Last week, when the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison cut a deal with President Donald Trump to break free from an executive order that could have ruined its business, the powerhouse firm framed the concessions as a mere reaffirmation of its principles. Those principles include: “We refuse to be deterred by the unpopularity of a client or his cause.”
But on Thursday morning, hours before Trump took to social media to proclaim that the firm, known as Paul Weiss, had pledged $40 million worth of pro bono services to initiatives aligned with his administration, the firm severed ties with the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil-rights organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens.
“LULAC’s long-standing relationship with Paul Weiss has been a fruitful one,” the organization’s CEO, Juan Proaño, told me over the weekend when I contacted him about the decision by Paul Weiss, which has been associated with prominent Democrats, to stop representing the group. The move is a previously unreported aspect of the firm’s concessions to Trump. The firm did not respond to a request for comment.
“I suppose they view LULAC as a DEI organization because we’re Latino,” Proaño said, referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion—commitments derided by Trump. He added, “We understand what the pressures are.”
The pressures boil down to fear—fear of adverse executive action, fear of associations disfavored by a vengeful president, and fear of a government bent on retribution.
Two months into Trump’s second term, fear is taking hold across broad cross sections of American society. Business executives are privately speculating that the U.S. president could be a foreign asset, his actions a “gift to China,” but biting their tongues in public. University administrators and the lobbyists they’ve retained are quietly expressing relief that Columbia is the government’s “whipping boy,” keeping their heads down to avoid a lashing of their own. Government scientists, apprehensive that their research will be scrapped, are scrubbing their work of anything that might smack of diversity efforts.
The fear stems from aggressive actions the president has taken to punish his perceived adversaries. These actions go beyond broadsides on social media and efforts to intimidate vulnerable groups including immigrants and transgender Americans, hallmarks of Trump’s first term in office. This time, he is also withholding government assets, whether in the form of federal funding, which has been the lifeblood of scientific and medical research, or security clearances and access to federal buildings indispensable to legal and other professional work.
The consequences are severe: hiring freezes, loss of clients, abandoned clinical trials. So fear of confronting the president spreads, quieting those who might otherwise be motivated to speak out.
First Amendment scholars and other experts say the repression is more extensive than at any other time since the McCarthy era, when anti-communist paranoia reached a fever pitch and produced blacklists, congressional hearings, and zealous prosecutions targeting Hollywood, academia, left-wing politics, and the labor movement. “I live in an age of fear,” E. B. White, the essayist and author of children’s classics including Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan, wrote in 1947.
A similar campaign of intimidation is now taking shape against universities, law firms, and federal workers. The fear coursing through them in recent weeks is a defining feature of authoritarian societies, experts told me.
“It’s a common tactic of authoritarian regimes to get people and institutions to violate their own principles out of fear, which then makes them less effective over time,” says Lee Bollinger, a lawyer and legal scholar who served as president of Columbia University for more than 20 years and, before that, as president of the University of Michigan.
Two developments last week revealed the depths of the fear within big law firms and prominent research universities.
The first was the move on Thursday by Paul Weiss to appease Trump so he would rescind an executive order stripping its lawyers of security clearances and barring them from government buildings—one of several similar orders targeting law firms because their members had represented his partisan opponents or aided his criminal prosecution. Then, the next day, Columbia caved to demands by the Trump administration to ban face coverings, reinforce campus policing, and overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies department as part of a standoff over $400 million in federal funding.
The concessions to Trump sent jolts through the legal and academic communities, where others suddenly felt less latitude to challenge administration actions. The “appeasement strategy,” as Bollinger puts it, “is really not one that I think ever works out in the end.” A better approach, he told me, is “very vigorous collective resistance, especially through litigation and the courts.”
Cecilia Menjívar, a sociologist at UCLA, told me that fear, as it spreads through society, can create the possibility for collective action. But it can also limit dissent. Autocrats around the world, she said, use fear and insecurity to silence opposition—“so the only voice is that of the autocrat.” Trump has acknowledged that fear is central to his authority. In a 2016 interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post, he said, “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”
The then-candidate was referring to fear among adversaries abroad. Now he has whole segments of American society running scared. In a statement, the White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told me, “President Trump wasn’t elected to satisfy the status quo, he was elected to upend the broken bureaucracy and bring common sense polices back to our Nation’s Capital. Regardless of what anyone says, the President has a mandate for everything he’s doing and the American people are on board.”
In the two months since Trump returned to power, there have been scattered acts of dissent. But they seem only to accentuate the broader silence within major American institutions.
Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University, warned in an essay for The Atlantic last week that the Trump administration’s crusade against Columbia endangers all of university life and, by extension, the country. “Every American should be concerned,” he wrote.
But many academic leaders are “keeping their heads down,” Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, a Washington-based nonprofit, told me. He described that as a “completely rational strategy.”
“There’s a conflict there, and I feel it myself,” Mitchell said. “Many university presidents are saying, Let’s take our time and watch where all this settles; let’s pick our battles, and let’s keep our powder dry. There will be a time when we’re challenged to stand up for our values, but now is not the time; it’s not that time yet. And I agree with that decision.” A lobbyist working with universities describes the sentiment a different way: “They’re just happy that Columbia is the whipping boy.”
The reaction from the medical community has also been muted. When asked if the American Medical Association has a position on sweeping cuts to medical and scientific research ordered by the Trump administration, a spokesperson for the professional group—the largest and most influential physician organization in the country—pointed to a March 5 letter to the National Institutes of Health submitted by the AMA’s president and nearly 50 other similar groups warning that the damage from the administration’s policy would be “profound and generational.” But the group’s president, Bruce Scott, a Kentucky otolaryngologist, has not spoken publicly about the research cuts. And the AMA did not weigh in on the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an outspoken vaccine skeptic, to be Trump’s health secretary.
Rachel Cohen, a 30-year-old associate at the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, tendered her resignation last week in a firm-wide email imploring her colleagues to speak out against a demand by the Trump administration that law firms detail their hiring practices as part of a crackdown on diversity initiatives. “Colleagues, if you question if it is as bad as you think it is, it is ten times worse,” she wrote.
“People are terrified, but everyone understands and admits what’s happening,” Cohen, a graduate of Ohio State University and Harvard Law School who specializes in finance law, told me.
Under Trump, the business imperatives influencing major law firms are running into conflict with their professional responsibilities, says Bob Bauer, a lawyer and law professor at NYU who served as White House counsel under former President Barack Obama. “The business side of the profession is at this point such a powerful draw away from what I’ll call Atticus Finch–like behavior,” Bauer told me, referring to the lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird who takes a principled stand against racism in the legal system.
Many business leaders are aghast at Trump’s actions, according to an anonymous survey released by Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute, which hosted about 100 CEOs at a conclave in Washington, D.C., this month. Eighty percent of the CEOs said they found themselves apologizing to foreign partners for Trump’s “capriciousness,” according to the survey results. Eighty-five percent said the chaos emanating from Washington is a “gift to China.”
On the roof terrace of 101 Constitution Avenue NW, adjacent to the Capitol, the leaders of such companies as Pfizer, JP Morgan, and American Airlines offered blunt assessments of Trump. “CEOs are whispering, ‘Is he merely a foreign asset, or is he a foreign agent?’” Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, a Yale School of Management professor and president of the leadership institute, told me. “He’s at war with the country, and they know it.”
Business leaders will speak out publicly once they feel sufficient societal pressure, Sonnenfeld said. “So I say, ‘Where’s everybody else? Where’s the American Medical Association? Where’s the clergy?’” Otherwise, CEOs “fear being targeted and forced from their positions,” he said, pointing to the departure of Matthew Levatich as CEO of the motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson after he became a focus of White House criticism during Trump’s first term.
At least one development would compel business leaders to speak up, Sonnenfeld said: “They virtually all tell us if the market drops 20 percent, they’ll be screaming their lungs out.”
Short of that kind of blow to their bottom line, “not complying is not an option,” a former senior Republican official in touch with prominent business leaders told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive conversations. “It’s the same calculus as Columbia,” the former official added, referring to the university’s efforts to appease the administration. “They are caving on everything so they can live to fight another day.”
Fear of speaking out is heightened, the former official said, because Trump has effectively removed many of the institutional checks on his authority to carry out retribution—including by bringing the Justice Department and the FBI more firmly under his control and firing inspectors general, who might probe improper government-contracting decisions.
“If you’re subject to unjust action by the administration, there’s no one to appeal to, or the appeal will take so long that the damage will be done,” the former official said. “There’s nothing to stop these folks in the short term from destroying entities and individuals they don’t like.”
Few are more afraid of the president destroying them than people inside the federal government. Federal workers have been swapping stories about new software appearing on their devices, worried that Elon Musk and his deputies at DOGE are “watching our every keystroke,” as one U.S. official told me.
“The fear is really palpable,” a senior government scientist told me. “I get up every morning to see if there’s something from the nameless, Kafkaesque HR department. I’ve stopped checking my email after 8 p.m. because if something comes at night, I won’t be able to sleep.”
The scientist said he feels compelled to stand up for the values of the federal health agencies—“to be part of the resistance”—but the fear is that “if you stand up, you’ll be cut down.”
Some civil servants have sued the Trump administration over their dismissal—part of a blizzard of early litigation challenging Trump’s executive actions. Dozens of rulings have temporarily halted aspects of the president’s agenda, including an effort to gut USAID as well as certain attempts by Musk’s team to access sensitive government data.
“The fear is real, but I have a somewhat contrarian view of the current situation: My perspective is that Trump’s flood-the-zone approach has been met and indeed surpassed by rule of law shock and awe,” says Norm Eisen, a lawyer who helped manage the first impeachment of Trump and, recently, has helped bring cases against the president contesting his efforts to dismantle the federal workforce and expand his own powers. Trump has taken notice, singling out Eisen during remarks at the Justice Department earlier this month: “He’s been vicious and violent.”
Trump last week took steps to scare off lawyers who would dare oppose him, directing his attorney general to identify firms associated with “frivolous” lawsuits so they can be targeted with executive actions—a move, a Washington lawyer told me, “designed expressly to make law firms think three times before suing the administration.”
Meanwhile, firms are taking steps to protect themselves. One Washington firm hired a vendor to scan right-wing message boards for threats that might bubble up to the White House and occasion an attack from the president. The firm also modified its document-retention policy in preparation for possible government probes.
The question haunting the firm, and prompting these actions, according to one of its members, who insisted that the firm not be identified to avoid reprisal, is, “Where are we on the list?”
