Alan Zendell, July 24, 2025

Donald Trump has often been accused of behaving like a gangster. The charge has considerable credibility. His association with organized crime figures in the 1980s and ’90s, including learning how to defy laws and courts at the feet of their shared consigliere, Roy Cohn, is well documented in photographs and interviews. For people who remain skeptical about the kinds of people Trump considers friends, the current, scandal over Jeffrey Epstein, should be convincing.

Epstein was as much a criminal as John Gotte and the other Gambino crime family thugs Trump hung out with in New York nightclubs. In many ways, he was worse. His crimes were premeditated, predatory assaults on women designed to provide perverted, salacious entertainment to wealthy elites whose moral standards were comparable to Trump’s – that is, they all, including Trump, have none.

Ever since Epstein became a political football, rumors have flown about how close he and Trump were, but yesterday, a slew of interviews showed up in the news media, confirming that Trump and Epstein were “best friends” for as long as twenty years. Stacey Williams, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, told CNN that during the several months she was Epstein’s girlfriend, the only person he ever referred to as a friend was Trump, and in her words, “They were very close and they were up to no good.”

There’s much more, but today, that stuff is just for background. The real issue is that Trump’s tendency to act like a gangster has dominated the first six months of his presidency, and nothing makes the point better than the extortion game he’s playing with some of America’s finest universities. Today, the White House announced that Columbia University agreed to pay a $200 million fine for failing to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism.

Since the day he was inaugurated, Trump has blown every dog whistle he could find. He turned ICE loose on millions of innocent Hispanics under the guise of ridding the country of murderers, rapists, drug smugglers, and sex traffickers who Barack Obama and Joe Biden allowed into our country. He made a show of firing top-ranked African Americans wherever he finds them, claiming they were only hired because they were black and were basically incompetent. He encourages Israel, whose Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has the same lack of respect for laws and human decency as Trump, to continue his campaign of genocide against two million Palestinians in Gaza.

Does that sound like a man who cares about discrimination and stamping out hate? He cares as much about anti-Semitism as he does about all the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers whose deaths he pretends to lament, while giving the nod to Vladimir Putin to go on killing as many as possible. To Trump, anti-Semitism is just another tool of extortion.

The war in Gaza caused many pro-Palestinian groups to demonstrate on American campuses. Elite universities like Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, and Northwestern, who have always bent over backwards in defense of the free speech of minorities, allowed the demonstrations to continue, and they became a thorn in the side of the Trump administration, which would have preferred not to draw attention to its willingness to enable the complete destruction of Gaza.

This is not about Hamas, the criminal, terrorist organization that started the war by killing over 2,000 innocent Israelis and a number of foreigner nationals who happened to be in Israel at the time. This is not a debate on how far Israel should be allowed to go in retaliation and to protect its citizens in the future. This is about Donald Trump seizing on a hot button issue and twisting it for his own purposes.

The $200 million dollar fine Columbia agreed to pay was, plain and simple, an extortion payment motivated entirely by Trump’s need to satisfy his base after running in 2024 on an anti-woke agenda. Declaring war on progressive-leaning universities to end diversity and curtail free speech was an essential part of Project 2025. What we see playing out in broad daylight is the mugging of our American democracy.

I’m a Columbia graduate. I would point out that my class (of 1964) was over 80% Jewish, something that raised the hackles of the real purveyors of anti-Semitism. The notion that Columbia, Harvard, and the others are anti-Semitic is pure nonsense. Did Columbia handle the Palestinian protests well? No, they were embarrassingly inept, but the idea that their poor management was part of an organized scheme to harm Jewish students is absurd.

Columbia’s crime, as we alumni are making clear to their administrators, was bending the knee to Trump to protect the $1.4 billion in federal research grants Trump had taken hostage. If you wake up one day soon wondering where your rights disappeared to, mark this date as one that accelerated the process. It’s one of our generation’s Days of Infamy, every bit as damaging to the United States and what it stands for as Pearl Harbor was.