Experts are calling it a coup. Law professors warn of a constitutional crisis. And we’re just one month into the second Trump administration.
Less than a year ago, the Main Green was home to Brown’s Gaza solidarity encampment. The banners were big, the letters were red, the flags were raised. You couldn’t miss it. Hundreds of Brown students rallied in protest, refusing to let the University turn a blind eye to the bloodshed in Gaza. The student body flexed its activism muscles and proved that the University’s long tradition of protest lives on. Yet today, walking across the Main Green, you would never know that a full-scale assault on American democracy is occurring before our eyes. Action is long overdue.
In The Herald’s opinion pages, one op-ed urges us to speak out about the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar and Sudan. Another demands that Brown take legal action against President Trump’s efforts to halt federal grants and loans for higher education. Yet another implores Brown’s liberal students to engage in conversation with their conservative peers. The writers make excellent points but have yet to comment on the elephant in the room: the conspicuous lack of resistance on campus to the second Trump administration.
For those of us aspiring to be doctors, lawyers, journalists or federal employees — and especially those of us who hold identities implicated by Trump’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion — our career prospects are in jeopardy. Trump has launched a plan to slash funding for medical research. The independence of the Justice Department is under attack, and federal agents and prosecutors, perceived as enemies of the administration, are being forced to resign or otherwise be fired. Trump has pledged to jail journalists whose coverage he disagrees with. Thousands of federal workers have been fired in Trump and Musk’s ongoing government purge, many in violation of statutes requiring due process. So many of the jobs we’ve worked toward for years are simply disappearing.
Many of us, though — especially the wealthy and white — will be okay. Many of us can afford to be complacent. But since when have we let that stop us from taking action? We cannot separate the wanton destructiveness of this administration from everything we claim to care about. This is about Gaza, which Trump has proposed to seize, and Sudan, where conditions are increasingly dire in the wake of Trump’s decision to pull the plug on the U.S. Agency for International Development. This is about trans rights and gay rights, immigrant rights and women’s rights and the right to birthright citizenship. This is about so many issues that it’s overwhelming and exhausting.
It is often easier to ignore the catastrophic headlines and focus on the things we can control. This is an understandable method of coping, but a dangerous one. As Masha Gessen writes in “Surviving Autocracy,” there are two main ways in which we navigate the anxiety of living in the age of Trump. One is to accept it. Another is to “stop paying attention, disengage and retreat to one’s private sphere. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics.” So, what do we do? We do what we do so well at Brown. We organize, we protest and we make noise.
On Saturday, hundreds rallied at the Rhode Island State House to protest Musk and the Trump administration. But up on College Hill, campus was quiet. Brown should be at the forefront of these demonstrations, standing alongside our Providence community in resistance. The momentum is there, and it’s time for us to join in.
As Timothy Synder puts it in “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” “generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference.” I refuse to believe that Brown is a community ruled by cynicism. At Brown, it is cool to care. So let’s exercise our right to protest while we still have it. America has opened the door to fascism, but we don’t have to stand idly by as Trump ushers it in.
Brunonians, you have been uncharacteristically quiet in the face of this assault on our bedrock American principles. It’s time to shake off the hibernation and go to the mat for our values. Democracy should go out not with a whimper, but with a roar.
Isabel Tribe ’27 can be reached at isabel_tribe@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
