College Protests. a Trump Trial. Raging Wars. Is Everything ‘on Fire’?

The Washington Post / Reis Thebault, Hannah Natanson

13:57 JST, May 6, 2024

This has been a superlative spring, in the worst ways. The largest campus protest movement of the 21st century. The first criminal trial of a former U.S. president. Some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation. And, on top of it all, two world-rattling wars whose horrific daily death tolls are so often overshadowed by domestic crises.

From coast to coast, Americans have been thrust under a cloud of chaos that seems to thicken with every breaking-news alert. And in an already contentious and consequential election year, there is seemingly no relief ahead.

“Everything is on fire,” said Preeti Kulkarni, a freshman at George Washington University, whose campus in the nation’s capital has been riven by clashes over Israel’s war in Gaza.

For those who lived through the anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s, or the Vietnam War demonstrations of the ’60s and ’70s, the current tumult – and the way it has collided with broader social and political upheaval – echoes some especially tense times in the country’s history.

But if the present moment has been one of discontent, it has also been one of dissonance. Polling shows that nearly 80 percent of Americans are generally satisfied with their personal lives. Yet roughly the same share is dissatisfied with the direction the country is headed. Unemployment is at its lowest level in decades, yet voters continue to register their displeasure with President Biden’s handling of the economy.

And despite wall-to-wall coverage of campus protests, in one national survey of young people – conducted before the latest round of uprisings – the Israel-Gaza war rated near the bottom of issues that respondents said were most important to them overall. In that same poll, just 17 percent of college students said they had attended a political rally or demonstration.

Still, historians confirm that this is a troubled and exceptional era, in which deep divisions have infected nearly every inch of public life, from politics to pop culture.

“There has been an erosion of democratic values and a rising political tribalism that I think is extremely dangerous,” said Robert Cohen, a history professor at New York University who has spent decades studying student activism. “The way politics is functioning now is so unhealthy that almost anything can happen. Even the Taylor Swift romance gets spun as some conspiracy – and that’s a really bad place.”

‘I’m getting so stressed’

The turmoil on college campuses is playing out both publicly – in encampments set up on quads and in occupied buildings – and privately, over text and in direct messages.

For Kulkarni, this new tension reached a personal peak a few weeks ago, when she got a blistering message from a pro-Palestinian friend. She was incensed that Kulkarni had just posted an Instagram photo posing with another friend who supports Zionism.

“You lack humanity,” the friend wrote. “I’m done with your friendship. … I hope that in the future you educate yourself on the ongoing situation in Palestine.”

The message stunned the 18-year-old, who was sitting in a study room, scrambling to finish an essay on Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex.”

“That was so jarring, because people have different beliefs all the time,” Kulkarni said in a later interview. “We live in a society, we have to interact with people who may not agree with us.”

Then she wondered: Do we live in a society anymore? Her former friend’s outrage seemed somehow inevitable, a microcosm of the national discourse. Kulkarni sent a long response, which read in part: “I believe issues are a lot more complex than you think they are, and compromise can best be achieved through open discourse and collaboration.”

This person, she thought, did not seem willing to have a nuanced dialogue. So Kulkarni blocked the number.

A tendency to demonize those one disagrees with is one of the more frightening features of this moment, Cohen said.

He had enjoyed more than 30 years in his mostly quiet corner of research – radical student politics – until a couple of weeks ago, when a deluge of media requests began flooding his inbox from around the world, as reporters asked him to compare current campus protests with those past.

While the demonstrations – which call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and university divestment from companies said to be profiting off the war – have spread quickly and the police crackdown has been severe, they are still much smaller than those that unfolded around Vietnam, Cohen said.

The scope of the demonstrations and the demands of the students, he said, more closely resemble the fight against South African apartheid in the 1980s, when organizers likewise called for university divestment. But at that time, Cohen added, there were no visible campus forces defending the apartheid regime. Today, pro-Palestinian groups, counterprotesters and police have converged at the encampments, with sometimes violent results.

One undeniable similarity, Cohen said, is the way elected officials, especially far-right Republicans, have sought to politicize the demonstrations, accusing liberal university leaders of allowing far-left students to run amok, as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said at Columbia University last week.

For Cohen, Johnson’s performance paralleled the 1966 California governor’s race, in which then-candidate Ronald Reagan prevailed by promising to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” following the university’s antiwar protests.

“They always want to conflate the liberal university’s leadership with the radicals who are disobeying university leadership,” Cohen said. “This is an old playbook.”

As rhetoric on the right becomes harsher, the potential for further violence will increase, Cohen said.

At Indiana University, the specter of bloodshed loomed, literally, overhead this week, when state police snipers were spotted on the roofs of campus buildings, including at the Memorial Union, a favorite student hangout.

For Kate Hutner, a 20-year-old sophomore double-majoring in journalism and fashion design, this was the final proof: “Yeah,” she said, “America is on fire.”

That police posture was a response to a pro-Palestinian encampment set up in the grass in front of the union, and it made viscerally personal the sense of unease Hutner had been feeling for years now. This foreboding came up frequently in conversations with friends: how they don’t want to have children and bring them into a world imperiled by climate change and conflict, one where Hutner and her cohort have already lived through a seemingly endless string of mass shootings, protests and culture wars.

And now, chaos was on campus. “I’m getting so stressed,” Hutner texted a friend, noting that her professor had been arrested on campus, “now 3 of my finals are canceled like I’m anxious.”

There are only two times Hutner feels a sense of calm – when fantasizing about her summer internship in Milan, or in bed, grateful she made it to the end of another day.

“It’s like, ‘Thank goodness I can go to bed and sleep,’” she said. “Because when I’m sleeping, I’m not thinking. When I’m sleeping, I don’t have to think about any of this.”

At Emory University in Atlanta, philosophy department chair Noëlle McAfee did not intend to go viral when she wandered outside her office last week to check on the student protesters.

But what she saw shocked her: Police had swarmed the encampment and one was beating a student, who was on the ground with her hands over her head, McAfee said. She approached the officer and yelled at him to stop. Moments later, the professor was under arrest, and footage of police leading her away quickly circulated online.

While those on social media quickly characterized her as an avatar for either Palestinian solidarity or anti-Israel sentiment, she has tried to avoid taking sides. Instead, McAfee has tried to be an advocate for academic freedom, public discussion and the right to protest – values she said school administrations subvert when they call in police to shut down demonstrations. Rather than escalate the situation, she said, school leaders should engage with protesters and attempt to work through the polarization, as seen at Brown and Northwestern universities.

“Instead of bringing in police and tearing down encampments, why don’t you go to REI and get a tent and sit down and talk with the students?” McAfee said. “What are you afraid of?”

‘Unprecedented times and uncharted territory’

Near the southern tip of Manhattan, more than 120 blocks from Columbia, where student protesters sparked this latest wave of demonstration, former president Donald Trump has been staging his own kind of seething sit-in, behind the closed doors of a drab art deco courthouse.

Trump, of course, is not on trial by choice – indeed, his legal team sought to delay the court date for as long as possible. But ever since the proceeding began in mid-April – the first involving a former president – Trump has been exercising his right to dissent, even if it means violating a gag order.

In recent days, he has returned to a frequent fixation: crowd size. More specifically, Trump has complained that courthouse security has prevented “thousands of MAGA supporters to be present.”

“If they did the same thing at Columbia, and other locations, there would be no problem with the protesters!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

While the college demonstrations have occasionally eclipsed Trump’s hush money trial, the proceeding is historic. It is the first of four criminal cases against the 45th president to go to trial, and last month it intersected with a U.S. Supreme Court hearing on the separate legal question of whether Trump can claim immunity to avoid prosecution.

Even by the former president’s standards, it has been a whirlwind.

“It is overwhelming,” said Meena Bose, the executive dean of Hofstra University’s Peter S. Kalikow School of Government, Public Policy and International Affairs. The news cycle, she said, “has reached the point where I can’t quite keep up with it.”

Bose, a presidential historian, has been trying to finish an update to an American government textbook – a tall task when new history continues to be made at warp speed.

“It’s impossible to write a paragraph,” Bose said, without seeing some new development out of New York or Georgia or the Supreme Court. There are, she said, only so many ways to say that this has never happened before.

“We really are in unprecedented times and uncharted territory,” Bose said.

But it is difficult to pinpoint when exactly these “unprecedented times” began, Bose said, and one could argue they date to Trump’s election in 2016, the coronavirus pandemic or the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

“I think we are in a unique point in American history and it’s difficult to say how we’ll look back at this,” Bose said. “But without a doubt, American politics has become even more tumultuous in the last year than it has been for the last decade.”

A number of domestic and international issues have the potential to roil the country further in months to come.

On Wednesday, a near-total ban on abortion took effect in Florida, the nation’s third-most populous state, in what amounted to an overnight transformation of one of the South’s few remaining refuges for people seeking the procedure. For someone in the state’s southern tip, the closest abortion clinic is a 14-hour drive away.

The new restrictions come months before voters will consider a November ballot referendum that would enshrine the right to abortion in Florida’s constitution, a fight expected to be costly and hard fought.

Also on Wednesday, the Arizona House, after weeks of hand-wringing, voted to repeal a Civil War-era ban on nearly all abortions, which was set to go back into effect next month. Like Florida, the state may also consider in November a constitutional amendment to protect abortion.

The political pandemonium has effectively obscured what is usually a reliable headline grabber – war, with bloody conflicts continuing to rage in Ukraine and Gaza.

Casualty estimates for Russia’s invasion, which began more than two years ago, are notoriously difficult to pin down, but at least tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers have been killed. Estimates of the Russian death toll range from 50,000 to more than 180,000.

In Gaza, the Health Ministry says more than 34,000 people have been killed since the war began, while Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed during Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that sparked its sweeping military response. Another 263 Israeli soldiers have been killed since the launch of the Israeli operation in Gaza.

Still, elected officials and the public remain divided over the role the U.S. government should play in both wars, yet another reminder of the many American rifts.

One more possible measure of our disunion: For two weeks in April, a dystopian film about a bloody alternative reality where America is at war with itself topped box office charts, grossing more than $50 million. “Civil War” is a work of speculative fiction, but some viewers emerged from theaters feeling like it captured the essence of caustic political debate in the country.

After a screening at the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Los Angeles, Adrian Stucker and Justin Bondy considered possible real-world parallels in the movie, which sought to avoid explicit discussion of partisan politics. In the film’s authoritarian president, the two friends saw Trump, and in the vision of an unraveled America and disintegrated democracy, they saw a conceivable future.

“It’s a scary, plausible situation,” Stucker said.

“I hope it’s not the case,” Bondy said. “But I’m afraid for this election.”

As it has so often in recent days, discord hung in the air outside the theater, too. The night before, a group of counterprotesters stormed the pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California at Los Angeles, launching fireworks and hurling wooden beams at student protesters. That same day, Trump, between appearances at his criminal trial, called for colleges to come down even harder on the demonstrators.

Stucker and Bondy have both tried to unplug from the news – for months, Bondy blocked out all sources but the NFL Network, an increasingly popular coping mechanism – but lately they have felt themselves tuning in more often, and becoming more anxious.

One reliable source of comfort, they say, comes from the knowledge that so many previous generations also thought the sky to be falling, only to keep on living. When Bondy’s grandmother, in her 90s, declares things worse than ever, his mother chimes in with: The 1960s would like a word.

“I don’t think it’s the end of the world,” Stucker said.

But, like many Americans, they’re bracing for whatever is ahead.

“I guess,” he added, “it’s a good time to go to a bar.”