing the villain has been something McConnell has done with apparent ease and even relish. It is a role that has suited him well. He was never going to be a Clintonian charmer, an Obama-style cool guy, a McCain-esque maverick. And so he leaned into his coldblooded, calculated, Machiavellian rep, leading with fear more than with love.

I have known members of McConnell’s own caucus who viewed him with equal measures of fear and fury. But his special gift was tormenting Democrats, whether by blithely thwarting their legislative dreams — he embraced the “Dr. No” moniker with glee — or blocking their Supreme Court pick.

And no matter how much heat he took for bending the system, he didn’t blink. Especially when it came to those judicial appointments. Forget legislating. Shifting the judiciary in a conservative direction was going to be McConnell’s legacy. And to a certain extent, it will be.

But his troubled relationship with Donald Trump put a weird wrinkle in McConnell’s political story. As Senate leader, he didn’t indulge in the shameful bootlicking that his House counterparts did. And more than once he stood his ground against Trump to protect the prerogatives of his chamber. But he also worked to protect Trump from being held accountable for some of his more outrageous sins, and he did not move to prevent Trump from returning to power when he might have encouraged other senators to choose that path. (See: the second impeachment trial.)

McConnell left leadership before Trump’s second term began. In a recent interview, he said he intends to be clearer about his differences with the president now than when he was conference leader. But his window for seriously standing up against Trumpian excesses has closed. And it is hard not to see his progressing physical frailty in recent years as a reflection of his fading power, the passing of his moment.

McConnell will be remembered as a formidable, brutally effective Senate leader. But depending on how the second Trump presidency goes, he may also be remembered as a leader who, for all his perceived strength, failed to stand up for democracy when it mattered most.

You can see the impact of Manhattan’s congestion-pricing plan — which President Trump capriciously announced plans to suspend on Wednesday — in the very concrete car crash data. In the first 10 business days of 2020, Gersh Kuntzman noted last month for Streetsblog, there were 400 crashes in what would later become the congestion relief zone. In the first 10 such days of 2025, there were 90.

The year-on-year improvements have been somewhat smaller — but, remarkably, they are citywide, with big declines not just in Manhattan but in each of the five boroughs. According to an analysis by Jeff Asher, the rolling 30-day average of car crashes throughout the entire city fell about 20 percent in January.

Since the program began, belatedly, on Jan. 5, much of the commentary has swirled around its effect on driving times. And those signs were positive: In the first week, 7.5 percent fewer cars entered the zone, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced, significantly speeding up commutes into Manhattan and accelerating many trips within the borough, as well. Within a few weeks, travel times had fallen between 10 and 30 percent across the zone, the agency said, with even larger improvements on bridges and tunnels.

But this was also always a narrow way of measuring success, and frankly a weirdly car-centered one for what is, by far, America’s least car-centric city. In Manhattan, foot traffic is up, not down; public transportation traffic, too, is up; and there were perhaps a million fewer cars on the streets in the zone of Manhattan affected by the program, in January. Buses are traveling faster, and late arrivals of students’ school buses have fallen almost in half.

And support for the program is growing among those most affected, at least according to one Morning Consult poll, with six out of 10 New Yorkers saying it should continue; those regularly driving into the affected zone and paying its fee now support the program 66 percent to 32 percent. In short, by almost every metric you could imagine, the congestion zone has been a success. But for now at least it seems the only metric that matters is the depth of Donald Trump’s spite.

For years, congestion pricing has been, in addition to a technocratic dream, a cautionary tale about the obstacles to policy progress: about the way transportation authority is unfortunately shared, in New York, between boroughs and states and agencies; about the burdens of environmental reviews and the power of “vetocracy” on the left; about the venality and shortsightedness of politicians, even those theoretically inclined to support such programs.

But if Trump’s kill shot holds up in court — which it may not, like so many initiatives of the administration’s first 100 days — it will give a somewhat more unsettling lesson: that none of those arguments or the way you might resolve them ultimately matter very much, if you have the gleeful rage of the world’s most powerful man turned against you. “LONG LIVE THE KING,” Trump declared Wednesday on Truth Social. The White House quickly put the line on a mock-up of a magazine cover in the style of Time magazine and tweeted it out.

It’s important to pay attention to the language of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” and notice that three of the four words in the name are purposeful illusions. DOGE is not a department, and it is not focused on government efficiency.

Remember all the things the tech industry told us were true, but that were not true? Uber was for “sharing” rides, a pleasant notion — who can be against sharing — that lulled the media as well as regulators in states and cities across the country and the world into not noticing or caring that “ridesharing” created an on-demand taxi service that attempted, for years, to evade the many rules and regulations that had built up over the decades for good reason, whether to ensure rider safety or reduce traffic. Airbnb was for “hosting” people — “guests” — in your home, also lulling regulators into complacency while significant portions of global cities’ housing supply turned into de facto hotel rooms, again, without attendant regulations. Ingenious use and abuse of the English language has enabled many of Big Tech’s biggest successes.

Now, even people who oppose the actions of Musk’s “department” are falling into the same trap of using big tech’s words.

First, “department.” The word department seems an anodyne way to describe what Musk’s DOGE is. But the word “department” in Washington means something specific: a congressionally created entity of government, with its leader confirmed by the Senate after a public committee hearing. Donald Trump, or his legal advisers, know this; the executive order creating this “department” notes, in its fine print, that the department is really just a renaming of an existing agency, the United States Digital Service. This matters: Calling this service a “department” invests it with a weight it does not have.

Second, the notion of “government efficiency.” Just as with “sharing” a car ride or “hosting” a “guest” in your home, it’s hard to object to the notion. Efficiency is nonpartisan and neutral; who can object to doing something — anything — better and for less cost? But DOGE isn’t focused on efficiency; disrupting an entire agency created and funded by Congress — U.S.A.I.D. — is not the same as finding efficiencies within that agency.

Indeed, “disrupt” — a tech-industry favorite word — is the proper term to use for what DOGE has done to U.S.A.I.D., not “shut down,” or abolish. Trump cannot shut down or abolish U.S.A.I.D., or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Only Congress can do that.

DOGE’s early actions illustrate that Musk, or a legal team advising Musk, actually understands this reality, in the choices of U.S.A.I.D. and the C.F.P.B. Though authorized by Congress, both entities operate under exploitable contradictions that are artifacts of their creation: Congress’s definition of U.S.A.I.D. as both “independent” but within the State Department, and the C.F.P.B.’s odd funding method, under which it asks the Federal Reserve for money rather than relying on a congressional appropriation.

All of this wordplay and technicality matters, because Musk is cleverly using words to deflect political accountability, both from Trump and from Congress. The government still works the way it always has. Tech bros do not fund or defund the government, and do not create or abolish government departments or agencies. Only Congress does.

The real crisis is still what it was before: not Elon Musk or DOGE, but a Congress that remains in thrall to Trump and will not provide the normal checks and balances that our government needs.