6 Nov 2026 - 7:15pm
Following this week’s midterms, in which Republicans were handed a historic defeat, Harmeet Dhillon became the first senior Trump administration official to resign. Announcing her decision to step down as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Dhillon highlighted how “we ushered in the downfall of illegal DEI, we fought to protect women and girls’ sports, and so much more.” Yet, far from bringing about the “downfall of illegal DEI”, she herself weaponised civil-rights law to the benefit of her ideological allies.
Take Columbia University, where I attend college and which was chief among Dhillon’s higher-education targets. Of course, there were very real instances of vitriol directed against Zionist and Jewish students. Yet Dhillon chose neither to solely punish the worst offenders nor to reaffirm the university’s commitment to universal anti-discrimination principles. Instead, the Trump administration’s endgame was to leverage civil-rights machinery to bully the university into advancing its agenda and marginalising anyone who disagreed.
In March 2025, the administration suspended $400 million in funding to Columbia over its alleged failure to combat anti-Jewish civil-rights violations. By July that year, following the threat of losing over $1 billion in funding and multiple high-profile student detainments by ICE, the university agreed to settle, paying a total of $221 million and agreeing to various conditions. Columbia adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s controversial definition of antisemitism, which critics argue conflates condemnation of Israel and Zionism with “antisemitic” animus. The university also announced partnerships with organisations which carry a pro-Israel ideological bias, such as the Anti-Defamation League, to provide “a deeper education on antisemitism” beyond existing anti-discrimination training. Finally, Columbia also pledged to review its Middle Eastern studies programme, strengthening focus on Israel specifically.
Before embarking on this effort, Dhillon had, in classic progressive-speak, criticised her ideological opponents on college campuses as “ill-informed, they’re poorly educated. They have no good parental guidance at home.”
She was undoubtedly a key player in the Trump administration’s pro-Israel crusade. In September 2025, with the Columbia settlement finalised and in effect, and negotiations ongoing with other institutions such as Harvard, Dhillon attended the Israeli-American Council (IAC) gala. There, she boasted that her efforts had resulted in “accountability for the bad behaviour of a lot of people”. Yet she went beyond punishing activist overreach and sought to establish glaring double standards that would make support for Israel the favoured position in higher education.
The IAC, in a statement to the Jerusalem Post, also confirmed that Dhillon was leading the Trump administration’s initiatives not only in funding freezes but also in the attempted deportation of pro-Palestinian activists on college campuses. (It’s not clear how she would have jurisdiction over the latter, and these students actually aren’t guilty of any crime.) Video interviews from her office show a massive IAC plaque in the background.
Dhillon wasn’t the only one doing “woke” for Zionists. Her comrade in that effort, Leo Terrell, chairs the Justice Department’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. Last month, a Harvard Crimson investigation alleged that he had harassed his Jewish interns. It seemed going after universities was more important than actually respecting Jews.
As the Republican Party will likely be taking a more Israel-skeptical direction to match its base’s position, there is increasingly little room for the likes of Dhillon. She may be remembered as one of the last people in the GOP who did absolutely everything to stop the inevitable tide. But progressive-style weaponisation and lawfare could not stop it. Whatever happens, we’ll probably be hearing about antisemitism on college campuses far less.
