Wisconsin’s leaders need to stop being doormats

Lawsuits and stern statements won’t cut it—and nothing short of escalated resistance will.

One of the central problems of the Trump era is that most observers of U.S. politics have set a frightfully low bar for what constitutes “standing up” to Trump and the fascist Republican Party. To the extent that they care to clear it at all, most of Wisconsin’s prominent political, educational, and media leaders manage to execute the leap with their feet still practically touching the ground. And I’m focusing specifically on people whose positions dictate that they should present some meaningful challenge to Trump.

It is somehow possible to conceive of someone as “standing up” to Trump even if they’ve rolled over for him or at times eagerly given him what he wants. Somehow our definition of this allows for anything short of consistent refusal, defiance, and obstruction. Make a little noise and a few gestures, and that’s good enough, regardless of whether they’ve done anything to meaningfully impede Trump or defeat fascism.

We can argue all day over what these people can reasonably or legally do within the accepted parameters of their formal authority. I don’t care. Right now, fascists are the only people in the United States who seem to believe that they can and should reshape the world as they see fit, damn the consequences and scruples. This means that the left and mainstream liberals are losing to people who shouldn’t be able to win anything, other than maybe malpractice lawsuits against their cosmetic surgeons. If we don’t fight back and fight for grand visions of our own, then we are letting the fascists tell us what we can do, even what we can ask for.

One thing they definitely should do is use their public bullhorns to encourage the open rebellion that we do in fact need at this moment. I believe it would make a difference if a large group of elected officials, universities, media outlets, and civil-society organizations made a unified call for the immediate dismantling of what is now clearly a dictatorship—essentially telling Trump to fuck off—even if it made for catastrophic funding shortfalls in the short term, which we know are coming anyway. The fight ahead would still be arduous and ugly, but this could galvanize a massive uprising from an already enraged public, hopefully the kind that forces out illegitimate regimes without sparking violence on a tragic scale. 

But that’s apparently too much to ask from the leaders we have. Take our Democratic Senator, Tammy Baldwin, for example.

Baldwin in January joined with every single one of her fellow Democratic Senators in voting to confirm Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who now openly presides over a regime of kidnapping international students who, in his words, “make a ruckus.” That vote happened on January 20, the day Trump was inaugurated and when he immediately began issuing dozens of racist, corrupt, and transphobic executive orders. No one who claims to meaningfully oppose Trump should be giving him anything he wants, ever, but especially not at the very moment when he’s launching a dictatorial blitzkrieg. 

Baldwin not only voted to confirm former District 7 Congressional Rep. and Gumby-looking fuck Sean Duffy as Secretary of Transportation, but provided a glowing introduction to Duffy’s confirmation hearing and issued an enthusiastic press release after the vote. Baldwin justified her support for Duffy in terms of bipartisan efforts to get infrastructure projects done in Wisconsin. OK, so they got a bridge built. This sort of logic breaks down when dealing with a regime that has made it very clear that it won’t accept any legal or civil checks on its power, won’t be reasoned with or bargained with, and will reward any concessions by simply screwing its targets even harder for even more concessions. Duffy hasn’t approached his new job in a collaborative spirit, because that is of course not how an ironclad Trump sycophant would behave. He has joined Trump in blaming DEI efforts for a tragic airplane crash, attempted to bully New York City into dropping a new toll program, made asinine comments about safety on public transportation, and, just to remind us that Elon Musk isn’t the only natalist freak in the administration, worked to tie federal transportation funding to marriage and birth rates. Certainly a novel combination of ideas.

In fact, Governor Tony Evers ended up sending a stern letter to Duffy in March, because it turned out that the administration’s illegal tampering with federal grants has really not helped us get infrastructure projects done in Wisconsin. Which gets us to the feebleness of key state-level elected Democrats. Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul have mostly responded to Trump’s power grabs by making statements and filing (or joining) lawsuits, but otherwise rolling over for the administration’s demands. Kaul’s attempt to stop Elon Musk from bribing Wisconsin voters ahead of the April 1 state Supreme Court election showed surprising initiative for our normally useless AG, but it wasn’t enough and, more to the point, it didn’t work. Somehow Kaul failed to nail a guy who announced, albeit in a since-deleted post, his intention to blatantly and plainly violate state law. Maybe the “take-backsies” defense is a real thing, maybe our judges were too afraid to cross the world’s richest man, or maybe, as one Columbia County judge suggested, Kaul didn’t really do the homework. 

In any case, litigating is not enough—especially given that the administration is now openly defying the courts anyway. (Not that the jellied spine of the Roberts Court presents much of an obstacle in the first place.) Lobbying is not enough. Stern, reasonable statements are not enough. Impeachment proceedings aren’t enough. We must go beyond formalities and do things that make the administration’s hold on power simply untenable.

It’s a little disconcerting that The New York Times in January cited Evers’ 2025 State of the State speech as an exception to Democrats’ befuddled, timid response in the opening days of this vindictive new dark age. “Many other Democratic leaders have been quieter in their pushback to the new administration,” an accompanying caption in the Times read. I suppose this is true in the same sense that hitting the mute button is quieter than inching the volume up to 1. This was not a display of defiance, but a call for bipartisanship that will simply never come, no matter how meekly or reasonably Democrats plead for it. A leader who grasped the danger of the moment would have spared us the innocuous midwestern-goober schtick for one merciful evening. (My god, even if Evers became a heroic anarchist freedom fighter tomorrow, he’d still go to hell for calling his wife “the cream to fill my cream puff” on live television.) 

Still, the award for best impersonation of a doormat in Wisconsin would have to go to the top leadership of the state’s public universities, including UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin and UW System President Jay Rothman. They’ve responded to catastrophic federal funding cuts by pointing out the damage they’ll do and the contributions federally funded research makes to society, plus some lobbying and litigating. This would maybe, kind of, be enough if we were talking about Congressional budget cuts. We are not. We are talking about illegal and unilateral interference with funds already allocated and awarded. We are talking about a dictator using federal funds to extort universities into carrying out ideological purges. Public-ed higher ups should at minimum be literally using terms like “illegal” and “abuse of power” in their public statements about threats to federal funding. 

Granted, the use case for people like Mnookin and Rothman is not to stop the paired assault of austerity and right-wing political meddling that public universities face, but to make sure it’s carried out in an orderly fashion. These are the people who struck an unconscionable bargain with legislative Republicans to secure funding that was already in the state budget. Rothman has suggested cutting liberal-arts programs at UW System campuses that serve low-income students. Mnookin called in the police to beat the shit out of students and professors at the spring 2024 pro-Palestine protest on Library Mall, and then helped promote a Big Lie that portrayed all this as a necessary response to (non-existent) aggression on the part of protestors. Trump’s war on higher ed is not so much a departure as it is a jarring acceleration of the destructive trends UW leaders are already going along with.

UW-Madison administrators have also made statements that legitimize Trump’s bullshit double-talk about antisemitism on college campuses. At the same time, they’ve made sure to repeatedly emphasize the measures UW has already taken to chill free speech on campus and claim an absurd position of political neutrality—essentially saying, “ease off, we obeyed real good before you even asked!” Their statements on threats to international students have been downright ghoulish in their neutral legalese. These statements are often couched in disavowals of agency or knowledge, and fail to address the nightmare of living in a country where the government disappears dissidents at will. An acknowledgement that the situation “may be highly unsettling” is the strongest description they can muster when describing a campaign of state terror. 

Scour everything these people have said since the election. Whether you’re a student, a faculty member, a staff member, or just a Wisconsin resident who appreciates the value of a good state university system, you’ll find little reassurance that they have your back. We don’t need more generalized platitudes about creating a “welcoming campus environment for all.” We need affirmative statements that specifically address what the regime is doing. Something like, I dunno: “We support your right to protest and to voice opinions whether or not the Trump administration likes those opinions, reject the administration’s efforts to demonize pro-Palestine views as antisemitic, and will do everything in our power to protect you from deportation and other forms of repression.” Oh, but that would probably violate UW-Madison’s new “Institutional and Public Position Statements policy.” 

Mnookin improved her messaging about international students in an April 17 op-ed for the Wisconsin State Journal, while still managing to fall well short of the bare minimum. This ran five weeks after the state kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil, and 12 days after the administration began hearing about visa terminations at UW-Madison. Mnookin found the courage to write this about the government kicking out people for no stated reason or for minor infractions: “Revoking visas on such flimsy grounds or on no clear grounds at all seems arbitrary and unjust.” (Italics mine.) She prefaces this by writing that: “To be sure, the federal government has both the right and responsibility to enforce immigration rules and to protect U.S. interests and national security. And international students must abide by our laws.” That’s a bit too close to some of the grotesquely backhanded statements Congressional Democratic leadership made about Khalil. It calls out an injustice, while reaffirming the underlying system that made said injustice possible. 

Focusing on the legalities does help to illustrate that the administration’s actions are unjustified, sure. Trouble is, we’re dealing with a lawless administration that is targeting international students for three key reasons: 1) punishing dissent, 2) ethnic cleansing, and 3) creating additional pressure for universities to cave to the administration’s slate of demands. Mnookin’s op-ed, tellingly, doesn’t address any of this. It doesn’t mention protest or affirm the rights of international students to speak their minds, unless we’re counting Mnookin’s observation that UW-Madison’s “diverse perspectives challenge assumptions and spark innovation.” 

Otherwise this piece is a bit too much about what immigrants can do for us. It focuses on the contributions of international students to the community, the economy, and the public good (hey, at least it’s still in Mnookin’s vocabulary). It highlights the illustrious careers of four past international students. Mnookin is right to brag about the great people who come here from all over and go on to achieve immense things. This would be excellent material for a splash page or a pitch to prospective donors. It’s solid messaging for another occasion—a time when students aren’t in court right now fighting off deportation efforts and even more students are living in fear. Falling back on the value proposition is just tone-deaf, but I really think it’s the only way the cowed liberal higher-ed elite knows how to talk these days.

Harvard University’s decision in mid-April to resist a number of Trump’s demands throws the failures of UW leadership into even sharper relief. Major public universities belong on the front lines of this fight, every bit as much as the oldest and richest Ivy League schools. In all fairness, Mnookin on April 22 did join about 200 other university presidents and chancellors in signing onto an open letter from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, rousingly titled “A Call For Constructive Engagement.” Addressed to no one in particular, it reaffirms an important set of values—”Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation”—but tells us nothing about what it will take to actually fight for those values.

On the media front, Wisconsin still has its share of journalists striving to do great work within flawed institutions. The fact remains that the country’s largest newspaper conglomerate, Gannett, and the fourth-largest, Lee Enterprises, have a huge footprint in Wisconsin media, owning a combined total of nearly 20 newspapers in the state. That’s going to become even more of a vulnerability than it already is. The regime is already using regulatory threats against publicly traded media companies to advance the right’s generations-long war on press freedom. They’ll keep doing so when publicly traded companies including Gannett and Lee need approval for things like mergers and acquisitions. Already, Gannett has preemptively rolled back its DEI efforts, even though the administration hasn’t even directly told the company to do so yet. Don’t count on these companies to defend the big domino that a free press represents.

Throw the dictatorship out, accept nothing less

We need to set a new floor for our demands. It is not sufficient to demand that the Trump administration cease behaving in illegal and unreasonable ways. It is not enough to demand that Trump himself be ousted. Impeachment? Not enough. A stern talking-to in the 2026 midterms, which Trump will absolutely not allow to be conducted in a free and fair manner? Not enough. We must demand the immediate dismantling of this entire regime and the wholesale annihilation of the organized political right in the United States as we know it. 

That means holding new elections for every federal elected office, abolishing voter-suppression measures, abolishing the Electoral College, abolishing partisan gerrymandering, and throwing out our entire rotten system of campaign finance. An important precondition for this is that it be a truly multi-party election. In this order, the Republican Party should be replaced by dust and rubble, and the Democratic Party should be replaced by a multiplicity of smaller, more ideologically coherent parties. This would create more openings for small parties of every description and create stronger incentives for elected officials to form effective, responsive coalitions. The resulting government will need to establish stability and legitimacy. It will never fully be rid of agonizing challenges, factional strife, or bad-faith nonsense, but we can at least ask for a world where a reasonable political process has a fighting chance.

This means officially banning the Republican Party and adequately reckoning with the many, many behaviors of Republicans that do in fact constitute crimes. Top to bottom—everything from the Republican National Committee to the most obscure little county chapter—dissolve it, seize its assets for the public treasury, subject every single officer or staff member outranking the janitor to a civil trial in which financial penalties and other forms of reparations may be assessed. It means removing every single Republican Party-affiliated elected or appointed official in the United States, at every level of government, and banning them permanently from public life—no running, no voting, no campaign contributions, no ability to serve on the board of any institution. (Don’t get me wrong: Everyone else who’s lost their voting rights as punishment for a crime should have them restored, including people currently incarcerated.) 

Those who have earned government salaries should be forced to repay them, either through community service, outright asset seizures, or confiscatory taxes levied against their incomes or estates, including after their deaths if necessary. This should also extend to major Republican donors and the right-wing civil-society organizations. No, I am not talking about rounding up everyone who votes Republican. The point is to focus on people with real power in the fascist movement. Enough hand-wringing about healing the political divide. The resounding, decisive defeat of fascism in the United States will have a healing effect all its own.

People will still have the right to run crackpot campaigns, vote for crackpots, form crackpot political parties, advocate for crackpot policies, and voice crackpot opinions across the political spectrum. They just won’t have the right to do so while wielding the vast resources of the world’s most powerful political party. They won’t have the right to hold an entire country—the entire world, really—hostage to their hatreds, delusions, pet grievances, and insatiable lust for power. They won’t have the right to gain power through the political process while maliciously undermining the legitimacy of that same process. They won’t have the right to press-gang academics and journalists into laundering their ideas. None of these things have ever been rights, but right-wingers in the U.S. have come to feel entitled to them. We must utterly break them of that attitude. 

This is entirely in line with basic principles that undergird any reasonable conception of law. Republicans have openly worked to violate the rights of hundreds of millions of people and openly sabotaged the systems that (sometimes and imperfectly) protect those rights. Violate the rights of others, and certain of your own rights take a backseat to accountability and the prevention of further harm. This is simple.

This also should not be a mirror of the vindictive ideological purge that the regime is already carrying out. Criminal and civil actions against the regime’s supporters can be firmly based upon their actions. Fixating on ideology in this context would be a waste of time—some of these people are simply opportunistic psychopaths without sincerely held beliefs in the first place. On the other hand, a sincerely held fascist ideology requires actions that trample upon the rights of others.

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of punishment measures like prison and execution, even for people who’ve knowingly cashed in their humanity, even when the demand for retribution is completely understandable. If Republicans have shown us anything, it’s that cruelty corrodes the mind and spirit and maybe even the body—it can’t be coincidence that so many right-wingers look like someone built them out of tannery scraps. We owe them no kindness or grace or high-road healing platitudes. We owe it to ourselves and each other to prevent the rise of another government of sadists. 

For most of these people, we should create a humane program of house arrest or exile, requiring them to put their skills to some sort of constructive use where possible. That still leaves a lot of people in U.S. politics who have literally committed war crimes and other crimes against humanity. We should work with the international community to facilitate their prosecutions regardless of their political affiliations. Either way, it beats letting them ship all of us to a death camp in El Salvador for a photo opp, which is quite literally what they’re already doing to people.

If all of this seems extreme or overly elaborate, ask yourself what the path forward looks like. Ask what you can accept. Ask what you can survive. Ask what gets you to the future you’d actually want for yourself and the people you care about that. Reconcile all that with a world where the people running the country today, or people who align with them, still have a chance at taking power, hurting more people, and, by the way, turning the planet into a gigantic murder oven on self-destruct mode. Our situation is irreconcilable. It is intolerable. Leaders who don’t understand that are leaders we cannot afford.