Bravo to all those engaged in the struggle against Trump’s anti-democratic bullying

The all-out war being waged by President Trump against so many American institutions and bedrock principles is sickening to watch.

In February, after Elon Musk took his chain saw to America’s most consequential foreign aid agency, I predicted that children would die as a result.

This month, PBS reported that a Nigerian mother of twins lost one of her babies to starvation, thanks to the dismantling of USAID. A former USAID chief nutritionist estimated that the cuts to food assistance could result in about a million children not receiving treatment for severe food nutrition and potentially 163,500 deaths. So much for rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Bill Gates told the Financial Times.

Every day brings a new horror as President Trump takes a blow torch to the Constitution.

He blackmails universities and corporations to force them to end efforts to diversify their student bodies and work forces. He makes life as hellish as possible for immigrants, legal and otherwise. He wants to kill off birthright citizenship. Suspend habeas corpus. Ditch due process. Accept “gifts” from foreign governments. Erase the line that separates church and state.

On Thursday, he ratcheted up his battle against Harvard University, announcing that it would no longer be permitted to enroll foreign students in what the New York Times described as “a major escalation of the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.”

The estimated 7,000 foreign students currently enrolled at Harvard, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem declared, would immediately have to transfer to other universities or lose their legal status.

While some Americans are positively reveling in the cruelty and chaos spewing from the White House, and many companies are knuckling under to Trump, those of us who oppose the descent into lawless bullying search for heroes and signs of hope anywhere we can find it.

Thankfully, Harvard is fighting back. With its $53-billion endowment, the school is uniquely suited to the task. Thursday, it filed a lawsuit challenging the termination of the school’s participation in the government’s student visa program. In April, it sued the administration over its revocation of $2.2 billion in research grants.

In January, Costco’s board of directors unanimously reaffirmed the company’s commitment to its diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In February, 97% of Apple’s shareholders voted against a proposal to abolish the company’s DEI initiatives. Executives at Delta Airlines have declared that diversity initiatives are a critical part of the company’s business strategy. Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont-based ice cream maker known for its progressive politics, said it would not be “intimidated or bullied” into abandoning its commitment to racial and social justice.

Recently, I found a ray of hope in an unlikely place: Madison, Wis., where I was attending the law school graduation of my step-granddaughter, Kenna.

I happened to drive past a Penzeys Spices store and pulled over to take a look. In an effort to counter some of the despair the second Trump term has caused, I have taken refuge in cooking, which yanks me out of my head and distracts me from all the bad news.

When I can no longer stomach the headlines, I zone out with my favorite online chefs: Notorious Foodie, a home cook who ends each of his videos by throwing a towel at the camera (I highly recommend his lasagne), and Chef Reactions, who offers a split-screen snarky commentary of trashy cooking videos (think Sandra Lee’s infamous Kwanzaa cake).

At the checkout counter with my herbes de Provence, pumpkin pie spice and ground Turkish sumac berries, the cashier gave me a little blue spice packet with a bleeding red heart labeled “Resist! Keep America Alive.” On the back: “Season Liberally.”

I did not realize that I had stumbled into what is probably Ground Zero of the business world’s Trump resistance. Based in Wisconsin — the state that can take credit for bringing Musk to his knees, the company’s founder and owner, Bill Penzey, has always been vocally liberal, and the outrages of the Trump era have given him an abundance of material.

On his website, in newsletters and Facebook posts, Penzey combines his politics with specials on various spices. In 2017, on the second anniversary of Trump’s infamous slander of Mexican immigrants, Penzey offered his customers free bottles of Mexican vanilla. “It seems a good day to apologize to the people of Mexico and Latin America,” he wrote on Facebook.

On the Penzeys Spices website, next to the typical “About Us” tab, he has added another, “About Republicans.”

“We’ve arrived at the point where there’s no way to respect the nonsense the Republican Party is promoting and have any hope of overcoming the problems we as a nation and we as a planet face,” Penzey writes. “Given the choice between saving America and planet Earth or saving the feelings of Republican voters, we are choosing to side with saving our country and our world.”

I reached out to Penzey, but he declined to chat with me.

“I‘m content with just doing what we do,” he wrote. “Somehow talking to people about it all and having them try to sum it up never quite clicks. Sorry.”

Oh don’t be.

Just keep doing what you do, Mr. Penzey, and let’s hope that democracy prevails.

@rabcarian.bsky.social @rabcarian