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Kevin Lamarque/ReutersHouse Republicans will move forward next week with a plan to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over the audio recording of an interview with President Joe Biden conducted as part of former special counsel Robert Hur’s probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents, reports say.The House Judiciary Committee is planning to hold a “markup” for a contempt resolution on May 16, a source told the Associated Press. The resolution could then go to the full House for a vote.Republicans have repeatedly demanded that the Justice Department turn over the unredacted audio of Biden’s interviews with Hur—requests that the DOJ has rebuffed. Instead, the department gave only some of the records, excluding the audio, to committees conducting the impeachment inquiry into Biden.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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A few months ago, I had an email exchange with a person who works in the right-wing-media world. He said that crime was “surging,” a claim that just happened to advance the Trumpian narrative that America during the Biden presidency is a dystopia.I pointed out that the preliminary data showed a dramatic drop in violent crime last year. (Violent crime spiked in the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, during the coronavirus pandemic, and has declined in each year of Joe Biden’s presidency.) During our back-and-forth, my interlocutor at first denied that crime had dropped. He sent me links showing that crime rates in Washington, D.C., were increasing, as though a national drop in crime couldn’t be accompanied by an increase in individual cities. He insisted the data I cited were false, implying they were the product of the liberal media. “Perception is reality,” he told me. “Nobody is buying the narrative that crime is getting better.”Eventually, after I responded to each of his claims, he reluctantly conceded that crime, rather than surging, was dropping—but ascribed the source of the progress to Republican states. I corrected him on that assertion, too. (Crime has dropped in both red and blue states.) He finally admitted that, yes, crime was decreasing, and in blue states too, but said the drop was inevitable, the result of the pandemic’s end. So he blamed Biden when he thought violent crime was increasing and insisted Biden deserves no credit now that violent crime is decreasing.[Rogé Karma: The great normalization]I consider where we ended up a victory, but only a partial and temporary one. His fundamental storyline hasn’t changed. Virtually every day he insists that life in America under Biden is a hellscape and that his reelection would lead to its destruction.Welcome to MAGA world.I mention this exchange because it reveals something important about the MAGA mind. Trump and his supporters have a deep investment in promoting fear. At almost every Trump rally, the former president tries to frighten his supporters out of their wits. He did this in 2016 and 2020, and he’s doing it again this year.“If he wins,” Trump said of Biden during a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, “our country is going to be destroyed.” Trump also said this of Biden: “He’s a demented tyrant.” After Trump’s victories on Super Tuesday, he told an audience of his supporters, “Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying.”Other politicians have been fearmongers, but none has been as relentless and effective as Trump. He has an unparalleled ability to promote feelings of terror among his base, with the goal of translating that terror into votes.But as I recently argued, Biden has been president for nearly three and a half years, and America has hardly entered a new Dark Age. In some important respects, in fact, the nation, based on empirical evidence, is doing better during the Biden years than it did during the Trump years. And evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, who comprise the most loyal and embittered parts of the Trump base, enjoy perhaps the greatest degree of religious liberty they ever have, and they are among the least persecuted religious communities in history. The number of abortions, of particular concern for evangelical Christians, declined steadily after 1990. At the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, during which there was a decrease of nearly 30 percent, the number of abortions reached its lowest level since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. (During the Trump administration, the number of abortions increased by 8 percent.)For many Trump supporters, then, fear is not so much the cause of their support for the former president as a justification for it. They use fear to rationalize their backing for Trump. They have a burning need to promote catastrophism, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories.But why? What’s driving their ongoing, deepening fealty to Trump?Part of the explanation is partisan loyalty. Every party rallies around its presidential nominee, even if the nation is flourishing under the stewardship of an incumbent from the other party.But that reasoning takes us only so far in this case. For one thing, it’s nearly inconceivable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him. Richard Nixon committed only a fraction of Trump’s misdeeds, and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the “smoking gun” tapes. It was not his liberal critics, but the collapse of support within the Republican Party, that persuaded Nixon to resign.Beyond that, Trump was not an incumbent this cycle. In 2020, he lost the presidency by 72 electoral votes and 7 million popular votes; Republicans lost control of the Senate, and Democrats maintained their majority in the House. In the past, when a one-term president was defeated and dragged his party down in the process, he was shown the exit. But despite Trump being a loser, Republicans remain enthralled by him. So something unusual is going on here.Human beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal affiliations. Some are drawn to what the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen calls the “need for chaos,” and wish to “burn down” the entire political order in the hopes of gaining status in the process. (My colleague Derek Thompson wrote about Petersen and his work earlier this year.) And social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out that mutual outrage bonds people together. Sharing anger can be very pleasurable, and the internet makes doing this orders of magnitude easier.For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually susceptible to these predispositions. Grievances had been building, with Republicans feeling as though they were being dishonored and disrespected by elite culture. Those feelings were stoked by figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who decivilized politics and turned it into a blood sport. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.An extraordinary connection between Trump and his base was forged when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 and employed his dehumanizing language. Almost every day since then, he has selected targets at which to channel his hate, which appears to be inexhaustible, and ramped up his rhetoric to the point that it now echoes lines from Mein Kampf. In the process, he has fueled the rage of his supporters.Trump not only validated hate; he made it fashionable. One friend observed to me that Trump makes his supporters feel as if they are embattled warriors making a last stand against the demise of everything they cherish, which is a powerful source of personal meaning and social solidarity. They become heroes in their own mythological narratives.But it doesn’t stop there. Trump has set himself up both as a Christ figure persecuted for the sake of his followers and as their avenging angel. At a speech last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”“You’re not selling ‘Morning in America’ from Mar-a-Lago,” Steve Bannon, one of the MAGA movement’s architects, told The New York Times’ Charles Homans. “You need a different tempo. He needed to reiterate to his followers, ‘This is [expletive] revenge.’”Malice, enmity, resentments: These are the emotions driving many Trump supporters. They’re why they not only accept but delight in the savagery and brutishness of Trump’s politics. They’re why you hear chants of “Fuck Joe Biden” at Trump rallies. His base constantly searches for new targets, new reasons to be indignant. It activates the pleasure center of their brain. It’s a compulsion loop.Which brings me back to the exchange I described at the beginning of this essay. My interlocutor was clearly rooting against good news; though he would deny it, the implication of his response was that he wanted crime to get worse. Not because he was rooting for innocent people to die, though that would be the effect. What appeared to animate him—as it has for the entire Biden presidency—is the awareness that good news for America means bad news for MAGA world. Worse yet, good news would be celebrated by people—Biden, Democrats, Never Trumpers—he has grown to hate. But hate is an unattractive emotion to celebrate; it benefits from a polite veneer.[Read: You should go to a Trump rally]In this case, the finishing coat is fear, the insistence that if Biden is president, all that Trump’s supporters hold dear will die. This isn’t true, but it doesn’t matter to them that it’s not true. The veneer also makes it easier for Trump supporters—evangelical Christians, “constitutional conservatives,” champions of law and order, and “family values” voters among them—to justify their support for a man who embodies almost everything they once loathed.Even as Donald Trump’s politics has become more savage, his threats aimed at opponents more ominous, and his humiliation of others more frequent—he has become ever more revered by his supporters.I imagine that even some of the Republican Party’s harshest liberal critics could not have anticipated a decade and a half ago that the GOP would be led by a man who referred to a violent mob that stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power as “political prisoners,” “hostages,” and “patriots.” It’s been an astonishing moral inversion, a sickening descent. And it’s not done.

Signs hang at George Washington University’s Gaza solidarity encampment, created by students in conjunction with other DC-area universities, in Washington, DC on April 25, 2024. | Allison Bailey/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images And is it feasible? Plus three other questions about the student protesters’ demands. A core demand at the heart of the protests over the war in Gaza currently roiling college campuses across the US and around the world: that universities divest from Israel. That means withdrawing funds their endowments have invested in companies that are linked to Israel. Their demands have revived a long-running debate about whether universities should even consider ethics in their investment decisions and whether there is an ethical approach to divestment from Israel, or if these institutions should simply maximize returns. There is also a question of whether these divestment demands, which have been criticized by some pundits as overly broad, are feasible to meet or will even be effective. Their demands come as the Palestinian death toll (now over 34,000 people) only keeps rising and as full-blown famine breaks out in northern Gaza, with the rest of the territory remaining at risk. The US Student Movement for Palestinian Liberation released a statement April 21 indicative of what the protests are broadly calling for; it asked universities to “completely divest our tuition dollars from — and to cut all institutional ties to — the zionist entity as well as all companies complicit in the colonization of Palestine.” But students on some campuses have articulated more specific demands, seeking to focus their efforts on divesting from major weapons manufacturers that universities have invested in, ensuring that their universities no longer accept research funding from the Israeli military, or ending academic partnerships with Israeli institutions. Some universities, including Columbia University, have already rejected those calls and have swiftly called the police on protesters, prompting further escalation. Others — including Brown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota — have agreed to consider them. On Thursday, Evergreen State College became one of the first to approve an effort to divest. Divestment has been a tactic embraced by protesters in previous student movements opposing the South African apartheid regime and fossil fuel companies contributing to climate change. Those calls for divestment have had varying degrees of success — to what degree depends on how you define that success in terms of their financial or political impact. The movement to divest from Israel borrows from the traditions of those historical movements. But will it work the same way? What is divestment? Divestment is, essentially, reversing an investment. And the goal of divestment movements generally is “generating social and political pressure on the companies that are targets of divestment — stigmatizing behavior,” said Cutler Cleveland, a Boston University sustainability professor who was involved in the decade-long fossil fuel divestment campaign there. Current calls for divestment from Israel are an outgrowth of the broader Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which originated in 2005 among Palestinian civil society groups after several failures in the two-state peace process and was inspired by the movement to divest from South African apartheid. The BDS movement’s website argues that, since Israel’s founding in 1948 when it forced 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homes, the country has “denied Palestinians their fundamental rights and has refused to comply with international law” while maintaining a “regime of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation over the Palestinian people.” The BDS movement has therefore called on banks, local councils, churches, pension funds, and universities to “withdraw investments from the State of Israel and all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid.” However, critics of BDS say that it is inherently antisemitic in that it “effectively reject[s] or ignore[s] the Jewish people’s right of self-determination” and that if implemented, it “would result in the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. Student groups behind the recent protests on college campuses have denounced antisemitism, which they do not equate with opposing Israel. But there have been incidents of antisemitism, and some Jewish students say they feel unsafe on their own campuses as the target of threatening behavior and rhetoric. The BDS movement has recently notched new wins: Evergreen State College’s announcement last week, and one from Ireland’s sovereign investment fund in April stating that it will divest from six Israeli companies, including some of its biggest banks, based on their operations in the Palestinian territories. How endowments work Understanding whether it’s feasible for universities to divest from Israel requires understanding how their endowments work. Endowments are basically large rainy day investment funds whose returns far outpace growth from new donations, allowing universities to supplement tuition dollars and fees in supporting their daily operations. Harvard University has the largest endowment, at $49.5 billion in fiscal year 2023 — bigger than the GDP of more than 120 countries — but US university endowments average about $1.6 billion. Most universities are “very wary or averse to using the endowment as a political tool,” said Georges Dyer, executive director of the Intentional Endowments Network. That’s because university endowments have both a financial interest in maximizing returns — and a legal duty to serve the financial health of their institutions. Today, the vast majority of universities manage their endowments through external investment management companies, Dyer said. They might invest in private equity funds, hedge funds, or public companies, usually via index funds where they are one of many investors putting their money into a pool that is invested in a portfolio of stocks and bonds designed to track a certain financial market index such as the S&P 500. The portfolios of these funds are not tailored to the preferences of a particular university, which may make it difficult to divest from particular causes. These funds also present challenges in terms of transparency. The companies included in index funds are publicly reported. But hedge funds or private equity funds may not even disclose to their own clients where their investments lie, which is part of their competitive advantage. Universities with larger endowments tend to allocate more of their investments to these private investments, Dyer said. And that can make divestment difficult. What we can learn from past divestment movements Two major divestment movements have laid the groundwork for the current protests. In the 1980s, student activists pushed their universities to divest from firms that supported or profited from South African apartheid. Politically, they were effective: 155 universities ultimately divested. And in 1986, the US government also bowed to pressure from protesters and enacted a divestment policy. Along with increasing protests within South Africa led by organizations including the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, and trade unions, that kind of international pressure helped force the white South African government to begin negotiations that ultimately ended apartheid, at least officially. A few things helped make this movement successful. For one, protesters faced little pushback at the time given that much of the political establishment was embarrassed by the US’s ties to apartheid. Investments in commingled funds that are now favored by universities were not as widely used back then. And the interconnected, global economy as we know it today had not yet taken shape, making it practicable to isolate companies based in South Africa or with major South African interests. Currently, there is an ongoing movement to push universities to divest from fossil fuels, popularized by climate activist and Middlebury professor Bill McKibben. About 250 universities have at least committed to do so after years of campus activism, though this has overall had a negligible impact on the finances of fossil fuel companies (with the exception of coal companies), suggesting that it may not have yet had the impact hoped. Cleveland said that part of what helped persuade his university to divest in 2021 is the undeniable fact that fossil fuel companies have driven the climate crisis, which provided “a basis to argue that the university has a responsibility to align its investment decisions with its educational research.” Practically, fossil fuel divestment was also feasible. Though there are some quibbles about what constitutes a fossil fuel company — for example, do power plants that use fossil fuels count? — it’s a generally easy-to-define group. It’s also become easier to disentangle fossil fuel investments from an endowment’s portfolio because fund managers have started to offer purportedly fossil fuel-free funds, seemingly in response to external pressure. And finally, there’s a financial argument for divestment from fossil fuels: “If and when society moves toward a low-carbon economy, those investments in the fossil fuel companies will become worth less because much of their value is based on the fossil fuel reserves that won’t be used,” Dyer said. Can divestment work in the context of Israel? Universities divesting broadly from Israeli companies or companies that do business in Israel might not have much of a financial impact. “The data suggests that, economically, anything short of official sanctions by important economic partners such as the United States or European Union would be unlikely to produce anything near the kind of economic pressure BDS supporters envision,” researchers at the Brookings Institution concluded. Broad divestment from Israel would also be practically very difficult. Israel has many research and development partnerships with US entities, and is also a major player in industries such as computer technology, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. Many major multinational companies do business in Israel or with Israel, such as Google and Cisco. To exclude them entirely would require withdrawing from many kinds of commingled investment funds. It might be more practicable for protesters to target a specific list of companies, as students at Brown University are doing. They are seeking divestment from 11 companies that Brown directly invests in, accounting for less the 10 percent of its endowment: AB Volvo, Airbus, Boeing, DXC, General Dynamics, General Electric, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Oaktree Capital, Raytheon, and United Technologies. The question, however, is where universities would draw the line. “There’s the very subjective nature of the assessment of the war in Gaza that I think puts you in a very different terrain than the fossil fuel divestment debate,” Cleveland said. “It will just be so arbitrary about who you’re going to include and not include.” And even with more piecemeal efforts to divest, universities and students would need to weigh any financial hit to the endowment that would hurt the university community and its mission. “Students need to be confronted with moral questions, such as whether Columbia being associated with defense contractors is worth the tuition discount,” Oliver Hart, an economics professor at Harvard, and Luigi Zingales, a professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, write in Compact. It’s hard to know exactly what the costs of divestment to universities might be in the context of Israel. Chris Marsicano, an assistant professor of education studies at Davidson College, told PBS that research including his own has shown that divestment in the fossil fuel context had “at worst, a negligible effect for institutions like Stanford and Dayton and Syracuse and, in many cases, may have had a positive effect.” What would make divestment successful? Calls for divestment at universities have always been a means to a greater end, whether it be bringing down an apartheid regime or reversing climate change. In the current context, what student protesters really want is an end to the fighting in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, and the end of what they see as the injustices Israel, as the biggest cumulative beneficiary of US foreign aid, has exacted on Palestinians for decades. Whether universities ultimately divest and whether that has any material financial impact on Israel might be less important to the protesters than whether their calls for divestment alone can make the status quo politically untenable. The question is whether the political impact of the protests is lining up with that goal. Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have already latched on to the protests as an example of America’s need for their brand of “law and order.” “The movements themselves become a potent symbol for the other side,” said Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communication, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University. Both US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have publicly addressed the protests on US college campuses, suggesting that they are feeling at least some pressure to react — but are not bowing to it yet. Biden said Thursday that the protests had not caused him to reconsider his strategy in the Middle East, and his aides remain confident that the protests will not overshadow his case for reelection in 2024. But young people leading the protests represent an important constituency for Biden. “Demanding financial disclosure and asking US universities to break their financial ties has proven to be very powerful and threatening,” said Jennie Stephens, a professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University who has written a forthcoming book about climate justice on campus. How powerful and threatening, however, remains to be seen. A version of the story appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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