“I am a professor! I am a professor of economics!” said Caroline Fohlin, face down, pinned to the ground by police at Emory University, in Atlanta, during campus demonstrations in late April. Her glasses had been thrown from her face, her head knocked against the concrete. While Fohlin’s words might be taken to suggest entitlement—a belief that her faculty status should confer immunity—I heard something else: an appeal to neutrality. It seemed to me that Fohlin was not in the quad to join the students in their protest of the war in Gaza: She was just trying to look out for them.

Other faculty members have been roughed up too. Video showing the arrest of Emory’s philosophy-department chair, Noëlle McAfee, went viral. So did a clip of the Dartmouth historian Annelise Orleck getting knocked over and zip-tied. At Washington University in St. Louis, where I am on faculty, Steve Tamari, a history professor at nearby Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, was filmed being tackled and dragged by police; Tamari says he was hospitalized with broken ribs and a broken hand. During a protest at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the sociology professor Samer Alatout was detained; he says police inflicted the head gash that was visible in images circulated on social media.

Though sometimes called “student protests,” students are only some of those participating in the campus demonstrations and occupations of the past three weeks. My university reported that 100 people were arrested on April 27, of which 23 were students and at least four were employees. Various roles are represented at the protests, and those roles bear different meanings. The faculty members whose images have been shared most widely aren’t among the protesters so much as beside them; they’ve been watching over students as their guardians, instead of marching as their peers. This is helicopter protesting, fit for the helicopter-parent generation.

Following her arrest at Emory, Fohlin’s attorney told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she “was not a protester,” but had just come down from her office out of concern for students on the quad. In so doing, she saw authorities wrestling an individual to the ground and approached to intervene: “What are you doing?” she asked the police, appearing to tap one on the back before another officer grabbed her. McAfee told a similar story in a local-television interview: “I saw something going on … A bunch of police had tackled a young person, and threw them on the ground, and were just pummeling them,” she said. McAfee, whose scholarship connects feminist theory to political life, acknowledged the gendered role of protector that she felt she was playing. “The mother in me said, Stop, stop,” she told reporters.

The role of protector isn’t limited to women, of course. Before his detention, Tamari can be seen filming the protesters around him, perhaps as a means of documentation. In a statement issued later, Tamari positioned himself as a participant, but also a peacekeeper: “I joined the student-led protests on Saturday to stop the genocide and support and protect the students.” Alatout, the University of Wisconsin professor, expressed a similar ambition: “My and other faculty and staff’s position is that we are defending the students’ rights,” he said. “To demonstrate and to protest, and that we are defending them.”

Protection has been a theme of the protests. Members of Congress have pressured university presidents to demonstrate that they have done enough to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism. Disputes about the intention and etymology of campus chants and calls for Intifada, mixed with political motivations quite separate from the real operation of campus life, are also set against a years-long trend to cast safety as a matter of sensation, and sensation as equal to harm.

One timely example: After the Columbia University protests, some law students reportedly called for exams to be canceled, because the events of the week had left them “irrevocably shaken.” To feel unsafe is to be unsafe in the contemporary campus scene, and one’s perception of a slight, or even an act of violence, has become akin to its reality. Professors have played a role in advancing that ethos in their classrooms and offices, in part out of political empathy, in part because they truly care about students and their well-being, and in part because their institutions now demand it.

That situation has now circled back on itself. At UCLA last week, the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and other organizations organized a rally on campus—a counterprotest, really, to the pro-Palestinian encampments—to “advocate for the protection of Jewish students,” as David N. Myers, one of the school’s history professors, put it. According to Myers, another, more agitated group of counterprotesters was also present, and came close to instigating a brawl with the anti-war activists. Myers wrote that he and other faculty “inserted ourselves between the two groups to serve as a buffer.” A few days later, the situation did turn violent, and some among the original student protesters were beaten by a mob, as the police stood aside. At first, police action was creating danger, then its absence did the same. Amid the confusion of today’s campus protests, it can be hard to predict who will be vulnerable to whom at any given time, and when protection can or should be provided.

Clearly students there and then badly needed help, of a sort that faculty could not reasonably provide. In the current college climate, concern for safety is a constant, but rarely modulates above a steady background noise. At the protests, as during the school year, teachers mostly offer their protection as a means of staving off much lesser harms than those delivered by stick-wielding thugs. At Columbia, one professor urged news cameramen not to film students inside the encampment, according to The New York Times, seemingly to guard the students’ reputations.

Columbia professors have been involved in student protests in the past, but they didn’t position themselves like this, as purveyors of moral support. Instead, they played the role of mediators. In 1968, when students occupied several buildings across campus, faculty at one point physically positioned themselves between the protesters and the police—in the interest of bringing the matter to a close. A faculty statement from the time read, in part, “As members of the faculty, we are determined to do everything within our power rapidly to resume the full life of this institution in the firm expectation that our proposals will permit a climate to prevail that will once again allow reason, judgment and order to reign.” That sentiment bears far more resemblance to the goals of today’s administrators and politicians—the restoration of order and resumption of business as usual on campus—than it does to the goals of professors who have intervened in recent weeks to keep students safe.

Today’s protests might look similar to those previous ones when viewed in pictures, but their context is transformed. Students and parents have spent years demanding more and better services on campus, including services to help students feel and be safe and comfortable. Universities have swelled into giant bureaucracies in response to regulatory demands and competition. College life itself, especially at elite private universities, is now consumed by professionalization more than self-discovery, thanks in part to the astronomical cost of attendance. Campuses have become more diverse, making today’s faculty motivations different and more varied than those driving the (whiter, maler) Columbia faculty of ’68, who yearned for reason’s victory. And politics has become more identitarian, giving selfhood greater sway.

In this new context, professors and students have developed a relationship of protection above all others. Faculty have been converted from instructors into personal coaches. Much is gained in this change, including its expression at campus protests; professors such as McAfee and Myers have shown bravery on behalf of students. And yet, something is also lost: By inserting ourselves into students’ lives as guardians of their welfare, we risk failing to protect an important aspect of their intellectual, political, and personal development—namely, their independence.

Recounting the intervention that had led to her arrest at Dartmouth, Annelise Orleck reported saying to the police, “Leave our students alone. They’re students. They’re not criminals.” Like some other faculty, Orleck drew a line at calling in law enforcement, a choice she said was unprecedented in her 34 years at the college. But since Columbia set the precedent to do so, policing itself has become a subject of campus demonstrations. Participants may well be risking arrest by design. At the same time, students seem ambivalent about the degree to which they really are at odds with authority, rather than reliant upon it. At Columbia, one was mocked after demanding “humanitarian aid” in the form of food and water after taking over Hamilton Hall. “I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students,” she said.

What, exactly, is the nature of that obligation? Attending college is an American coming-of-age ritual, and a means of giving students room to figure out how to live and act in the world. Orleck’s reminder that students are just students undercuts that mission, in a way. It’s both protective and infantilizing. It strips students of their power before they’ve even had a chance to test it out. None of us wants our students or our colleagues to be harmed. But there’s value in learning how it feels to take risks, and to reap their rewards.

Jury hears testimony on how hush-money payments were made as judge again fines Trump for violating gag order in US case.

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By killing her dog, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem may have also killed her chances of becoming Donald Trump’s vice president. So who else is on the list? We’ll get into Trump’s options after four new stories from The Atlantic:

The blindness of elites What’s left to restrain Donald Trump? David Frum: What Joe Biden needs to say about anti-Semitism Mark Leibovich: “House Republicans showed up at a campus protest. Of course.”

Trump’s Big Decision

As a reporter, it is my duty to remind you that Trump’s team loves messing with the media almost as much as it loves jockeying for influence with the big man himself. Trump’s advisers might dish, for example, that after careful consideration, so-and-so is off the vice-president list, and you know who is back on. They might explain that, actually, some of the usual considerations of geography and gender aren’t playing a role in this VP decision.

But the truth is, none of these supposed insiders really knows much. No one has any idea what Trump is thinking, except for Trump himself. And the former president is quite famously unpredictable, with a well-established tendency to make decisions based on his most recent conversation. Predicting his Veep pick, then, is a bit futile. It’s also really early: Candidates don’t typically choose a running mate until around the party convention, in late summer. And Trump will likely try to milk as much media coverage as he can out of making people wait.

Still, without prognosticating too much, we can anticipate what Trump is probably looking for in a vice president. He’ll want someone who looks good on television but not someone who might outshine him. Someone who isn’t polarizing to the MAGA base but who demonstrates range. He’ll choose a candidate with experience, or at least with some record of being a winner. He is probably not looking for a politician to “balance” out his ticket like Mike Pence did in 2016, when Trump desperately needed to win over evangelicals.

Above all, of course, Trump will want someone unfailingly loyal to him. This time around, it’s not about logic or persuasion—it’s about personality. The Republican strategists Doug Heye and Mike Murphy, neither of whom are involved with the Trump campaign, walked me through some of Trump’s VP options.

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott

Why does this name keep floating around? Well, the senator, who’s been in office for more than a decade, has always been popular. He’s a former insurance salesman who knows how to schmooze, and, Heye told me, he’s also a “prodigious fundraiser.” Scott never fully cozied up to Trump while the latter was president, but he didn’t criticize him much either. “He played it smart,” Murphy told me, by not getting too close or too far. The dynamic changed when Scott launched his own presidential campaign last year. “He was the puppy on his back, supplicant,” even while he was running against Trump, Murphy said, and that loyalty “will appeal to Trump.”

Scott could also—the thinking goes—help Trump appeal to Black voters, who have already started peeling off from Democrats, albeit in a small way. Trump and his campaign have seemed obsessed with this task as they try to avoid a repeat of 2020, and Scott could help them do it.

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Trump’s former press secretary was on even the earliest iterations of his 2024 VP shortlist. She is in her first term as a state governor and has enacted plenty of MAGA-style legislation. She’s smart and spent two years working for Trump, which means that she’s familiar with handling the D.C. media and that Trump is probably pretty comfortable with her. Having a woman like Sanders on the ticket could help Trump pick up women voters, another demographic he’s struggled with. “She’s never going to have any agenda or not be the completely loyal type,” Murphy said. “And [she’s] less of a star, so no worry of [Trump] being diminished at all.”

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum

Burgum has been governor for eight years and seems well liked. He’s personally wealthy, like Trump, but not famous. He’s ambitious, but not in a way that intimidates Trump. He ran for president this cycle too, remember? If you don’t, that’s probably a plus for Trump.

When you pick a vice president, you should “pick a slightly less impressive version of yourself,” Murphy told me—like when Bill Clinton picked Al Gore, another moderate, Protestant white man. “When you’re John McCain, [if] you pick a Sarah Palin, it’s just trouble,” he said. Could Burgum be that slightly less impressive version of Trump?

New York Representative Elise Stefanik

This 39-year-old House Republican has been openly auditioning for the VP slot for years now. She’s a gifted fundraiser and easily the most powerful Republican in New York. She has establishment bona fides—Harvard, the George W. Bush White House, aide to Paul Ryan—but has devoted herself entirely to Trump’s defense and the MAGA cause. She’s a competent woman who could help Trump appeal to other educated women. The problem, of course, is that he may not find her particularly authentic. “She’d poison her mother to get two points on Election Day,” Murphy said. “And I think he would smell that.”

Ohio Senator J. D. Vance

The Hillbilly Elegy author and former venture capitalist seems to share Trump’s populist sensibilities. Vance was once a Trump critic but changed his tune when he ran for the Senate. He’s ambitious in a way that Trump might read as disingenuous—probably because it is. “If I were Trump, I’d be troubled by the fact that J. D. Vance was calling [Republican strategists] to ask about running as an anti-Trump Republican when he first looked at running statewide in Ohio,” Murphy said. Then again, he said, “Vance is a clever-enough chameleon to be able to suck up to Trump with skill.”

Former Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson

Carson, a former neurosurgeon, ran for president against Trump back in 2016. He worked in the administration for a while, heading up HUD. We haven’t heard much from him since then, but he does seem to hang out in Trump’s circles, and has been spotted at Mar-a-Lago on more than one occasion.

Carson could, in theory, help Trump appeal to Black voters. But he doesn’t have quite the political credentials that Scott does. “I was meeting a friend for drinks back in February, and he said he knows for a fact that it’s going to be Ben Carson,” Heye told me. “I’m like, ‘Okay, well, one, it’s February. Two, why Ben Carson?’”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio

Rubio is young and telegenic, with two terms in the Senate (plus a failed presidential campaign) under his belt. The son of Cuban immigrants, he could theoretically help Trump appeal to Latino voters. The problem is, Rubio would have to resign from the Senate. He’d also have to change his residence, because the Constitution bars electors from voting for a president and a vice president from the same state. Trump picking Rubio is “completely far-fetched—with the caveat that when you’re dealing with Donald Trump, far-fetched things happen,” Heye said.

Kari Lake

The Arizona TV anchor turned Stop the Steal devotee would clearly love to serve as Trump’s vice president. (See her here, vacuuming a red carpet for the former president.) But Lake has never actually won a race, and Trump, as we all know, prefers a winner.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem

She’s still on the list, because in Trumpworld anything is possible. But shooting a dog in a gravel pit? It’s about the worst thing you can do for your political career.

Related:

Did Kristi Noem just doom her career? Elise Stefanik’s Trump audition

Today’s News

The Justice Department announced that Texas Representative Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, have been indicted on bribery and money-laundering charges. In a statement, Cuellar said that he and his wife are innocent of the charges. The former White House official Hope Hicks, who once was one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers, testified at Trump’s hush-money criminal trial. Canadian police arrested three people tied to last year’s killing of a prominent Sikh separatist in British Columbia, and are continuing to investigate allegations that the individuals were hired by the Indian government.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Poetry is an act of hope, Maya Chung writes. It can help us come closest to capturing events that exist beyond our capacity to describe them. Atlantic Intelligence: New consumer gadgets are coming out, and their entire selling point revolves around artificial intelligence, Damon Beres writes. The broken-gadget era is upon us.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

Racehorses Have No Idea What’s Going On

By Haley Weiss

This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs. If you count TV spectators, nearly 16 million people are expected to tune in to an event that awards major titles to athletes who may not know they’ve won and cannot be interviewed.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Medieval pets had one of humanity’s most cursed diseases. When writers silence writers What is Wagner doing in Africa? Marijuana’s health effects are about to get a whole lot clearer.

Culture Break

Michael Buckner / Deadline via Contour RA by Getty

Watch. I Saw the TV Glow (out now in theaters), the unsettling new film directed by Jane Schoenbrun. They’ve got some ideas about how to make a genuinely weird mainstream movie.

Read. “Noon,” a poem by Li-Young Lee:

“The tall curtains billow / with presences coming and going, impossible / to confirm.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

As a 30-year-old city dweller with a dog and no kids, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the role of friendship in my life. Making friends feels harder when you’re an adult—your days are suddenly so full of commitments, and interesting new people aren’t standing right in front of you at recess. Worse, at least in a place like D.C., where I live, friends tend to come and go with the seasons: They get new jobs, leave for grad school, have babies. I’m curious to hear from readers who’ve figured it out: What’s your best advice for making new friends as an adult? And what are your tips for keeping in touch with the old ones, as you all move along in life?

— Elaine

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Updated at 12:26 p.m. ET on May 5, 2024

One irony of the 2024 election is that, at a time when Americans profess exceptionally low faith in their government and institutions, their choices for president represent the most insider slate of candidates in at least a quarter century, and perhaps longer.

The Democratic nominee is Joe Biden, the sitting president, a former vice president, and a former U.S. senator of 36 years. The Republican nominee is Donald Trump, who is the most recent former president. The leading third-party candidate, the ostensible alternative, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is, well, exactly who his name suggests.

This produces another irony: Trump, despite being literally the former president, and Kennedy, despite being literally a Kennedy, have both worked to depict themselves as outsiders. During his current campaign, Trump has often insisted that he’s being persecuted by the criminal-justice system for standing up for the little guy. “Be totally unafraid to challenge entrenched interests and failed power structures,” Trump intoned in a February campaign video. “Relish the opportunity to be an outsider and embrace that label … It’s the outsiders who change the world.” Kennedy, too, has positioned himself as someone without any connection to existing power structures. “It’s not somebody who’s inside who’s going to solve the problem,” Kennedy said on NewsNation in March. “They’re the ones who gave us the problem. We need somebody who can think about it in a different way.” (“Accepted,” replied the host, Chris Cuomo, the son and brother of former New York governors.)

Biden has not tried to distance himself from the system in the same way. That’s partly an acknowledgment of the absurdity of doing so while president and partly an expression of Biden’s affinity for institutions, even as his presidency has quietly undermined many aspects of the existing system.

[Ronald Brownstein: Biden’s electoral college challenge]

For Trump to claim to be an outsider requires asking voters to forget about the four years he was president—which, to be fair, does seem to be a central aim of his campaign. Trump often criticizes Biden for issues that he himself either created or didn’t solve as president. Most prominently, Trump failed to complete his paramount campaign promise of building a wall that would secure the southern border. The major rise in violent crime over the past few years—which has now dropped sharply—began during his administration. He has again promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, having failed to do so as president.

Trump proposes different policies than Biden does, naturally, but that doesn’t make him an outsider—it makes him a typical presidential candidate. In office, his signature policy move was a tax cut that benefited wealthy Americans. This time around, his most drastically anti-system proposals involve politicizing the Department of Justice and overhauling the federal bureaucracy to eliminate the civil service. These are not populist reforms in any sense of the word, but instead changes that would encourage cronyism and political corruption.

Trump had a more persuasive claim to being an outsider in 2016, when he had never held or run for office, and had to overcome the opposition of most of the Republican Party leadership; by contrast, he controls the Republican National Committee today. But even eight years ago, the claim was questionable. Despite Trump’s umbrage at elites who he believes have long looked down on him, as my colleague McKay Coppins has reported, he is very much a product of an elite background. Trump is an alumnus of a private prep school and the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career with his family’s existing real-estate business, prospered by exploiting a tax code designed to aid people like him, and cannily used the bankruptcy system to get out of jams. During his 2016 campaign, he laid out how he had used political donations to obtain favors, such as giving to the Clinton Foundation and then getting Hillary Clinton to attend his wedding. The story demonstrated his place as a consummate inside operator.

[Russell Berman: The open plot to dismantle the federal government]

In short, Trump is railing against a system that created him and that he declined to change. Much the same is true of Kennedy, who would plainly not be a presidential candidate if he weren’t a member of the Kennedy family (notwithstanding the nearly uniform opposition to his candidacy among his relations). Kennedy invokes his father and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, frequently, and a super PAC supporting him even aired an ad during the Super Bowl that mimics one of JFK’s commercials. “This entire campaign is a pose, as is his outsider stance. He is a Kennedy. He is the fifth member of his family to run for president,” Rebecca Traister wrote in New York last year.

Kennedy’s claims to being against the system rest largely on his running as a third-party candidate, even though he became one only after he received practically no support as a Democratic candidate. His policy positions are less outsider than they are an incoherent mix of liberal and conservative: He backs a ban on abortion after 15 weeks and tight border enforcement, but he also wants single-payer health care and strong environmental regulation. Many are poorly fleshed out His most esoteric ideas—notably, his anti-vaccine obsession—are more expressive than wonkish, more anti-sense than anti-system. His largest campaign funder is the scion of the Mellons, a family even richer and more established than his own.

Weirdly, Biden has a claim to being both the most pro-system and anti-system candidate of the three. As recently as the 2020 campaign, the idea that he would seriously shake up the status quo would have seemed ridiculous. But in office, he has adopted a quietly revolutionary approach, attempting to overhaul the U.S. economy like no president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Last year, Biden became the first president to ever walk a picket line, marching alongside United Auto Workers strikers—the most visible but also perhaps least consequential in a string of moves to weaken employers. His Federal Trade Commission is the most anti-corporate in memory, banning noncompete clauses and seeking to block dozens of mergers. He has pushed an industrial policy in which the federal government puts its muscle and money behind key industries, a major shift from the neoliberal consensus of the past half century. He has canceled billions in student debt.

We likely won’t hear Biden touting himself as an outsider candidate, which produces a third irony of the 2024 presidential race: Notwithstanding his anti-system policies, Biden is running as the institutionalist candidate who will preserve American democracy, while Trump is working to destroy it—all in an effort to protect and serve the most entrenched interests around.

This article originally understated the number of years Joe Biden served as a senator.

Last month, a pro-Palestinian activist stood in front of me on Columbia University’s campus with a sign that read By Any Means Necessary. She smiled. She seemed like a nice person. I am an Israeli graduate student at the university, and I know holding that sign is within her rights. And yet, its message was so painful and disturbing that after that moment, I left New York for a few days.

If I’d had the courage, I would have asked that student, "What exactly do you mean by ‘any means necessary’?” Holding up signs? Leading demonstrations? Or do knives also fall under that category? Guns and rifles as well? Raping and taking civilians hostage? (As of this writing, 133 hostages are still being held in Gaza.) And whom would these means be employed against? Columbia? The Israeli government? Soldiers? Civilians? Children?

Since my return to Columbia, tensions have escalated dramatically. After protesters broke into Hamilton Hall on Tuesday night, the administration sent in the NYPD to evacuate the building and arrest the occupiers. This is the second time such measures have been taken—and they may only intensify the frustration and hostility of all involved. More worrying, this frustration might push more students to believe that “by any means necessary” is the only way to achieve their goals.

At this point, anyone reading this essay might suspect that I am not objective, and they would be absolutely right. Because if you ask me what I think about when I see the words by any means necessary, it is only one thing. I think about Sagi: my best friend, whom I knew since sixth grade, the funniest and kindest person I have ever met.

On the morning of October 7, Sagi Golan woke up at home with his boyfriend, Omer Ohana, whom he was supposed to marry two weeks later. They had already bought their beautiful white suits, and I had bought a plane ticket to the wedding. As a reservist, Sagi immediately headed south, where he fought bravely for hours at Kibbutz Be’eri, saving the lives of innocent adults and children, until he was killed in combat with terrorists. One hundred civilians were killed in Be’eri, and 30 more were taken hostage.

I am a writer who has published short stories and a novel, but the day Sagi was killed, I lost my words. I couldn’t get a plane ticket to Israel for the funeral, so I just showed up at the airport. I was so confused and upset that when the ticketing agent tried to understand why I was trying to get on a plane without a ticket, I said, “My best friend … a wedding … a funeral …” The agent, a complete stranger, asked if he could give me a hug. Half an hour later, he’d arranged a one-way ticket.

I landed an hour before Sagi’s funeral. The flowers that were meant for my best friend's wedding were laid upon his grave.

[Mark Leibovich: House Republicans at the ‘Liberation Camp’]

Back in New York, I barely left my apartment. I barely ate, barely slept. By that time, protests had already become routine on campus, but I was so deep in my own grief that I didn’t even notice. This went on for months. Toward the end of the fall semester, a professor took me aside after class. He told me that in his youth, he’d had friends who spent summers at kibbutzim in Israel, describing the people there as the nicest in the world. Neither he nor his friends were Jewish, but they were captivated by the concept of a cooperative socialist society. “Hearing about the attacks on those kibbutzim on October 7 was deeply painful for me,” he said. “So I can’t even imagine how painful it is for you.”

That professor is a strong critic of the Israeli government and its policies. But in that particular moment, he chose to address only my pain. Although I’m still grieving and will be for a long while, his compassion helped me start to heal, and allowed me to better perceive the suffering of many others, Israelis and Palestinians, whose lives have been shattered since October 7.

As an Israeli, I despise the rhetoric emerging from certain extremist politicians, who have claimed that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza or advocated for a forced deportation of Palestinians. I also believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will go down as one of the worst leaders in the history of the Jewish people. His willingness to grant political power and public legitimacy to racist and fascist ideologues is a moral stain on the history of the nation, and I am alarmed by the possibility that Netanyahu would reject a hostage deal and a cease-fire to preserve his own power.

But some of the demonstrators are calling for something categorically different from an end to the Netanyahu government or even the war. Some of them are suggesting, implicitly, that there is no place for Jewish life between the river and the sea. Indeed, many of their slogans have nothing to do with peace. Almost every day, I hear protesters chant “Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel has to fall” and “Intifada Revolution.” Growing up in Israel during the early 2000s, I lived through the Second Intifada. I witnessed buses blown up by suicide bombers and mass shootings in city centers, terrorist attacks that killed many innocent civilians in the name of an “Intifada Revolution.”

Recently, a video surfaced of a student leader saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live”; on campus, an individual stood in front of Jewish students with a sign reading Al-Qassam’s next targets. In the encampment itself, signs hang with small red triangles that might seem like an innocent design choice. Whether the protesters realize it or not, Hamas uses that icon to indicate Israeli targets.

I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. Bringing the NYPD onto campus on April 18, when the encampment had just been established, likely contributed to the escalation, and I know that off-campus bad actors, including politicians, are taking advantage of the volatile situation and fueling tensions. Most of the student protesters are peaceful; Jews are participating in the demonstrations. But most is not all. And what’s significant is that many students on campus minimize or ignore extreme or violent rhetoric, and some even laugh and cheer along. I’ve heard Columbia students claim that these incidents are so petty that they are not worth discussing at all. I find myself debating intelligent people who treat reported facts like myths if they don’t align with their narrative.

Universities don’t have to be battlefields. More people, including faculty and students, should speak out against hateful rhetoric that is morally wrong, even if this rhetoric is protected by the First Amendment. Fundamentally, I don’t see how the protesters’ insistence on using the language of violence will contribute to the Palestinian cause, or their own. They have to know that their actions have only strengthened the extreme-right political forces in the U.S. and Israel, who are already using these statements to consolidate more power. Their expressions and actions trample the voices of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who advocate for complexity and compassion. And they further entrench today’s distorted public discourse, which demands complete conformity from people within the same group and zero compassion for those in another.

The Saturday Night Live cold open is usually a place for the series to do its most topical, often political, material. But an awkward sense of obligation hung over last night’s sketch, about campus protests surrounding the conflict in Gaza. The activism at colleges across the U.S. has been dominating the news, especially as the university and police responses have led to arrests. SNL seemed compelled to acknowledge this in some way, but all it gave its audience was uncomfortable, limp material that failed to make any real point about the urgent subjects animating protesters.

The show opened with a fake NY1 community-affairs panel featuring parents of New York City college students. Even the cast seemed ill at ease. Heidi Gardner’s Hunter College mom spoke of the strain the protests had put on her relationship with her daughter. Mikey Day’s New School dad said, “I want to let my son make his own choices, but to be honest, it’s a little scary.” Kenan Thompson, playing a Columbia dad named Alphonse Roberts, appeared to be fully supportive of the protests—“Nothing makes me prouder than young people using their voices to fight for what they believe in”—until it was implied that his daughter might be out there. “I am supportive of y’all’s kids protesting,” he said; “not my kids.”

Thompson’s delivery is routinely one of the most delightful things SNL has to offer, and that was the case here. Yet the sketch was underdeveloped, with little discussion of the reason students are demonstrating, and that tension hung in the air. There was some loose commentary on class and race in the divide between the concerned white parents and Alphonse, a Black man who works multiple jobs to pay Columbia’s exorbitant tuition. It turned out that Alphonse didn’t really care about the protests, as long as his daughter “had her butt in class,” pursuing the degree he was paying for. By the time Thompson got to the close and yelled, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!,” he looked both surprised and relieved the moment had come.

It was as if the writers felt moved to say something but ended up reaching for the most potentially inoffensive angle. The ultimate joke was less about the protests and more about how expensive it is to attend college—a fact probably anyone in the audience would agree with. The sketch certainly didn’t have the boldness of Ramy Youssef’s opening monologue earlier this season, a deft stand-up set about how “complicated” his prayers are these days, in which he also said, “Please free the people of Palestine, please,” and “Please free the hostages, all the hostages, please.”

In general lately, SNL seems to be struggling with the most newsworthy material. Regarding Israel and Gaza, that makes sense. The war is nearly impossible to joke about, especially for a program trying to be broadly appealing. But even in a sketch last night on a lower-stakes topic—the ongoing beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, featuring host Dua Lipa as a clueless southern morning-show reporter with limited knowledge of Black culture—the gags were labored.

The sketches that hit were the most bizarre and absurdist: Sarah Sherman’s riff on The Elephant Man, titled “The Anomalous Man,” in which a 19th-century woman, played by Lipa, falls for Sherman’s monstrous playwright, who turns out to be a major player and is cheating on her; and “Sonny Angel,” in which Bowen Yang played a tiny, naked doll hooking up with Lipa’s character, a woman with a fixation on her “little boyfriend” toys.

One sketch late in the night perhaps unintentionally captured SNL’s predicament. In a fake ad for the “Teeny Tiny Statement Pin,” the writers mocked celebrities who were too afraid of taking a stand to wear a normal-size pin on the red carpet. “It’s wrong to stay silent, but it’s also wrong to say too much,” Gardner said. “I just wish there was a way to split the difference.” The joke was supposed to be on wishy-washy famous people—but SNL might as well have been sending up itself.

In April, when Judge Juan Merchan first heard arguments about whether Donald Trump was violating a gag order in his criminal case in Manhattan, he sharply and skeptically questioned the former president’s attorneys, accusing one of “losing all credibility.” When he found Trump in contempt last week, he did so in a detailed, impassioned ruling that defended his gag order and the need for political speech.

The second time around, things were less tense. Merchan was far more relaxed during a contempt hearing last week. His ruling today found Trump in contempt on only one of the four counts prosecutors claimed, and his written decision was shorter and drier. He fined Trump $1,000, adding to a $9,000 penalty levied last week.

In the courtroom this morning, Merchan was blunt, explicitly threatening to imprison Trump if he won’t stop. “Going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction,” he said. “Mr. Trump, it’s important you understand, the last thing I want to do is put you in jail.”

[David A. Graham: Trump’s contempt knows no bounds]

But, Merchan said, he has an obligation to “protect the dignity of the justice system,” adding: “The magnitude of this decision is not lost on me, but at the end of the day I have a job to do. So as much as I don’t want to impose a jail sanction,” he said, “I want you to understand that I will if necessary and appropriate.”

The pairing of Merchan’s somewhat perfunctory ruling today with his previous, more emotional courtroom delivery reveals the difficult situation that Merchan faces. He must choose between exercising a power he doesn’t want to exercise, and rendering himself powerless.

Knowing Trump’s true mind is impossible, and some of the reporters best-sourced in his camp say he doesn’t want to be sent to jail. But the former president is behaving like a man who has calculated that getting thrown in the clink for a night or two for the offense of posting some mean things on Truth Social would be great publicity.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s naps are actually worrying]

Even worse for Merchan, that might be right. Trump’s legal defense in the trial seems to be a bit shaky. The overarching strategy seems to be to sow doubts about little parts of the prosecution’s story, rather than mounting some counternarrative. The defendant has reportedly been grumbling that his lawyers are not aggressive enough, while they keep running afoul of Merchan.

But Trump has always been more interested in the political defense, in which he has a clear counternarrative: He says that the big bad justice system, run by Democrats, is out to get him and interfere with the election in order to hurt him. (The irony is that this master of projection sits accused of election interference in the Manhattan trial.) And what could show that better than the outlandish penalty of jail for off-brand tweets? That might not convince any skeptics, but it could rile up his base.

Yet, as Merchan said, he can’t just let the attacks go. Trump has made his various trials into a test of the principle of equal justice under the law, arguing that he should not face accountability for his own actions. Merchan called Trump’s defiance “a direct attack on the rule of law,” and though the scale is much smaller than the immunity case at the Supreme Court last month, he’s right: Any other defendant who repeatedly violated an order from a judge would expect to face escalating sanctions. Merchan may have little interest in defending expected witness Michael Cohen, whose inability to stay quiet he called out in his previous ruling, but he really does need to defend the jury and other witnesses from intimidation—to say nothing of his need to enforce his own orders.

[Read: The infantilization of the president]

The result is something like watching a parent ineffectually scold a toddler. (This is not the first time that Trump has warranted that comparison, in many cases from his own aides.)

Maybe this time the judge’s warning will get through and Trump will rein himself in. “He’s now sitting quietly, frowning, still seemingly absorbing that message from the judge,” The New York Times reported, noting that this is far more restrained than his reaction when the federal judge in his defamation trial threatened jail. Then again, his campaign today called Merchan’s threat a “Third World authoritarian tactic.”

One other notable observer doesn’t think the threat will work. “Because this is now the tenth time that this Court has found Defendant in criminal contempt, spanning three separate motions, it is apparent that monetary fines have not, and will not, suffice to deter Defendant from violating this Court’s lawful orders,” he wrote. That observer was Merchan himself in today’s decision.

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Announcement comes days after New York police raided and dispersed Gaza solidarity encampment on Columbia campus.