This Memorial Day, Americans pay tribute to service members who gave their lives in defense of this country and its values. That includes more than 5,000 members of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines who died in Afghanistan and Iraq during what President George W. Bush dubbed the “global war on terror.” Their remit was to uproot the threat that terrorists posed to the United States, combating the Taliban and (far less justifiably) the regime of Saddam Hussein in an effort to prevent any attacks mirroring those of Sept. 11, 2001.
The war on terror comes for Trump’s political and cultural enemies
The administration is using “terrorism” as a cudgel to attack individuals and institutions.
May 26, 2025
How surprised they might be to learn about the new terrorist threat to the homeland: Harvard University.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was terminating the certification that allows Harvard to accept and enroll foreign students. A federal judge quickly imposed a stay on the action, but it’s not clear that the Trump administration won’t eventually get its way. Students at the school certainly aren’t assuming that this will all resolve in their favor.
What’s striking about the action is the predicate offered by DHS.
“Harvard’s leadership has created an unsafe campus environment,” a statement from the department read, “by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students, and otherwise obstruct its once-venerable learning environment.” Harvard, DHS claims, was being held accountable for “fostering violence, antisemitism, and pro-terrorist conduct.”
It is undeniably true that there exists antisemitic sentiment in the United States, sentiment that drove a striking increase in hate crimes targeting Jewish people between 2023 and 2024. We cannot deny, particularly after the shocking killing of a Jewish couple in D.C. last week, that hostility to Israel’s approach to Gaza is being deployed as a rationale for violence.
What the administration does, though, is leverage fear of antisemitism and terrorism by the left to enact its agenda.
DHS’s claim of pervasive dangers is remarkably light on evidence. The allegation that Jewish students were subject to “physical assault” appears to center on what contemporaneous news reports described as a “minor clash” that involved protesters opposed to Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza attempting to keep a Jewish student from filming a protest. (Two graduate students involved in the 2023 confrontation were ordered to do 80 hours of community service this year.)
Where’s the support for terrorism? Where it was when federal agents arrested Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in New York: in a blended slurry of opposition to Israel, support for Palestinians in Gaza and isolated statements of support for Hamas (in Khalil’s case, from other people entirely). To my knowledge, no evidence has emerged of any college student, native-born or immigrant, offering material support to Hamas. Instead, Khalil’s activities were described as being “aligned with Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” Terrorism by proxy, as at Harvard.
In isolation, this would all appear to be awfully dubious. But we don’t have to take it in isolation, to treat the accusations as being offered in good faith. It is part of a broader pattern of Trump and his team making over-the-top allegations against those it seeks to target. Words such as “terrorism,” “antisemitism,” “invasion” and “treason” are used by the administration to heighten claims that its opponents (actual or ideological) are dangerous to the nation rather than simply to the president’s agenda. At times, the hyperbole has a legal aim, as with the administration’s insistence that there exists an invasion of immigrants that allows the federal government to use powers otherwise reserved for war. Usually, though, it’s just rhetoric.
For example, the administration has been relentless in disparaging Kilmar Abrego García, who was living in Maryland before being sent to his native El Salvador in violation of a court order. In addition to amplifying unproven claims that he was a member of a gang, administration officials, including the president, have asserted that Abrego García is somehow a “terrorist.”
It also disparaged Khalil as “antisemitic” despite his appearing on CNN during protests at Columbia and stating, “Our Jewish brothers and sisters … are an integral part of this movement.” The White House mocked Khalil’s arrest by bidding him “shalom” — even as it welcomed a putative refugee from South Africa who wrote on social media that “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group” and “not Gods chosen.” DHS has stated that it is vetting immigrants’ social media accounts for antisemitism, but it is apparently doing so selectively.
The DHS edict isn’t even the first punitive action taken against Harvard University. Early this month, Education Secretary Linda McMahon (in a letter that heavily mirrored the vernacular and mannerisms of the president) excoriated Harvard for having “failed to abide by its legal obligations, its ethical and fiduciary duties, its transparency responsibilities, and any semblance of academic rigor.” In that letter, McMahon informed the school that it would no longer been eligible for federal grants. What she did not allege, though, was that the school was fostering a “pro-terrorist” environment.
The rationales are scattershot because — as is so often the case with this president — the desired outcome preceded the evidence. The right has long been hostile to American universities, seeing them (without evidence) as engines of liberal thought. Anything that isn’t directly related to future employment is dismissed as soft or wasteful. “Liberal education” has become a pejorative that hinges on the word “liberal.”
DHS Secretary Kristi L. Noem was interviewed on Fox News soon after her department’s policy on Harvard was announced. She was asked whether other schools, including Columbia, might be next.
“This should be a warning to every other university to get your act together,” Noem said. She added that “antisemitism will not be stood for, and any participation with a country or an entity or a terrorist group that hates America and perpetuates this type of violence, we will stop it.”
The Trump administration has taken the governmental approach of the war on terror — the scapegoating, the fearmongering, the power centralization, the tone policing — and applied it to people with purported links to groups that allegedly offered approval for the actions of terrorists.
It’s also begun deploying the people with the guns.