Jeanne Shaheen Is Right to Retire

Can I get a hearty huzzah for Senator Jeanne Shaheen on her decision not to run for another term in 2026?

I realize this further complicates her party’s chances of winning the majority and breaking the Trumpian death grip on the federal government. But after three decades in elected office, the New Hampshire Democrat has done her time — and then some.

At 78, Ms. Shaheen has passed the age when leaders in many high-stress fields are expected, and in some cases required, to hang up their spurs. Good on her for eventually recognizing that there is more to life than her powerful job.

Politicians, as you may have noticed, often stick around until past not just the common retirement age, but their primes. It is not ageist to note that Mitch McConnell or Joe Biden or Dianne Feinstein stayed in the game longer than they should have — along with many other elected officials. President Trump certainly seems to have lost several steps since 2016 — though at least the presidency has term limits.

While I have plenty of thoughts on congressional term limits, especially after years of watching lawmakers cling to office even as they visibly declined, that is a more involved discussion for another day. For now, I’ll stick with noting that the American public would be well served if there were an attitude shift in Congress, if the expectation was that members would retire before they grew too old or infirm to, say, stay awake during a committee hearing.

I appreciate the benefits of experience. And I am thrilled that many of our officials remain fit well into their senior years. But there are concrete downsides to a Congress — an entire political system — where members refuse to make way for fresh blood.

Some people will find it bizarre that I am cheering a senator for stepping down in 2027 at the tender age of 79. I feel you. Be assured that I am more impressed by the recent retirement announcements of Senator Gary Peters and Senator Tina Smith, each of whom, if re-elected, would have been 68 when starting another six-year term.

These decisions are hard — for individual members and for their parties. But no one likes a gerontocracy, and, Ms. Shaheen’s charms aside, she is not wrong in observing that “it’s important for New Hampshire and the country to have a new generation of leadership.”

“This is the first arrest of many to come,” President Trump boasted on Truth Social about the arrest of the Columbia graduate student (and green card holder and pro-Palestinian campus leader) Mahmoud Khalil. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again!” Even more ominously, perhaps: “We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to Comply!”

It is easy to fear where this all might lead, even if you choose to take Trump seriously rather than literally. The State Department is apparently using artificial intelligence to review the social media posts of foreign students, looking for visas it might revoke. On Monday, Ann Coulter suggested that compiling a list of students to deport because of their stances was an obvious violation of the First Amendment. The scholar Samuel Moyn, who spent much of the first Trump term criticizing those hyperventilating about the president, called it “a big and flagrant step towards fascism.” My colleague Michelle Goldberg called it the biggest threat to free speech since the Red Scare.

“The state cannot make it up as it goes along,” John Ganz wrote — as it seems to have done in this case, arresting Khalil without seeming to know he holds a green card, according to his lawyer, or which constitutional protections that afforded him. “If it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law; we live under a police state.”

But the arrest is not only a portent but also a kind of culmination, with a history stretching farther back than Trump’s second inauguration. Those protests have been going on in some form for almost a year and a half, and many of the country’s liberal institutions and organizations regarded them as dubious and perhaps criminal.

When the Trump administration announced last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants previously promised to Columbia, explicitly to punish the school for its handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, it was both outrageous and unsurprising: the country’s elite schools have been under fire for their handling of such protests; several university presidents have been forced to resign in response. The new administration has reportedly prepared a list of nine additional schools to target.

But the strike against Columbia was especially grotesque, to me, since during last year’s campus protests across the nation, the university delivered the most conspicuously punitive and visible public crackdown. Almost immediately after the attacks of Oct. 7, the university suspended its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, and when the encampment developed the following spring, Columbia invited the New York Police Department on campus to break up the encampment and arrest students.

This school year, the crackdown continued, even after the embattled Columbia president, Minouche Shafik, resigned in August. A new Office of Institutional Equity disciplinary committee has begun investigations into the activism of dozens of students, according to reporting by The Associated Press, including one who reported that her main offense was writing an opinion essay calling on the university to divest from Israel. One professor claimed she was pushed into retirement, and several Barnard students have been expelled for their activism.

Even if you believe that these protests and essays and the quad encampment egregiously interfered with the life of the campus — I don’t — what more could you have realistically asked a university to do to punish them? The problem, it seems, was not the university’s response so much as the fact that there were students inclined to protest at all.

A few weeks ago, I asked a good friend who is in the United States on a green card if he might be willing to be interviewed about a controversial Trump administration policy involving the country of his birth. Normally voluble on all things political, especially those touching on his homeland, he demurred. He had his citizenship interview coming up, he explained. Best not to risk it.

At the time, I wondered if he was being a bit too cautious: Permanent residents have legal rights, after all, including the right to free speech enshrined under the First Amendment. How could an interview possibly harm his citizenship application?

After the detention by ICE over the weekend of Mahmoud Khalil, an activist of Palestinian origin who was a student organizer of the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University, it is clear that I was the one being naïve. Of course the Trump administration would weaponize immigration proceedings to punish speech it did not like.

Khalil, who graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December, not only has a green card; his wife, who is eight months pregnant, is also an American citizen. He was a prominent leader of the campus protests against the war in Gaza, but there is no public indication that he has been charged with a crime.

It is impossible to overstate how chilling this detention is. If it is allowed to stand, what stops the Trump administration from detaining and ultimately expelling permanent residents who support any cause it does not like? Ukrainians, dissident Russians, Kurds, Sikh separatists, anti-Zionist Jews — all could be at risk simply for what they believe. Any permanent resident — a German who protests American climate policy, a Nigerian who marches against police violence targeting Black people, a Spaniard advocating trans rights — would have to think carefully before exercising the constitutionally protected right to free speech.

It is especially troubling that Khalil’s arrest happened in the context of a university. American higher education competes to attract the very brightest foreign students, who are drawn to the dynamism and opportunity the U.S. education system and economy provide. They are a crucial component of American competitiveness, but not immune to concerns about funding, politics, uncertainty and the welcome extended to foreigners (or lack of it).

On Monday, I called my friend who was awaiting his citizenship interview, and he shared the news that he had passed the interview and been naturalized. Still, he did not feel safe to share his name or country of origin — he does not yet have his new passport in hand. He called the Trump administration’s demonizing and defunding of universities “a kind of vandalism — it is the American Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan sculptures.”

The Trump administration has been savvy in choosing unpopular targets: dismantling foreign aid, targeting transgender people, demonizing migrants and trashing elite colleges. Each of these moves chips away at bedrock American ideals. But free speech is not merely an ideal. There is a reason it is enshrined in the very first amendment of the Constitution. It is the foundation of our system of government, the most important condition of its existence. To lose it is to lose democracy itself.

President Trump loves tariffs not because he wants to revive American manufacturing or because he wants to fill the government’s coffers or because he really believes that Canada is pumping fentanyl into the United States. He loves tariffs because he loves to make people beg.

There is, unfortunately, nothing to prevent Trump from imposing tariffs. Congress evidently isn’t interested in exercising its constitutional powers. But even in the absence of other barriers, Trump keeps stopping himself.

On Wednesday, he announced a one-month suspension of tariffs on vehicles imported from Canada and Mexico after the chief executives of the major automakers apparently performed sufficient acts of obeisance. On Thursday, he announced a broader, again temporary suspension of tariffs on Mexican imports after a call with President Claudia Sheinbaum. We don’t know exactly what was said, but it doesn’t really matter. Trump got to play at noblesse oblige.

These delays are not changes in plan. They are the plan, and Mexico and the Big Three automakers — General Motors, Ford and Stellantis — must surely recognize that what they have been granted is not a reprieve. It is an unpalatable choice: Toe Trump’s line or face economic ruin.

Canada and China are still subject to tariffs — or were, until Trump also suspended the tariffs on Canadian goods that comply with USMCA late Thursday afternoon. Both countries reportedly are struggling to figure out what the United States wants. That’s the wrong question. This isn’t about the United States. It is about Donald Trump, and what he wants is to rest his boots on your head. That’s why he took Mitt Romney on the world’s most awkward dinner date eight years ago. That’s why he made Robert Kennedy Jr. scarf fast food after the election. That’s why the administration wants to establish a hotline for senators to call to beg for the restoration of funding for programs that they care about.

On Tuesday, in his address before Congress, Mr. Trump went on at great length about the benefits of tariffs, which he has long extolled as a kind of miracle cure for a wide range of national ailments. He’s been saying similar things for a long time, and I guess he probably believes it. But events since the address have once again made clear what Trump values most about tariffs: power.

As President Trump methodically disrupts government, it’s easy to forget why voters returned him to the White House. Last week we got a reminder: the announcement by Mayor Eric Adams of New York that the city would soon close the Asylum Seeker Humanitarian Relief and Arrival Center at Midtown Manhattan’s more than 1,000-room Roosevelt Hotel. The hotel became, nearly two years ago, the defining edifice of Democratic failures to handle record irregular immigration.

As July turned to August in 2023, news footage documented dozens of people lined up around the block outside the Roosevelt, many sleeping on the sidewalk. Nearby office workers brought them plastic water bottles as they waited in the heat.

The photos and videos demonstrated to national voters: Nobody in charge had a plan.

Two failures reflected and magnified each other. First, the White House’s mute inaction under President Joe Biden as the United States saw an enormous number of irregular migrants, an average of 2.4 million people annually from 2021 to 2023. It wasn’t until 2024 that he reasserted some order.

Second, New York City’s overactivity as Adams tried to demonstrate that the city could handle a record number of newcomers. When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began sending migrants to New York in August 2022, the Adams administration asked for help from Washington but said it would “welcome asylum seekers” with “open arms.” The mayor greeted migrants getting off buses.

New York has always had immigrants, but they didn’t show up at city shelters in overwhelming numbers, instead finding rooms or apartments informally. Since 1981, when the city and state settled an advocacy lawsuit rather than take it to the state’s highest court, the city has operated as if the state Constitution guarantees a right to shelter. But few envisioned the right to shelter as an open-ended immigrant-settlement program.

Rather than acknowledge the obvious — that New York City could not house an undefined number of people self-reporting as asylum seekers — Adams began contracting with hotel after hotel. In May 2023 the city took over the Roosevelt Hotel and called it the arrival center, housing people there, as well as directing them elsewhere. Eventually, more than 173,000 people came through the lobby. Adams didn’t secure a change in the city’s right-to-shelter obligation until March 2024, when the city began imposing time limits.

“Arrival center” implied a capacity that the city didn’t possess. New York officials added 69,000 people to city shelters’ nightly rolls by the peak month of January 2024, compared with a total of roughly 45,000 homeless people sheltered nightly in August 2021. By last June, the city had taken over rooms in 157 hotels, or 11.5 percent of the city’s hotel room supply, helping push rates on remaining rooms to record highs.

The pernicious cycle focused attention on the worst traits of Biden and Adams. Biden seemed oblivious. Adams seemed too eager, signing no-bid contracts, vulnerable to corruption, including for $202 a night per room at the Roosevelt, owned ultimately by the government of Pakistan.

The nation’s voters saw a party empty of leadership. As the president keeps his migration promises, weekly arrivals to the Roosevelt have fallen from 4,000 to 350, enabling Adams to shutter the hotel. The empty building will be a sign not of responsibility conscientiously met but responsibility carelessly abandoned when last year’s election remained in the balance.