Opinion: The people who want institutions to stand up to Trump
Like so many other powerful people, companies and institutions, the partners of the elite law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom bowed to President Trump in a matter of weeks.
Surpassing them in courage are more than 250 people affiliated with the firm’s prestigious fellowship program, who have signed their names to a letter condemning the firm for striking a deal with the Trump administration rather than fighting alongside clients and competitors who have also been targeted by the president for providing legal services to Trump’s political rivals. In the letter, which was written after the deal, current and former fellows said Skadden had betrayed the rule of law “in the service of autocracy” and implored its partners to abandon the deal.
“It is never too late for Skadden to do the right thing. Your courage will be worth it,” they wrote.
The remarkable letter gave voice to many Americans who do not share Trump’s vision for the country and have watched with growing rage and grief as prominent institutions and people have caved to him or failed to defend the values they claimed to stand for. Others appeared to be gripped by inertia. That rising anger is increasingly evident in early election results, growing protests and ire at town halls.
The coveted Skadden fellowship is a two-year program that pays the salaries of dozens of recent law school graduates who engage in legal work free of charge for Americans living in poverty. It is work that many Skadden fellows continue long after they leave the fellowship. In its deal with the White House last month, Skadden pledged $100 million toward causes that the administration supports.
Who stands up
Isabel Flores-Ganley, a current Skadden fellow who signed the letter, is providing legal representation to workers, largely to undocumented and LGBTQ people, through the nonprofit Legal Aid at Work. “It’s allowed me to do the work I’ve always dreamed of doing,” Flores-Ganley told me. She said both her parents were activists. Her mother, she said, was a teacher, and her father a janitor from El Salvador who was once a labor organizer. “To find myself in a position where I’m able to do workers’ rights, especially in communities that remind me of my dad, is significant.”
Flores-Ganley said her conscience compelled her to speak. “As someone who is benefiting from this institution, I would feel complicit in standing by and being silent.”
The decision of these people to speak up is the latest example of an unmistakable pattern. Three months into the second Trump administration, it is vividly clear that many of the Americans refusing to back down or stay silent are ordinary people and everyday workers: lay clergy and academics, teachers and scientists, artists and journalists, doctors and line attorneys.
At Columbia University, for example, school administrators made a series of changes last month to preserve $400 million in federal funding that the Trump administration has threatened to cut. The university agreed to implement many of the Trump administration’s demands that it restrict campus protests; create a university definition for antisemitism; and place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department under a special administrator.
But students and faculty have continued to protest. On April 4, police removed a group of students demanding that school officials disclose whether they had aided Trump administration officials in the March 8 arrest of the former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian activism on campus. Many of the students protesting on April 4 were Jewish and had chained themselves to the gates of the university.
At Skadden, the firm’s partners left the moral clarity to Thomas Sipp, a 27-year-old Skadden associate who quit the firm. “Skadden is on the wrong side of history,” he wrote in an email to colleagues.
‘No one of note’
Among the alumni of the Skadden fellowship are some Americans with a higher profile, including Matt Meyer, the governor of Delaware, who signed the letter. But most are private citizens Americans have never heard of.
“I’m no one of note,” Lauren Koster, an attorney and former Skadden fellow who runs a small firm representing charter schools and nonprofits in Connecticut and Massachusetts, told me. I asked her whether she was afraid of speaking out publicly.
Instead of fear, Koster said signing the letter had brought her relief. “There is just this sense, oddly, of peace. I feel like this is the right thing to do, and there’s really nothing that can shake me from that,” she said. “No one is coming to save us; we have to save the republic. Feeling that to my core does not leave room for fear.”
Terry Maroney, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who served as a Skadden fellow from 1999 to 2001, said she felt an obligation to speak up because others had not. “I’m a tenured professor with a named chair at a very elite institution,” she said. “I know that doesn’t protect me from being targeted, but I think it obligates me to take the risk, especially when I see that far more powerful people who have a lot more leverage than I do are failing to do so, which makes me furious.”
Several attorneys with whom I spoke expressed doubt that the letter would change the minds of Skadden’s partners. They added their names anyway. They weren’t the most powerful people in America. But they had decided to say what they believed, and do what they could.
Mara Gay is a member of the New York Times editorial board.