Powerful institutions from academia to law are preparing to pivot, but their recent history of compliance with the Trump administration remains an indelible record that demands scrutiny.
After the midterm elections on November 4, 2026, those who orchestrated this quiet capitulation are already moving to hide their tracks.
As progressive journalist Walker Bragman noted in the hours after the midterms, many institutions sacrificed their integrity on the assumption of inevitable authoritarian success. “Many people, institutions, and companies sacrificed their integrity because they thought Trump’s power grab was inevitably going to succeed and he’d be the American Orban. Don’t forget their names,” Bragman wrote, as reported by The Nation.
The Architecture of Institutional Compliance
The past two years revealed a stark divide between the resilience of ordinary citizens and the fecklessness of the American elite. While professionals in law, technology, and science often chose to “obey in advance,” these sectors were systematically hollowed out. This was not merely passive observation; it was an active alignment with a movement that sought to dismantle the very foundations of public health and academic freedom.
While RFK Jr is an absolutely terrible choice for HHS Secretary, I think @MartyMakary at FDA, @DrOz at CMS and @DrJBhattacharya at NIH are all pretty reasonable I have plenty of policy disagreements with them They are smart and experienced We will need them to do well
The academic sector, in particular, offers a masterclass in this decay. At Princeton, political scientists Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo publicly advocated for Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, framing his potential appointment as a path toward “fresh thinking.”
The reality, however, saw the NIH reduced to a shell of its former self, leaving a legacy of institutional damage that experts suggest will require decades to repair, according to The Nation.
Ashish Jha, the former dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, publicly characterized figures like Marty Makary, Dr. Oz, and Jay Bhattacharya as “pretty reasonable” in the weeks following the 2024 election.
The Selective Defense of Academic Liberty
The hypocrisy of the “heterodox academy” has become increasingly difficult to ignore. While self-styled champions of free speech frequently decry “woke” culture, they remained conspicuously silent when the Trump administration targeted scholars whose work centered on race, gender, or human rights. The removal of Mary Bassett from the FXB Center for Human Rights at Harvard occurred without public outcry from high-profile academics like Larry Summers or Steven Pinker.
“It made them little different from the Trump administration officials attacking universities around diversity, equity, and inclusion, yet no one called them out as they used their seniority in academia as a shield for their behavior,” The Nation reported. This selective application of academic freedom effectively transformed these institutions into shields for their own, rather than bastions of intellectual inquiry.
Yale and the Strategy of Appeasement
The experience at Yale University serves as a case study in how elite institutions attempted to manage the political climate through calculated concessions. The administration and its trustees adopted a posture of appeasement, which included clamping down on student protests and scrubbing resources related to diversity, equity, and inclusion from official platforms.
These actions by universities, scientists, and other institutions reflect a broader institutional fecklessness and cowardice in their response to the Trump administration.
“The argument is always the same: rather than judge MAHA supporters on what they do, we should judge them on what they say. This is dangerously uninformed about how conspiracy movements work, said Michael Hobbes, as quoted by The Nation.”
As the nation looks toward the 2028 elections, the primary mission is to resist the onset of “historical negationism.” The receipts—the specific records of who stood by and who facilitated the decay—are the primary sources for future accountability. The rout of the Republican agenda in the recent midterms suggests that the pillars of white supremacy and democratic backsliding are not as immovable as the elite enablers once feared.
Repairing the damage to American science and public health is inextricably linked to the broader effort to sustain a multiracial democracy. The movement for a “Third Reconstruction,” as championed by the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, provides a moral framework for this recovery.
While the road ahead is difficult, the recent election results show that even in historically locked regions, voters can change the outcome. The question remains whether those who facilitated the status quo will be permitted to rewrite their own histories, or if the record of their capitulation will finally be held to account.
