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This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent. After the New York Times reported that President Trump had backtracked on a major demand

he'd made on Harvard University, he spiraled out of control in three wild tirades. He denied

backtracking, demanded a correction from the Times, and levied a series

of unhinged new threats against Harvard. What's interesting here, though, is how panicked,

ineffective, and humiliated Trump looked as he fired off crazed half-cocked threats at the university.

Why don't more institutions grasp that standing firm in the face of

Trump's bullying is the only way to diffuse it? We're talking about all this with Ryan Enos,

a political scientist at Harvard who's been at the forefront of arguing that Harvard shouldn't cave.

Ryan, nice to have you on. Thanks. I'm very glad to be here. So the Times reported that Harvard seems to have decided not to pay the $200 million that the Trump administration was demanding over claims that it had mishandled anti-Semitism on campus. Apparently, Harvard's leadership worried about the backlash to surrendering to Trump. They had to weigh that against the prospect of

losing a lot of federal research grants, which the administration has been attempting to cut.

Ryan, can you walk us through how all this happened and bring us up to date?

Yeah, well, look, I mean, it's a long convoluted story, but we have to remember that this is all

in the context of Trump's

authoritarian attacks on civil institutions. And the universities are just one of those, just like other

authoritarians have done in other countries, universities are a prime target. And everybody knew from day

one that Harvard would be one of those prime targets because the prime target because of its standing

in American higher education.

...