Obama calls on citizens, colleges and law firms to resist Trump agenda

Former president Barack Obama called on universities and law firms to stand up to intimidation from President Donald Trump’s administration and urged Americans to prepare to “possibly sacrifice” in support of democratic values.

In a speech Thursday night at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, Obama also accused Trump’s government of working to destroy the international order created after World War II.

Obama painted a picture of a postwar political environment in which disagreements happened within a shared respect for certain rules and norms, such as free speech and an independent judiciary, which he said was now eroding. “It is up to all of us to fix this,” he said, including “the citizen, the ordinary person who says, no, that’s not right.”

The former president said that he disagreed with some of Trump’s economic policies such as widespread new tariffs, but that he is “more deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don’t give up students who are exercising their right to free speech.”

Obama called for universities to be prepared to lose government funding to defend academic freedom and other core values, or dip into their endowments - though endowments are sometimes funded with restrictions from donors on how that money can be spent.

“If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?” he said. “If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.”

The Trump administration last month stripped $400 million in federal grants and funding from Columbia University. The administration said it may reinstitute the money after Columbia made policy changes related to last year’s pro-Palestinian campus protests, such as bringing in new security officers with arrest powers, banning protests in academic buildings and reviewing educational programs that focus on the Middle East.

The federal government is also reviewing billions in federal funding to Harvard University and has paused grants to Princeton University. The Education Department said it is investigating 60 universities and colleges over alleged antisemitism during student protests - mostly during former president Joe Biden’s term - denouncing U.S. support for Israel as it has fought a war in Gaza.

The Trump administration has also deported or is attempting to deport some students and scholars who participated in pro-Palestinian advocacy who do not hold U.S. citizenship. The Education Department has demanded that some schools hand over names and nationalities of students suspected of antisemitism, a highly unusual step in civil rights investigations.

Obama did not specifically mention the campus protests or conflicts in the Middle East in his remarks, but said, “It has been easy during most of our lifetimes to say you are a progressive or say you are for social justice or say you’re for free speech and not have to pay a price for it.”

“Now we’re at one of those moments where, you know what? It’s not enough just to say you’re for something; you may actually have to do something,” he added.

Obama said that there would have been an outcry from Republicans if he had sought to punish law firms that disliked the Affordable Care Act. Trump has used executive orders to financially target law firms connected to attorneys involved in investigations and cases against him or who have represented his political enemies such as Hillary Clinton. “It’s unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me or a whole bunch of my predecessors,” Obama said.

“Imagine if I had done any of this. Imagine if I had pulled Fox News’s credentials from the White House press corps,” he added, in an apparent reference to the Trump administration’s ban on the Associated Press from official events, instituted after the wire service said it would continue using “Gulf of Mexico” instead of the administration’s new name for the oceanic basin, “Gulf of America.” Obama’s administration did block Fox News from interviewing an official during his first term but backed down after backlash.

He concluded his remarks by advocating for values such as resilience and respect for others regardless of skin color, gender, sexual orientation and religion. “I know that these days, the idea of inclusion has somehow been deemed illegal, but you know what? I believe in it,” he said.