We Need to Make a List of Cowardly Institutions

I like the movie Michael Clayton. It’s not perfect, but Tom Wilkinson is perfect in it. Tilda Swinton is great, too. She’s the scaredy-cat head of legal at uNorth, a Monsanto stand-in. The worst thing she can imagine is not achieving. The title character, played by George Clooney, is a shady lawyer who knows he’s shady and has enough self-confidence to play the game without being a total shit. He can imagine worse things than not achieving.

Swinton won a best supporting actress Oscar for her performance. And, I get it, making this amoral horrible character a woman is a choice, and there are plenty of men in that movie who are more terrible than her, so we can discuss that in the comments if you’d like.

That said, one of the many great scenes in the movie is her panic attack meltdown in a bathroom where she’s frantically trying to dry her armpits because she’s sweating like crazy. I think of this scene when I read this about the “Big Law” firm Paul, Weiss:

Obviously, this is offensive for many reasons, but if you want to adopt a Michael-Clayton-like amoral perspective, it’s mainly fucking stupid. When you bow down to a bully like Trump, you’re just signaling to him that you’ll take his shit, and he’s going to want more, more, more until, like a mob boss, he knows that you have nothing left. So, $40 million and groveling is just the start for Paul, Weiss’ journey into the heart of darkness. People who hire lawyers want someone who both knows the law, and knows the play, and clearly they didn’t know the play here.

Paul, Weiss’ act of obeisance was prompted by a Trump EO singling them out for the sin of employing a lawyer who had previously worked for New York DA Alvin Bragg in Trump’s hush money trial. Apparently, all the “big law” firms tried to get together and have a coordinated response, but they couldn’t get it done. So, now, Trump will try to pick them off one-by-one.

Some of the law firms will push back, and some won’t. The ones who push back should be memorialized and celebrated. The ones who don’t should be shunned.

Similarly, it looks like Columbia’s descent into absolute subservience to the Trump Administration continues apace:

When we last checked in with Columbia, they had suspended, expelled and revoked diplomas from students who had taken part in demonstrations. That wasn’t enough, so now they have to add some more capitulation in a vain attempt to placate Trump. They’ll have to do more in the future.

When this is all over, my guess is that the list of universities who pushed back on Trump’s threats and withholding of money will be small or even nonexistent. Tilda Swinton’s character in Michael Clayton is probably a brave soldier compared to the average university administrator.

Columbia has an endowment of $14.8 billion. The brave thing to do here would be a combination of raiding the endowment and some judicious budget cuts. Instead, capitulation. We see this over and over in the last couple of months. The filibuster, which had to be preserved for a rainy day, wasn’t used in the CR fight. Endowments, more rainy-day funds, aren’t being used when it’s coming down in buckets. When you have Tilda-Swinton-in-Michael-Clayton types in charge, this is what you get.

These people cannot be in charge when it comes time to reclaim our country from the Musk/Trump junta.