Of all the tawdry delights in “Verity” — Michael Showalter’s adaptation of bestselling author Colleen Hoover’s massively popular psychological thriller — the best and most unexpected is how well the film hides its secrets. Now, don’t get me wrong: The movie isn’t exactly garnering Oscar buzz, or even eliciting the fervent “you’ve got to see this!” refrain that followed 2014’s “Gone Girl” around. “Verity” is trashy fun through and through, and doesn’t try to elevate itself past that pulpy baseline. But Showalter and the movie’s screenwriter, Nick Antosca, are skilled in the art of misdirection. They know how to surprise, and they use their trio of actors to do it cleverly.

Take Anne Hathaway, fresh off a string of box-office smashes in “The Odyssey,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” “The End of Oak Street” and “Mother Mary.” (Alright, the last one made a few pennies and a nickel, but we can dream.) This year alone, Hathaway has repeatedly proven her versatility, jumping between gun-toting moms, tortured pop stars and struggling journalists. In “Verity,” she plays the titular character, Verity Crawford, the author of a string of hit thriller novels who’s been mysteriously incapacitated after a car accident and can’t finish her final three books.

(Dave Allocca / Starpix) Josh Hartnett attends the “Verity” New York Premiere

To complete the series, Verity’s publisher taps little-known writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who agrees to step into Verity’s place using her copious notes. While Johnson’s elasticity as a performer is a bit more contentious, I’ve always found her choices fascinating — oscillating between rom-coms, superhero films and arthouse horror with the bat of a mascara’d eye. “Verity” is no different, allowing Johnson to move her character between suspicion and warmth with languid ease as she settles into Verity’s Vermont home to work.

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But the key piece to the “Verity” puzzle is Josh Hartnett, who plays Verity’s put-upon husband, Jeremy, with all the unnerving capriciousness a film like this demands. Here, Hartnett’s character exists in flux, somewhere between his old life and a new start. He’s both charming and chilling, expertly using a near-imperceptible shift in expression or tone to keep the audience on their toes. With Hartnett weaving through the entire story, it’s nearly impossible to get a handle on what’s really going on in “Verity.” And that volatility is what makes the film so exciting, even when it goes full-tilt cheesy.

This is nothing new for Hartnett, who’s spent the last few years enjoying a well-deserved career renaissance, following up his role in “Verity” with a starring role in Netflix‘s supernatural thriller miniseries, “Below.” Once the quintessential ’90s heartthrob, Hartnett has parlayed the goodwill from his hunky idol days into something far more compelling. Though he’s always been a great actor, popping up here and there to elevate material, Hartnett has found an artistic sweet spot, using his effervescent charm and boy-next-door-all-grown-up good looks to subvert expectations. Hartnett stands out among the roster of stubborn, uncompromisingly masculine leading men from his heyday, proving that there’s much more to winning over an audience than simply playing into the public’s perception.

For those who have watched Hartnett grow throughout his career, the actor’s keen yet unassuming abilities surely don’t come as a shock. His late ’90s breakthrough in the triple-hitter lineup of “Halloween: H20,” “The Faculty” and “The Virgin Suicides” catapulted him to international fame practically overnight, cementing his place alongside the era’s Tiger Beat celebrity infatuations. The primary difference between Hartnett and his contemporaries, though, was that Hartnett could hold his own on screen. He may not have had the bona fides of someone like Leonardo DiCaprio, but Hartnett’s work was consistent and appealing. He knew how to play the everyman (or everyteenager), caught up in frequently absurd or abrupt situations beyond his control.

That’s not to say they were all hits, of course. 2002’s “40 Days and 40 Nights,” an offbeat rom-com about a Bay Area web designer who chooses to abstain from sex and masturbation for the duration of Lent, is patently ridiculous and more than a little sexist. But that’s also where Hartnett’s appeal lies. He understands how to use his innate magnetism to charm his way through even the silliest scripts, occasionally creating a dissonance between the film and his performances that makes even the duds memorable. 

(Netflix) Josh Hartnett as Calvin in “Below”

These days, I can’t say the same about some of Hartnett’s early peers, like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, who, despite rising to fame earlier than Hartnett, never fully figured out how to separate themselves from their reputation. Both Cruise and Pitt have a death grip on their A-List prestige, hyper-aware of how much the world perceives and enjoys their work. That self-awareness has made their late-period work all too stodgy, selecting roles clearly informed by their notable reputations. Take Pitt’s “F1: The Movie” and this year’s “Heart of the Beast,” where Pitt plays hypermasculine characters whose lives, actions and goals are defined by a relentless desire to come out on top. For someone whose notoriety has twice become inseparable from who he’s married to, Pitt’s choice to play gruff loners feels noticeably calculated, keeping an arm’s distance between his work and the audience. 

In Cruise’s case, artistry seems to have taken a backseat almost entirely. Over the last decade, Cruise has resigned himself to action stardom, writing death-defying stunts into his contracts. Even with “Digger,” Cruise’s most ambitious project in years, he confines himself to a loud, obnoxious character destined to be written about as a “big swing.” The problem is that “Digger” only feels like a big swing because it’s marginally different from what Cruise has been doing lately. Cruise’s ambition is moot if he’s otherwise resigned himself to crowd-pleasers, making his occasional enterprising choices look even more daring.

Comparing Hartnett to actors like Pitt and Cruise might seem like a stretch. But consider that “Verity” topped last week’s box office by a wide margin, leaving “Digger” and “Heart of the Beast” eating its dust. No doubt this is partially due to Hoover’s extreme popularity, and Hathaway and Johnson’s bankability — those are fair elements to incorporate here. But when it comes to the difference in performance among all three leads, there’s really no competition.

Hartnett’s work is dynamic and unsettling, making what could be a forgettable tertiary character into an integral part of the story that viewers hold in the back of their minds, even when he’s offscreen. From the start, when Jeremy runs into Lowen on the street before they meet at Verity’s publisher’s office, Hartnett makes Jeremy’s presence feel dubious. His every motive feels ulterior, and his inevitable simmering romance with Lowen resembles a can of worms that could pop open at any moment.

But that’s Hartnett’s great skill. He understands how to keep viewers vigilant, how to shock them and startle them as soon as they think they know where he’s headed. He doesn’t just subvert expectations; he perverts them, creating characters who appear to have rich inner lives and plenty of secrets that the audience may never fully understand. M. Night Shyamalan’s 2024 thriller “Trap” used Hartnett’s expertise to its full potential, crafting a character who could be both a doting dad and a vicious serial killer at the same time. For Hartnett, shading in a complete picture, warts and all, is essential to making a character believable. It’s an old-school way of thinking for the modern era — a belief that the work should be taken seriously but without ever letting the viewer in on how intensely he’s considering it. With Hartnett, what you see is never what you get, at least not fully. And what a delight it is that this world still holds some surprises for us.

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The 1975 film “Jaws,” in which a local government hires a shark hunter to protect the town’s tourism industry, delighted me as a 10-year-old. But other than its infamous opening sequence, I don’t recall being scared. My younger sister, however, developed a years-long fear of deep water, even our 11-foot-deep pool. Maybe I’d just cultivated too much shark knowledge, well aware that these apex predators are docile and do not hunt humans like they do in Peter Benchley’s novel. The book and the film — I consumed both and can report that Steven Spielberg’s adaptation is better — only instilled in me a deeper love and respect for sharks. They are still my favorite fish to observe in aquariums or the ocean.

Outside of the movies, shark bounties are uncommon these days. That’s why news this week that Greenland was planning to cull 1,000 Greenland sharks was so alarming to many online. Officials in the Avannaata municipality on the island nation’s west coast approved the plan, offering fishers 300 Danish kroner, or about $45, per shark heart. The government complained that hungry sharks are eating too much Atlantic cod and Greenland halibut, cutting into what humans can bring home and damaging their gear. Lars Erik Gabrielsen, mayor of Avannaata, told The Guardian, “We need to safeguard the income of fishermen and the catch so that we can continue to eat the foods that we have relied on for generations.”

Conservationists and shark lovers were outraged at the proposal. Nick Dulvy, a professor and marine conservationist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, called it a “disaster” and said that biologically, the sharks are “the most sensitive species in the ocean to overfishing.” Marine ecologist Spencer Roberts, whose advocacy work includes calling out shark poaching, posted on X that “There is a psychotic sense of entitlement spreading around the world that imagines humans own the fish in the sea and demands retaliatory killing of predators who rely on these fish. Even centuries-old sages of the Arctic Ocean are not safe from this deranged human delusion.”

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Indeed, the Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) is bizarre and misunderstood, basically being the couch potato of the depths of the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean, where waters are just above freezing. Known as an abyssal species, it slothfully trawls the shadows like some mournful Lovecraftian being, possessing an especially sluggish metabolism, which isn’t surprising considering its size. Greenland sharks weigh in at one ton and reaching up to 23 feet in length. The maximum lifespan can average 400 years, the longest lifespan of any known vertebrate, meaning there are apparently Greenland sharks that are older than the United States. If that doesn’t blow you out of the water, I don’t know what will. Humans are famously bad at mentally fathoming deep time, so thinking about these ghostly rotund things hiding in the dark of the ocean, outliving empires like an ichthyological Ozymandias, fills me with even more awe than most sharks do.

In a rare spot of good news, the local government dropped the plan after national officials questioned its legality, but a future cull hasn’t been ruled out. Still, it’s worth upholding this turnaround as an example of why speaking out on animal rights can be successful. We don’t need to just sit back and watch the extinction of any species that doesn’t directly benefit us, while of course recognizing that fishers have to eat too. Some have proposed reimbursing fishers or using acoustic deterrents instead of mass slaughter.

But it’s more than just Greenland sharks at risk, with an estimated 79 million sharks dying in fisheries in 2019. At least 25 million of those species are threatened. As coral reefs struggle to survive, many sharks are losing their main food source, but humans are to blame for that one. These animals can be dangerous, same as a grizzly bear or elephant, but people tend to value sharks a lot less. This is in spite of their critical role in a healthy environment. Sharks aren’t monsters, they evolved to fill very specific roles in the ocean — a huge block in the Jenga of life — and if they go, our oceans would dramatically tumble in ways that would negatively impact humans too.

“Jaws” is a fantastic film if you can suspend your disbelief about a great white being the menace of the seas. That’s really us, but it doesn’t have to be.

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On Wednesday in the Oval Office, Donald Trump made clear that he’s not happy with how his political rivals have treated him and stoutly reserved his right for revenge. “They impeached me twice. I certainly — even to this moment I can do whatever I want, if I want.” Trump said, before claiming that only his respect for the office of the president keeps his behavior in check.  

If this were a sitcom— and it feels like a bad one — we would now hear a laugh track followed by groans.

Clearly Trump has never understood the foundational concepts of American politics. Political ethics, the art of “half a loaf,” the truism that “all politics are local” and the principles of public service over private enrichment are lost on him. Those are just sayings on trophies Trump has minted for himself since he’ll never get the Nobel Peace Prize. 

He certainly doesn’t understand compromise or the importance of local issues. Consider his enthusiastic support for data centers, the only issue currently uniting Americans. He’s too busy feathering his own nest while laughing off any pretense of ethical behavior. While we can certainly criticize Trump for ignoring the foundations of our democracy, the same could also be said of Congress, most state houses and many city councils. And, hey, let’s not talk about the local pool board. That’s where stuff really gets weird. Sometime I’ll tell you about my former neighbor in Gaithersburg who thought “Robert’s Rules of Order” had something to do with sharing spouses. 

Recent polls of likely voters in the midterm elections make it clear that a significant majority are extremely tired of the nonsense promulgated by Trump and others. Yeah, those are just polls and they only offer you a vague snapshot in time. That being said, it isn’t just about the polls. Donald Trump is so scared of what’s coming that he’s limited his campaign activities to shoring up support in the deepest red districts of America while threatening Democrats with hellfire and damnation.

No one could be more delighted than the Democratic National Committee, whose pitch to the electorate consists of three words: “We’re not him!” It’s a simple message, if not exactly an inspiring one, made possible by Trump’s overwhelmingly inept corruption. At least for now, the Republicans have lowered the bar so far under a despotic president that even the dysfunctional Democrats might crawl over it. 

Where I see real hope for change is at the local level. Some of the most promising Democrats have led energetic and engaging campaigns, with more public appearances in front of potential constituents than most Republican incumbents have ever dared to hold. The pitch is reaching disgruntled voters of all stripes, including Latinos, Republican women and independents.  Some of them, like retired Army officer Richard Ojeda, the Democratic nominee in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, and Fred Wellman, another military vet running in Missouri’s 2nd District, have independently and successfully put themselves within striking distance in traditionally red districts. Trump won Wellman’s Missouri district by eight points in 2024, and won Ojeda’s Tar Heel State district by double digits. With more than three weeks to go, both races are statistical dead heats.Wow. It appears that talking to the electorate and not acting like a bully can have positive effects. Who knew?

Meanwhile Trump still preaches his gospel that the economy is in great shape and people are doing better than ever; “I think we’re going to do very well,” he said recently. “We’re letting people know what the Republicans have done, and it’s incredible. And prices are now coming way down. And oil, as soon as the war is over, which will be soon, will be coming way down.”

While his stump speech wears thin, Republican incumbents are also running against a Democratic Party that has already lost twice to Trump, forcing us to confront what might happen if the Republicans win again. In the first two years of the second Trump administration, he has effectively destroyed the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and 10th amendments. With a continuing GOP majority in Congress, the other five are toast as well.

It’s more interesting to consider what happens if the Democrats, despite their best efforts, actually win control of Congress. Can they make substantive changes? Obviously, Trump will veto any bills the Democrats pass. During the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, House Speaker John Boehner famously remarked that the House had passed a plan, and it was up to Barack Obama to sign it. Will the current crop of Democrats be satisfied to offer that response in 2027? 

I doubt it. There’s already talk of impeaching both Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump himself — at least according to Trump. My bet is on Hegseth. At the very least, that would undermine Trump’s control of the military, which he would eagerly wield to suppress the will of the people. It was an outgoing Republican member of Congress, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who proposed impeaching the “secretary of fashion,” and it’s widely believed that more Republicans could be persuaded to vote Hegseth out following a big blue wave. Actually removing him from office would require 67 votes in the Senate, always a tall order. But Hegseth is as popular in Congress as a canker sore on a first date. On Thursday, he revived the medieval notion of holding public executions, always a sign of civility, and after a Democratic takeover of both houses, the remaining Republicans will have their own futures to think about. As Brad Pitt said in “Fight Club,”  it’s about “survival of the fittest, baby.” 

If Hegseth is actually removed, the smart money would have Congress then turning its attention on Trump. Only then, the argument goes, would Trump be weakened enough that it might be possible to impeach and convict him, finally removing him from office. I’d want to whip the votes to make sure you could get a conviction before even starting down that road. But many angry Democrats want to bypass Hegseth and immediately try to impeach the president. Knee-jerk reaction? Thy name is politician.

Of course, it’s also possible the Democrats might opt to do nothing about Trump once they get a majority, which is more or less their national campaign strategy. But with no ability to pass legislation, I suspect they’d focus their energy on investigations, some of which would go nowhere and all of which would further fuel our nation’s bitter divisions. But is there another, better option?

Six weeks before the 2020 election, when Trump’s chances of winning looked bleak, he let us know he’d be willing to sponsor or support an insurrection. He urged us to stop counting the votes. We got the insurrection when we didn’t. So what’s he telling us now? One persistent fear is that he may try to snatch ballot boxes in hotly contested districts and claim victory, while screaming about election fraud. Others are fearful that with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress, he’ll let government funding run out in mid-December and shut down the government again. 

As he says, he’ll take whatever action he wants. That has included moving B-1 bombers from a base in England because of a supposed terror threat from Iran, a nation he claims is on its knees, along with a suggestion that the Iranians might “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego. Not exactly Trump’s finest hour. 

His public pronouncement that he can do whatever he wants to Democratic leaders, combined with implied threats against American cities, proves one more time that this American president is an existential threat to humanity. Anything and everything is transactional to Trump, even the sacrifice of millions of innocent lives, both Democratic and Republican. More horrifying still, his statement was met by extended cheers from his exuberant audience of nearly 6,000 people who showed up in Nebraska on Oct. 5. 

The punchline here is this: That was the second time in a week that Trump played before a very small crowd. It looks better, I suppose, to have a thousand people kept from entering a venue than seating them in a spacious arena he can no longer fill. In Ohio, he played to about 5,000 people in a high school gym and later threatened to jail reporters who pointed out that he hadn’t filled that “arena.” 

Trump has clearly given up on retaining control of the House and pulled out of the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina. This week he has grown increasingly dark in emails to his MAGA contributors. Tuesday, he told his supporters, “One seat slips, then another, and the gavel changes hands like a throat being cut in silence. The other side does not need a landslide. They need the dark to do their work for them. A tired voter. An empty chair. A man who tells himself the night will pass if he stays indoors.”

No one believes Trump wrote that macabre bit of poetry, evocative of a “Halloween in the Heartland” tale of terror. It stinks of a collaboration between Susie Wiles and Stephen Miller.

At the end of this road, if the Democrats seize a majority in both the House and the Senate, Trump will become a Manhattan sewer rat cornered in a dank alley fighting over a rotting slice of pizza. 

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Government shutdowns, name-calling, blame-spreading, ballot seizures and even a failure to seat the winning Democrats in Congress are all conceivable between the morning of Nov. 4 and the moment the new Congress is sworn in. But I detect a couple of tells that indicate Trump’s threats are empty. First, his notoriously low popularity likely won’t lead to a more successful result than the Jan. 6 insurrection, although the effort could be more dangerous and desperate.

The second tell is that we’re already hearing talk among Republicans about moving beyond Trump. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio will supposedly run for House minority leader and outgoing Speaker Mike Johnson will be shown the door. Jordan has stayed in the shadows since Trump’s return, allowing Johnson to gaslight reporters and the public with his creepy smile. Will Jordan become the new face of the Republicans following Trump’s departure? Will JD Vance, who’s been campaigning in Alaska recently? (I make that suggestion with a straight face.) Then there’s Marco Rubio, the man in the Trump administration who wears all the hats and avoids most of the criticism. They are all jockeying for position in an uncertain future.

The surest sign Trump is faltering is his shrinking crowds — and his desperate efforts to hide that fact.

Trump may stay in office until January of 2029, and he may not. Nature, politics and his unexplained health issues will have a say in that matter.

But as both Republicans and Democrats contemplate a future without him, perhaps even one based on democratic principles, Trump becomes increasingly insignificant while, at the same time, increasingly dangerous. We cannot afford to forget that.

The post What will Trump do after the midterms, with nothing left to lose? appeared first on Salon.com.

In the wake of a national story of an alleged gang rape at the Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell University in October 2024, both students and faculty are turning their ire on the Ivy League school’s administration. On Monday, thousands of students and faculty members marched on the office of Michael Kotlikoff, who became the university’s president a few months before the alleged rape, with chants of “Resign!” The night before, graffiti appeared on his office building reading, “At Cornell, rapists are protected, protesters are expelled,” a reference to students who were suspended for protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. The university’s faculty senate is preparing a vote of no confidence on the administration’s leadership over claims that the school mishandled the rape allegations after the alleged victim, called Jane Doe, made a report to the campus police. 

The whole debacle has refreshed interest in the previous big controversy of Kotikoff’s brief but eventful presidential tenure: Cornell’s $60 million settlement with Donald Trump’s administration, which was announced in November 2025. The agreement was widely lambasted as a capitulation to the White House’s all-out war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Not only did the university implicitly concede that programs meant to help women and minorities are discriminatory against white men, they agreed to hand over data on race in admissions to the Trump administration and impose anti-DEI materials, provided by the White House, on faculty and staff. 

After the settlement was announced, the American Association of University Professors said in a statement that the agreement would “threaten some of the most vulnerable students on campus and invite ongoing federal government supervision to reduce the diversity of Cornell’s student body.” In July, the organization published an extensive report comparing the administration’s war on DEI to the Red Scare of the 1950s and called on university leadership to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy racial diversity and gender equity efforts on campus. 

As the AAUP report shows, Cornell was far from the only university to cave to Trump; the norm for colleges and universities was rapid compliance. Diversity offices were shut down. Progressive student protesters were bullied and punished. Title IX protections, including rules protecting students from sexual harassment and abuse, were scaled back. Anecdotes have spread from faculty and students about a new chill descending over college campuses — a fear of retaliation for acknowledging the ongoing realities of racism, sexism and homophobia on campuses and in larger society. 

The fallout from the Cornell assault accusations, however, suggests that it may have been more than fear that was compelling this swift bending of the knee by many universities to Trump. There is also a degree of complicity. Progressive reforms to make campuses more welcoming to women and minority students are often a hassle for university administrators, even those ideologically who are aligned with the left. It means conflicts with board members, donors and alumni with more conservative leanings. It means having to handle student complaints of harassment, discrimination and even sexual abuse that would be easier to sweep under the rug. It means having to confront institutions — like fraternities — that reinscribe racism and sexism but are often simultaneously protected by the most elite and wealthy people connected to the universities. Giving into the Trump administration on DEI means being able to revert to older, easier ways of doing things — even if it comes at the expense of student freedom and safety. 

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It’s worth remembering that Jane Doe filed her complaint before Trump was president. Her case has all the hallmarks of an institution that tried to make her go away. Cornell police excluded relevant language — including the unambiguous phrase “I was raped” — from their report to the district attorney on Doe’s statement. Her lawyer claims that the university made her believe that the authorities were pursuing a criminal investigation, even though her case had already been closed. As Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne noted in an essay for New York magazine, the university’s student code of conduct has a stricter definition of rape-by-intoxication than New York State’s, which would seem to cover the situation alleged here, where a woman is as high and drunk as Doe admits she was. And yet only five of the seven men accused were expelled from school, even as she was forced to drop out due to the subsequent stress and anxiety. 

Kotlikoff has a public record of flirting with “anti-woke” backlash. Last year, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that framed “free speech” as a conservative concern and censorship as a leftist phenomenon, bragging about how his school had invited Ann Coulter and other right-wing speakers to campus, despite student protests. But as reader Michael Handelman wisely pointed out in a letter to the editor, “I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Right now, the greatest threat to academic freedom is the Trump administration.” Kotlikoff’s omission was telling, and left the reader with the impression that a few student protesters are a bigger threat to free speech than the heavy boot of the federal government stomping on academic freedom, which the administration was doing by suing Cornell in the first place. 

Earlier this year, Kotlikoff made news by bumping student protesters with his car, claiming he was the victim of “harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech” — an odd statement, as student protest is a form of protected speech. In this case, the students were asking Kotlikoff about the suspensions of pro-Palestinian protesters, which also put them on the “pro” side of the free speech issue the Cornell president claims to hold so dear. The board of trustees cleared Kotlikoff in its investigation and blamed the students, but the student protesters accused the board of bias. 

If Cornell is guilty of abandoning Jane Doe, it has no reason to fear consequences from the federal government for failure to enforce Title IX protections against sexual abuse on campus. As the New York Times reported this week, the Trump administration barely enforced the law during his first term. In his second term, enforcement is basically nonexistent. According to analysis by the Washington Post, Cornell’s track record is already alarming. From 2018 to 2024, there were 1,216 reports of sexual assault, domestic and dating violence, and stalking on campus. Only 51 people were ever found responsible, and of those, fewer than half faced serious consequences.

Jane Doe reported her alleged rape a few days after Trump got elected. With that history in mind, Cornell police and administrators could have had every reason to believe there would be no federal repercussions if they failed to reach a just outcome in her case.

Jane Doe’s lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, told CNN that his client “was not somebody who was a legacy [student], from a wealthy family” and “came from a small town.” Fraternities, in stark contrast, enjoy immense protections from exactly those wealthy people from legacy families. As historian Nick Syrett, author of “The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities,” told Time, former fraternity members are “a base of alumni that universities don’t want to upset because they’re generous and they’re powerful.” Whatever an administrator’s personal feelings, in a situation like this, it is objectively easier to cut loose an alleged victim rather than take on alleged assailants who are well-connected to powerful elites.

From a purely self-interested point of view, the Trump administration’s demands that schools give up policies and programs to help women and minority students is a win-win for administrators. It allows school leaders to give up a miserable, uphill battle against elite forces, while handing them a way to deflect blame onto the White House for forcing them into it.

We can’t peer into the hearts of administrators and know the exact mix of complicity and fear that drove these capitulations. But the Cornell case is a stark illustration of why the prospect of letting Trump have what he wants has a dark allure. 

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A vulgar spectacle uses gilt and grandeur to cover for a weak mind. There’s a bit of treacle for a devoted audience, all flash, no substance. Yet despite it all, it’s an undeniable force with a string of victories proving that Americans have horrible taste.

You could be forgiven for thinking, given the context of the last decade, that I’m talking about President Donald Trump. But those are the sentiments that greeted Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” when the musical crossed the pond from London’s West End in the late 1980s. Time reviewer William A. Henry III called it “muddled” and “slushily derivative.” Still, he couldn’t doubt that it bowled over a certain type of theatergoer.

“For those who seek an equivalent to a ride through the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World — seemingly a vast proportion of today’s Broadway audience — ‘Phantom’ is a brilliantly manipulated journey, scary yet ultimately unthreatening,” he wrote.

Trump was in that number, clapping along with the theme park-ride of a musical. The real estate scion had himself made a jump — across the East River — in the ‘80s. As the crow flies, his commute from Queens was shorter than Phantom’s, but it was about as far metaphorically. Trump’s Manhattan offensive took the family business of his slumlord father into the old-money center of the universe. His penchant for ostentatious displays of wealth and slapping his name up in massive gilded letters did little to win him friends among New York’s elite. 

As he explained in his bestseller “The Art of the Deal,” Trump had always wanted to be in Manhattan. “I believed, perhaps to an irrational degree, that Manhattan was always going to be the best place to live — the center of the world,” he wrote. If he rubbed elbows with members of high society in Broadway box seats and swanky steakhouses, they inevitably came away feeling they were touched the wrong way. As the 1990s dawned, Trump would tell any reporter within earshot that New York society was “horses**t.”

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“I’ll never have the goodwill of the establishment, the tastemakers of New York,” he told Vanity Fair in 1990. “The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing.”

Trump has been open about his love of “Phantom” — though he admitted in his 2004 book “Think Like A Billionaire” to liking “Evita” best out of all Webber’s productions — and he’d shouted out the musical multiple times in interviews. In a 2023 chat with far-right podcaster Steve Bannon, Trump explained his reaction upon seeing the play for the first time: “This thing is unbelievable. It didn’t take long, because the music was incredible . . . The whole thing with the gondolas and the candles . . . it’s great, everybody loves it.” 

Even if Trump hadn’t blasted “Music of the Night” from his newly installed speakers in the White House Rose Garden as pressure to release the Epstein files mounted, and even if he hadn’t used his Kennedy Center sway to honor Michael Crawford, who originated the musical’s title role, it’s hard not to imagine that the president sees a bit of himself in the titular Phantom.

Watching this outsider derail the lives of a stuffy opera society that would never accept him, you have to wonder what Trump was cheering for. Was it Webber’s melodramatic love story, which the show brings to life with all the subtlety of a chandelier crashing to the stage? Was it the cheesy stab of synthesizers and Meat Loaf-style vocals, a stick-in-the-eye for Broadway purists? Or was it the Phantom himself, a man so consumed with the need for recognition that he’d drag all of high society into hell if he couldn’t get it?

The Phantom is a disfigured man who lives beneath a Parisian opera house, furiously writing a discordant opera about the legendary lover Don Juan. He haunts the opera house, eventually fixating on a chorus girl named Christine. He convinces her that he is an “angel of music,” taking advantage of a childhood story told to her by her late father, and he blackmails the opera’s ownership into making Christine a star, while also pining for her. When he realizes Christine is engaged to an aristocrat, the enraged Phantom kills several of the opera company’s members. After forcing the opera house to stage his composition, he kidnaps Christine and tries to force her to marry him. Only after she convinces him that he’s worthy of love does he let Christine and her fiancé go.   

The musical closed in April 2023 after an historic 35-year run, which means that the chandelier no longer falls inside a Broadway theater. But the Phantom of the Opera is still here — in Trump’s mind. Despite winning two presidential elections, he has never received the adoration he feels is due. In public speeches, Trump moans about a press and a public that refuse to give him credit for all the good he’s done. He claims the media never gave him his flowers over his response to the Covid-19 pandemic, that no one celebrates his donation of his presidential salary to federal agencies, that journalists focus too much on the wars he’s started and not the conflicts he’s avoided. 

When the public had the chance to show him love in the 2020 presidential election, they soundly rejected him. It’s a slight he still hasn’t recovered from, and he’s used every opportunity in his second term to settle petty scores and destroy anything that scans like the tastes of elites. You can see Trump’s scorn for the snobs best in his assault on the Kennedy Center, a living memorial to the 35th president that hosted philharmonics and operas — until Trump got his lasso around its neck. Unable to extort the institution into something suitable for his tastes, he’s now shuttered the building and is reportedly weighing its demolition. In his destructive tirades and ongoing dismantlings, all payback for long-held petty grudges, you can almost see a younger Trump watching the heartbroken Phantom. 

The masked outsider lurks on the rooftop, having discovered Christine is engaged. The lines of her duet with her fiancé still ring in his ears: “Love me. That’s all I ask of you.”  

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