I have a new article up at The UnPopulist, continuing my work for them on charting Donald Trump’s abuses of executive power.
This time, I focus on an effort to deprive universities of tax-exempt non-profit status on vague and arbitrary grounds.
Earlier this month, the Treasury Department and the IRS proposed a rule that would revoke tax-exempt status from private schools—everything from elementary schools to universities—that offer “targeted support to Black or other minority students.” This isn’t just a ban on explicit racial preferences or quotas. It’s a ban on any help offered specifically to minority students, down to minority student clubs and mentoring programs, which the administration apparently considers an offense against that most victimized minority in America: white men.
Aside from the nefarious goal of this rule change, we should be concerned about how the administration is using the IRS to impose it. The politicization of the IRS’s nonprofit rules has implications that go far beyond college admission policies. It is a way to gain direct presidential control over civil society.
A word on the substance of this particular policy. The Trump administration is trying to use the language of civil rights, talking about eliminating special favors, but doing so in a way that is actually designed to roll back the advances of the civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow.
Let’s put it this way. I grew up still seeing ads for the United Negro College Fund, with its famous motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” The fund aimed at providing scholarships for talented young black people who otherwise could not afford to go to college. Is this a special favor for black students? Yes, but one that was based on merit, recognizing the disadvantages they faced from poverty and from the lack of educational opportunities and helping them overcome that.
But under Trump’s rules, this would be targeted by the IRS as an illegitimate purpose. Follow the link about how the Trump administration pressured universities into disavowing a mentoring program for black Ph.D. students because this is “discriminatory.” Here’s what that looks like in practice:
MIT, like many of the schools cited in the investigation, had paid The PhD Project “a nominal fee” to participate in the group’s university fairs or conferences, allowing MIT to send representatives to answer questions about attending their school, spokesperson Kimberly Allen said.
MIT informed the government in April 2025 it had ended its participation in such conferences.
I don’t know about you, but telling MIT it can’t even engage in recruitment of black students doesn’t sound like anti-discrimination. It sounds like a return to discrimination. And that’s a lot clearer when you realize that this administration is chock full of explicit racists. (This is something I’ve covered in the past, but I’ve been storing away even more examples, which I’ll be sharing soon.)
But that’s not the focus of this article. I focus on the arbitrary way the Trump administration is reshaping its rules for tax-exempt nonprofits. While they’re imposing new restrictions on universities, they’re loosening restrictions on churches by allowing religious organizations—but not other tax-exempt nonprofits—to engage in political activity and endorse candidates. I sum up the administration’s policy this way: “Starve the universities, feed the churches. Exploit a politicized IRS to discourage activity you deem politically unwelcome in institutions you regard as hostile, while you open the floodgates of money and influence for institutions you regard as friendly.”
I point out how vague statutes and undefined powers in the law made this possible, but then I point to a more ominous factor.
Today’s authoritarian right has revived and adopted the ideas of the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. The central idea of Schmitt’s theory is that no legal doctrine can really be based on universal and neutral liberal principles. Instead, he insisted, the only basic distinction in politics is between friend and enemy. The fundamental political imperative is to reward one’s friends and punish one’s enemies.
Here we see that doctrine put into practice in the nitty-gritty of IRS tax rules.
And please do follow those links, especially Andy Craig’s article, which lists some of the contemporary American right-wing endorsements of Schmitt. It’s one of those things that sounds so cartoonishly evil you can’t believe it’s really happening—but then the vice-president name-drops a Nazi theorist.
But you don’t need a theorist to engage in the age-old political impulse to rig the system in favor of your gang, which is the rule of our politics right now, until we demand something better.