At the first press conference I attended with Donald Trump after his re-election, the then president-elect, holding court at his Mar-a-Lago estate, began musing about the changes between his first and second turn at power. 

“The biggest difference is that people want to get along with me this time,” he said.  

Prescient. It has been nearly three months since Trump moved back into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the instinct to “get along” (critics might say kowtow) or face consequences has hit institutions across a broad spectrum of American society: universities, law firms, media companies and elected leaders on Capitol Hill. But some of them are beginning to stand up to the Republican president. Courts are, too. 

It must take some guts to stare at a potential loss of billions of dollars and weigh principles versus practicality. That’s what Harvard University did this week, and it sided with principles. The Ivy League school declined to accept the Trump administration’s proposed restrictions to keep federal grants, calling them unprecedented assertions of power. The consequence, beyond a loss of grant money? The president threatened to strip the university of its tax-exempt status. I asked Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, about it in the briefing room on Tuesday, and she said Harvard needed to “apologize” for what she called antisemitism on its campus against Jewish American students.  

Law firms that have pledged $940 million so far in free legal work and made other concessions to avoid a showdown with the administration have defended those moves as needed to protect their interests without compromising their principles. But some are facing a backlash from their own lawyers for capitulating to the president. 

Two judges this week delivered setbacks for the administration’s hardline deportation policies. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said on Wednesday Trump officials could face criminal contempt charges for violating his order to halt deportations of alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador.  

Another judge demanded that U.S. officials provide information about what they had done to secure the return of a man wrongly deported to El Salvador. I asked Trump on Air Force One last week if he would follow a Supreme Court ruling to return the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to the United States. He said he would. But in an extraordinary meeting with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on Monday, the U.S. president not only did not ask for the man to be returned, he reveled in Bukele’s suggestion that doing so would be akin to smuggling a terrorist back into the United States. I also asked Trump if he was concerned about alleged human rights abuses at the mega-prison in El Salvador where alleged gang members were taken. He said no. 

Having the chance to ask such questions is an important part of covering any administration. The White House put new curbs on that this week, too, taking away a permanent slot in the press pool from wire services including Reuters and Bloomberg. We will continue to do the work of covering Trump robustly and fairly, even as such restrictions make it harder for independent reporters like myself and my colleagues to hold officials of this or any administration accountable.  

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U.S. ally Japan is "deeply concerned" about global economic fallout from Trump's trade tariffs, Finance Minister Katsunobu Kato said on Thursday in the government's strongest warning yet as the two nations began trade talks. 

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