Company (Google) Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

Michael Cohen’s latest guilty plea is both surprising and unsurprising. The president’s former personal attorney admitted on Thursday to having lied to Congress about the extent of President Donald Trump’s business dealings with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. “I made these statements to be consistent with [Trump]’s messaging and to be loyal to [Trump],” Cohen told a federal judge in New York during his allocution. His plea came as part of his cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry, according to court filings.

The president’s longtime legal fixer already pleaded guilty to eight tax and fraud-related charges in August, including two campaign-finance violations related to payments he made during the 2016 campaign to cover up alleged affairs between Trump and two women. Cohen told the court at the time that Trump personally directed him to make the payments.

Thursday’s plea deal offered little in the way of new revelations on Trump’s relationship with Moscow during the election. BuzzFeed News reported the bulk of Cohen’s story in May, detailing how he and Trump associate Felix Sater negotiated to build a new Trump Organization tower on a Moscow riverfront during the 2016 campaign. It’s also been widely reported for months that Cohen is cooperating with Mueller’s inquiry, though the full extent of that cooperation remains unclear.

But that’s not to say that the plea deal is meaningless. It confirms that Trump himself lied for years about his business ties with Russia. (“I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” the president tweeted in 2017.) It draws a direct line between the Trump Organization and the Russian government during the 2016 election. It raises questions about whether other people in Trump’s orbit may have told similar lies to Congress about the Trump Organization’s contacts with the Kremlin, and whether those people may now be in greater legal jeopardy. (Cohen’s statement of information explicitly notes that he informed members of Trump’s family about the contacts when they took place.)

The most surprising—and perhaps most significant—aspect of Cohen’s plea deal may be its timing. It’s the second time, for example, that the special counsel’s office has made a major public move in the days ahead of a scheduled meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In July, the Justice Department indicted twelve Russian intelligence operatives for election cyberattacks against the Democratic Party. Three days later, Trump stood next to Putin at a press conference in Helsinki and said he believed the Russian president’s denials over the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies.

This time, the Trump-Putin tête-à-tête was scheduled to take place during the G20 summit in Buenos Aires this weekend. Hours after Cohen’s plea deal, however, Trump announced on Twitter that he would no longer be meeting with the Russian president in Argentina, citing an incident last weekend between Russian and Ukrainian naval forces as his reason for canceling the meeting.

Based on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia, I have decided it would be best for all parties concerned to cancel my previously scheduled meeting....

....in Argentina with President Vladimir Putin. I look forward to a meaningful Summit again as soon as this situation is resolved!

Cohen’s plea deal also comes less than a fortnight after Trump answered a series of written questions from Mueller about his campaign’s ties to Russia. The exact questions Mueller asked and Trump answered aren’t yet known. Two questions The New York Times reported the Mueller team had sent to Trump in April, however, touch upon what Cohen pleaded guilty to on Thursday: “What communication did you have with Michael D. Cohen, Felix Sater and others, including foreign nationals, about Russian real estate developments during the campaign?” and “What discussions did you have during the campaign regarding any meeting with Mr. Putin? Did you discuss it with others?”

Trump’s lawyers told reporters Thursday that the president’s answers matched Cohen’s new narrative in his guilty plea this week. If Trump’s answers don’t match what Cohen told the court, however, he could find himself in greater legal peril than he already was. It’s illegal to lie to federal investigators during the course of a criminal investigation.

Thursday’s plea deal also comes shortly after Mueller’s office told a federal judge in D.C. that Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, violated his plea agreement by lying to investigators on multiple investigations since he signed it in August. What’s more, Manafort’s lawyers reportedly briefed Trump’s legal team on what Manafort was telling the special counsel. Those communications amounted to what one legal observer called a “brazen violation of criminal defense norms” and “a catastrophe for everyone involved.”

It’s not yet known what Manafort lied about and how Mueller knew he lied. But the twist is a serious blow to the investigation. When Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s office in September, I noted that the disgraced political operative is the one of the few Americans not related to Trump by blood or marriage who could give a comprehensive account of the campaign’s ties to the Russian government. Manafort’s alleged lying casts doubt on whatever he already told Mueller and makes him of limited use as a witness in any future criminal cases.

Mueller has other avenues of inquiry, though. Cohen’s plea deal for lying to Congress increases the legal peril faced by Jerome Corsi, a conservative activist currently under the special counsel’s scrutiny. Corsi rose to fame in the 2000s by smearing John Kerry’s military service during the 2004 and spreading racist conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s citizenship throughout his presidency. During the 2016 election, he communicated with veteran political operative Roger Stone about obtaining hacked Clinton campaign emails from WikiLeaks—one of the events some believe may have involved cooperation between Russians and the Trump campaign.

Corsi, who is 72 years old, acknowledged in a TV interview on Wednesday that he misled Congress about his actions during the 2016 election and that he may die in prison as a result. But he also distanced himself from the prospect of accepting a similar plea deal and cooperating with Mueller’s inquiry, telling MSNBC’s Ari Melber that he believed “in his heart” that he didn’t intend to deceive Congress. Corsi’s lawyers have signed a joint defense agreement with Trump’s legal team, indicating that their legal interests are currently aligned.

Mueller’s overall silence, coupled with his office’s apparent lack of leaks, makes it hard to gauge where he’s going next in the Russia investigation. Whether intentionally or not, the timing of Cohen’s plea deal will likely send a few signals to the president, other witnesses, and the public. The federal investigation into Trump’s connections with Russia isn’t over. Lying to Congress about those connections will result in criminal charges. Mueller’s office is still willing to cooperate with witnesses who tell the truth. And it’s unwilling to brook witnesses who don’t.

It’s never a shock to see white Mississippians cover themselves in shame. They’ve been doing it reliably throughout the entire history of a place that became known as the “lynching state” long before the inceptions of the Confederacy, the Klan, or Jim Crow. “By the 1830s,” David Oshinsky writes in his history of the state’s racist criminal-justice system, Worse Than Slavery, “Mississippi was viewed as a place of violent moods and minimal restraint, where passion took precedence over the law.”

In politics, too, white Mississippians have always put passion—for white supremacy and black subjugation—above all pragmatic considerations. With clockwork regularity, every election, they’ve chosen to keep their state an economic and educational backwater, an international symbol of America’s racial lunacy.

On Tuesday, of course, they did it again. White Mississippi voters punched their ballots in overwhelming numbers for appointed U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, a casually racist mediocrity, and rejected one of the most thoroughly centrist Democratic candidates on the ballot in 2018. They chose to shame themselves all over again rather than vote for former congressman and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, a Clinton Democrat whose election would have at least complicated, if not erased, the long-held view of Mississippi as the most race-haunted and self-defeating state in the union. And they made that choice in spite of—in some cases, probably because of—another two-week dose of self-humiliation in the national spotlight, as Hyde-Smith’s neo-Confederate sympathies kept making headlines.

Espy gave them every chance to break the pattern. The consistent message of his campaign was an appeal—Espy is too mild-mannered to call it a “challenge”—to white voters to opt, at long last, for sanity and a brighter future. “Mississippi, we still just seem to be mired,” as he put it on the morning of the runoff election. “Still last on all the good lists, and at the top of all the bad lists. All the things you want to be first in, we’re lagging toward the bottom.”

In his closing ad, Espy made the stakes clear—if, that is, Hyde-Smith’s professed wishes for a front-row seat at a “public hanging” and her “joke” about the desirability of suppressing black voter turnout hadn’t already done so. “We can’t afford a senator who embarrasses us and reinforces the stereotypes we’ve worked so hard to overcome,” he said, trying to flatter white voters into crossing the rubicon for a black candidate. With the grassroots groups who fueled Doug Jones’s win in Alabama last year (and Stacey Abrams’s and Andrew Gillum’s near-misses on Nov. 6 in Georgia and Florida) producing high turnout among the black 38 percent of the state, Espy only needed about one-quarter of whites to see the light. In the end, even that was asking too much.

As the outcome became clear on Tuesday night, the ritual shaming-and-blaming began. Sure, Espy had shaved ten points off President Trump’s winning margin in the state in 2016. And yes, the new black-power voting movement in the Deep South had turned what should have been a cakewalk—Democrats haven’t won a Senate race in the state since 1982, or even come close—into an actual contest.

But none of that mattered to many members of the liberal Twitterati. Here was a prime opportunity to trot out those dismissive one-liners and “Mississippi Goddamn” references, to take another round of potshots at America’s favorite state to hate. “Mississippi,” quipped comedian Tony Posnanski, “is the person that looks at the McDonalds menu for 15 minutes that hasn’t changed for 30 years and still orders the McRacist sandwich.” Andy Lassner, co-producer of The Ellen Show, got 36,000 likes for his contribution: “Turns out it’s still 1951 in Mississippi.” An Indivisible organizer from Texas encapsulated a whole mini-genre of comments with this: “Seriously Mississippi you deserve to be at the bottom of the barrel.”

It’s amazing how 46 percent of a state can be rendered invisible by an election result. As I scrolled through the ritual Mississippi abuse, it became clear that most such comments were made by white liberal tweeters—few of whom bothered to note that it was only white Mississippi that had earned another piling-on. Atlantic writer Vann Newkirk, who delivered some of the most thoughtful dispatches from the state during the runoff, certainly noticed: “All I see is people who couldn’t give a damn about poor black folks in Mississippi and have never deemed them worthy of attention or assistance crying on Twitter about how bad Mississippi is,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “Kids are going to go to bed hungry. Fathers gonna work under the whip at Parchman and mothers gonna struggle with childbirth. All under all y’all’s watch for years and years. But damn them all because a race MSNBC told you to care about didn’t go the way you wanted it to.”

Hating on Mississippi has long been a national pastime. But when the entire state is stereotyped, the largest concentration of African Americans in the county is basically erased. Author Kiese Laymon nailed the injustice of that: “When folks diss the blackest state in the nation with the richest history Black organic resistance and Black cultural work, please know they are not just hating Mississippi; they are often hating the Black folk of Mississippi who have given the world a blueprint for liberation.”

That legacy of resistance is not, as this election showed, a thing of the past, a relic of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The surprising competitiveness of this Senate election wasn’t just the result of the GOP nominating a clown to run against the classy Espy. It grew out of the progressive organizing that led the state to stop the anti-abortion “personhood” movement in its tracks by shooting down a constitutional amendment that would have outlawed birth control and in-vitro fertilization. As I noted last week, it stemmed from the efforts of Black Voters Matter, local NAACPs, and the array of new grassroots voter-engagement groups that sprung up down South in the wake of Trump’s election. It was spawned by the progressive uprising in Jackson, the state capitol, which last year elected young Chokwe Antar Lumumba mayor on a promise to turn it into “the most radical city on the planet.”

Old Mississippi might have won another victory on Tuesday, but signs of a new Mississippi are there for anyone who cares to see them. You can hear it from young whites as well as blacks, including Ole Miss’s first female Rhodes Scholar, Jaz Brisack. Interviewed last week by the Oxford Eagle, Brisack did not mince words: “Given that our state amplifies the voices of white supremacist women like Cindy Hyde-Smith who reinforce and uphold misogynist policies,” she said, “I’m glad to be able to provide a very different example of how an empowered Southern woman acts.” The day after the election, her fellow students organized an impressive protest calling for the removal of the Confederate monument on campus.

But that’s not the Mississippi many white liberals outside the state want to see. There’s a reason why Mississippi is the place they love to loathe: It’s comforting. We live, after all, in a country that went to war over slavery, then created Jim Crow—and where a white nationalist used racist rhetoric to become president in 2016, put over the top by a number of those infinitely more enlightened states up North. Mississippi is not an outlier. It’s the America that white Americans don’t want to recognize as their own.

There’s no excuse for the white people in Mississippi who knowingly elected a white supremacist on Tuesday. There’s no excuse for the criminal injustices and economic deprivation that black folks continue to suffer in a state that stubbornly keeps a symbol of hate on its flag. But there’s also no excuse for the second-class status of African Americans in most of the rest of the country. And there’s no excuse for pretending that institutional racism, violent bigotry, and blinkered voters exist only in the Deep South. Dissing Mississippi is a convenient way to shunt the problem aside, to say, “Hey, at least we’re not them.” Even if we are.

The last forty years have seen a transformation in American business. Three major airlines dominate the skies. About ten pharmaceutical companies make up the lion’s share of the industry. Three major companies constitute the seed and pesticide industry. And 70 percent of beer is sold to one of two conglomerates. Scholars have shown that this wave of consolidation has depressed wages, increased inequality, and arrested small business formation. The decline in competition is so plain that even centrist organizations like The Economist and the Brookings Institution have called for a reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement.

Antitrust law today is, however, very narrowly construed. The currently reigning paradigm originated in the 1970s with Robert Bork—the same Bork whom the Senate would later block from the Supreme Court. Bork’s book The Antitrust Paradox argued that the only goal of the antitrust laws was consumer welfare. This eagle-eyed focus was not only economically efficient, Bork and his followers pointed out, but easy for courts to administer, because consumer welfare could be measured in terms of prices: If prices are going down, the system is working. To abandon this standard, former FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright, a Republican, has said, “would be a monumental shift,” and “a dangerous one.”

Wright’s comments were largely directed at the insurgent neo-Brandeisian school of antitrust—a group of scholars, activists, lawyers, and economists who want to rethink the current approach. The neo-Brandeisians (whom Wright derisively calls the “hipster antitrust movement”) believe that the antitrust laws were written not solely to deal with consumer welfare or purely for economic purposes, but also to ensure competitive markets, break up vast and powerful private entities, and, in the process, preserve democracy. When economic power is concentrated, it destroys not only economic freedom but also political freedom, as the wealthy and powerful use their resources to capture the government and rig it in their favor.

In the midst of this debate over the future of antitrust comes Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. In this concise and accessible history, Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, takes us from the great merger movement of the late nineteenth century to the antitrust legislation and prosecutions in the Progressive Era to “peak antitrust” in the mid-twentieth century. He judiciously describes how the “Chicago School” of antitrust, with its narrow focus on consumer welfare, came to dominate antitrust law and ushered in our new era of monopoly capitalism. As he briskly narrates the origins and evolution of antitrust law in America, he makes the case that the narrow economic approach is a betrayal of its purposes and historic understanding. The central goals of antitrust law and policy, he argues, have always included preserving the conditions for democracy.

Whether it was Senator John Sherman, author of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, Theodore Roosevelt in his trust-busting prosecutions of Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan’s railroad trust, or Woodrow Wilson, who created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914, the founders of antitrust law saw its work as both political and economic. No problem “is more threatening than the inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity,” Sherman said in the debates leading to his eponymous bill. “If the concerted powers of this combination,” he continued, “are entrusted to a single man, it is a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government.”

What the framers of the antitrust laws understood is that concentrated private
power poses a threat to freedom, to our constitutional republic. When a small number of people wield unchecked power, they can oppress their workers and employees, crush the opportunity of any entrepreneur or small business, and even control the government. The result is not a republican form of government, in which representatives of the people rule. The result is an oligarchy or a plutocracy, in which freedom exists only for those with wealth and power. As the celebrated historian Richard Hofstadter once commented of the antitrust movement of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: “Nothing less was at stake than the entire organization of American business and American politics, the very question of who was to control the country.”

The most famous trustbuster of the era was, of course, Theodore Roosevelt. And here, Wu’s account of the history of antitrust takes a different tack from that of many other neo-Brandeisians. As their name suggests, the neo-Brandeisians tend to be devotees of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis—and implicitly opponents of Roosevelt. Both Brandeis and Roosevelt believed that our constitutional system could not survive if a small number of companies or individuals controlled the government. But whereas Brandeis emphasized breaking up the powerful trusts, Roosevelt thought that bigness might not be a problem if the federal government could prevent big companies from engaging in bad behavior. Both Brandeis and Roosevelt supported public utilities regulation as a way to deal with monopolies, but Brandeis is generally seen as a decentralizer and Roosevelt as a nationalist.

While Wu describes this divide fairly, and firmly sides with Brandeis on the question of nationalism versus decentralization, he gives Roosevelt equal consideration and portrays him as a hero in the saga of antitrust—as the president who used his bully pulpit and the sheer force of his personality to bring antitrust prosecutions into the public conversation. Many of Roosevelt’s detractors point out that his successor William Howard Taft initiated more cases. But it was Roosevelt’s prosecutions of Standard Oil and the Morgan railroad trust that became the marquee fights, featuring the most powerful men in America. It was thus Roosevelt who set an example that has echoed through history, serving to bolster the efforts of Thurman Arnold in the 1930s and early 1940s and Joel Klein (who prosecuted Microsoft) in the 1990s. This reading of Roosevelt is insightful: Because antitrust is not a technical enterprise, it cannot be left to faceless, nameless economists and technocrats. Like politics more broadly, it requires leaders with the courage to take on the powerful and the charisma to build public support for reform.

Antitrust also played an important role in the greatest battle of the twentieth century—between fascism and democracy—though this is largely forgotten today. During the 1930s and 1940s, the New Dealers and their allies recognized that monopolists and cartels had helped bring the authoritarian regimes of Germany and Japan to power and had kept them in power. German monopolies and cartels in a range of industries—railroads, armaments, chemicals—supported Hitler and the Nazis when they had comparatively few backers, and then cooperated with the Nazi regime, sustaining it during the war.

The New Dealers saw that economic power and political power were intrinsically linked. In Germany, an unequal economy had enabled tyranny. “Here was arbitrary power without public control,” Thurman Arnold, head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, wrote in a 1940 book. The country “became [economically] organized to such an extent that it needed a general and Hitler leaped into power; had it not been Hitler it would have been someone else.” After the war, Arnold’s lieutenants joined teams working on the Marshall Plan and pushed Germany to adopt antitrust laws. The aggressive competition laws of today’s European Union thus have the New Dealers as one of their ancestors. Democratizing Europe required democratizing the economy in Europe.

This principle is, however, often overlooked in analysis of crises today: A stream of books and commentary on the return of authoritarianism around the world—Fascism: A Warning; How Democracies Die—largely undervalues the relationship between economics and politics. While their authors fear the breakdown of constitutional norms and a loss of faith in democratic institutions, they have far too little to say about widening inequality and the rising concentration of economic power. In today’s global contest between democracy and nationalist oligarchy, economic power is a critical element and, as a result, antitrust law is an essential tool.

The author of The Attention Merchants and The Master Switch, Wu weaves his considerable knowledge of the technology and communications industries seamlessly into the arc of antitrust history—and to good effect. We learn how the breakup of AT&T in 1984 accelerated the rise of home internet connections: Whereas the telecommunications giant previously had a monopoly on equipment like phones that used its phone jacks, more people now began to buy their own phones, as well as new devices such as answering machines and modems. We see how the case against IBM in the 1970s kept Big Blue from tying its hardware and software together, and so allowed the computer hardware industry of the 1980s to flourish. And we see how prosecuting Microsoft’s practice of bundling its products together facilitated a more open software industry, one that helped foster tech innovation in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Yet even as these victories were being won, the paradigm was shifting. With the demise of a three-decade liberal era in the 1970s and the rising power of neoliberal ideology, Bork’s book found a ready audience. His approach, which came to be associated with the Chicago School of law and economics, took hold of the entire field over the ensuing decades, though its power derived more from simplicity than accuracy. The Chicago School approach turned theoretical assumptions (there is always a threat of possible competition) into broad assertions about the world (companies never raise prices for fear of this competition). The effect was to reframe monopolists: Rather than being predators and oppressors, these “gentle giants” lived in fear of competition, while seeking only to make the economy more efficient. They thus posed no threat to consumer welfare.

To call the logic questionable would be charitable, as predatory corporate behavior captures the headlines year after year. But the consumer welfare approach was gaining favor. “During the [George W.] Bush years, the anti-monopoly provisions of the Sherman Act went into a deep freeze from which they have never really recovered,” Wu writes. With the Microsoft case settled, the Bush Justice Department didn’t bring any serious anti-monopoly antitrust cases and didn’t block any major mergers. And since Microsoft—some twenty years ago—there have been no big cases “targeting an industry-spanning monopolist or super-monopolist, seeking the goal of breakup.” By 2004, in the case of Verizon v. Trinko, Justice Antonin Scalia could write for the Supreme Court that the “mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free-market system.” In other words, antitrust laws were far from being anti-monopoly in motivation; they recognized and accepted the value of monopolies.

Of course, Scalia’s and Bork’s positions were political, despite their claims of neutrality. It is a political choice to argue for a policy that includes some factors (consumer prices) and excludes others (size, influence, political power). Just as it is a political choice to put a thumb on the scale in favor of mergers, against enforcement, and for consolidation. And it is a political choice to believe in monopolists when they claim they are simply trying to make the world a better place.

Wu also seeks to point the way forward for a neo-Brandeisian approach to antitrust law. The Curse of Bigness is neither an academic book nor a policy brief, so his prescriptions are more a sketch of an agenda than a blueprint for reform. But they include most of the main components that must accompany an antitrust revival: reforms to merger policy, more big prosecutions, breakups of existing conglomerates, industrywide investigations, and a rethinking of the consumer welfare standard.

One omission is surprising. When compared to most areas of domestic regulation, antitrust is exceptional because the courts—not regulatory agencies—are the central policymakers. This makes little sense, as judges are not experts in economic policy-making, nor are they meant to have a leading policy- making role in our constitutional system. Taking antitrust policy-making away from the courts and rooting it back in Congress and regulatory agencies must also be a core part of neo-Brandeisian reforms.

“We must decide very quickly what sort of country we want to live in,” Senator Estes Kefauver said in debates over his 1950 Anti-Merger Act. “Through monopolistic mergers the people are losing power to direct their own economic welfare. When they lose the power to direct their economic welfare they also lose the means to direct their political future.” Sweeping in scope, The Curse of Bigness is probably the best popular account of the history of American antitrust law and policy. It captures the stakes in the battle for antitrust—and it cuts to the heart of one of the central questions of our time: Can democracy survive?

Viktor Orban is on a roll. Since his landslide re-election in April, Hungary’s prime minister has been promoting himself as a European mouthpiece of the nationalist populism sweeping the continent. Now he’s anticipating a new milestone at home in the establishment of “illiberal democracy,” a term he coined: shuttering Budapest’s Central European University (CEU), one of the top-ranked universities in the region, and a symbol of international cooperation.

A cherished project of the Hungarian-born financier and philanthropist George Soros following the communist collapse in 1989, the CEU was conceived to “help facilitate the transition from dictatorship to democracy” by educating new generations. It has become Hungary’s leading university, a bastion of academic freedom and symbol of open society that attracts students from around the world. But the CEU’s administrators say they will be forced to relocate to Vienna if the Hungarian government refuses to provide the university certification by December 1.

Orban’s campaign against the CEU represents his latest means of consolidating power. Since taking office in 2010, he has eroded the rule of law and other fundamental freedoms with assaults against judicial independence, media, and civil society while overseeing a rise of corruption that has included funneling both European Union money and control of key sectors of the economy to his allies. Among them, four super-rich cronies—including Orban’s son-in-law—won 5 percent of public procurement contracts between 2010 and 2016 to the tune of more than $2 billion, according to one study. Their bids averaged 13 times the size of all the others. Orban has repeatedly thumbed his nose at protests from the European Union, of which Hungary is a member.

As late as this spring, the international community stood by as he purged the judiciary by forcing the resignations of scores of judges. This time, however, the United States has attempted to draw a line, with Washington’s ambassador to Hungary, David Cornstein, declaring the CEU’s presence in Budapest to be the most important subject of his tenure so far, saying “that’s how important it is to me and to the American people.” Other American officials, including members of Congress and the State Department, have also weighed in with support for the university, recognizing its closure as a troubling new line.

How Washington responds to continued defiance by the Hungarian government in the coming days will be significant. In early November, I was one of seventy other signatories of a statement by the Washington-based bipartisan Transatlantic Democracy Working Group which argued that the CEU’s fate is an important test of the Trump administration’s promise to seek “principled engagement” with Hungary. Closing the CEU, unlike the purging of Hungary’s judiciary, is also a clear act against Western and specifically United States relations with Hungary—and therefore a much more direct strike against U.S. interests than Orban’s previous misdeeds, which American officials largely wrote off as a European issue. If the American foreign policy establishment and an impending Democratic majority in Congress accepts a major violation of transatlantic values by a fellow NATO member state—with its implications for Western security—what is it good for?

The CEU is not just a bulwark against illiberalism in Hungary or Eastern Europe. The threat against it also concerns U.S. influence in the world, and the central role Democrats and their Republican foreign policy allies in Washington must play in upholding the transatlantic alliance while the current president is busy undermining it.

Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked NATO members, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization itself, and the G7. He’s praised Orban, making common cause with the Hungarian leader in vilifying Soros, a Jew who survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest during World War II and has spent billions of dollars supporting democratic institutions and civil society around the world. But a loud congressional response to the CEU’s impending closure would send an important signal that Americans haven’t forgotten the 20th century’s terrible lessons about inaction over threats to democracy.

Orban’s attacks against the CEU have been mounting for some time. Last year, the Hungarian parliament amended a law on higher education to make operations for the university almost impossible. To comply with a Byzantine new requirement for the New York-registered university to maintain a foreign presence, the CEU set up programs with Bard College.

Then Orban’s Fidesz Party launched a series of anti-Semitic personal attacks against Soros ahead of April’s parliamentary elections, accusing him of encouraging migrants to Europe and seeking to erase Hungarian national identity. Following his victory, Orban promised revenge against his opponents, and the CEU was informed there would be no deal. In June, the government passed a “Stop Soros” law banning organizations from providing assistance to undocumented immigrants.

Leaders on the continent have begun to act, however slowly. The European Parliament invoked Article 7 of the bloc’s founding treaty against Hungary in September for undermining the EU’s core values, threatening Budapest with the loss of its voting rights. The CEU’s President Michael Ignatieff warned ahead of the vote that the university’s fate, particularly in the context of Orban’s multifaceted assault on liberalism, was “not an abstract issue. A lot of the future of Europe hangs in the balance.”

Daniel Berg, a CEU graduate who now helps lead the new opposition party Momentum, agrees, saying the expulsion of an independent academic institution for political reasons in an EU member state is unprecedented. “This is a watershed moment for Central Europe,” he said in Washington this week. “It’s a battle for hearts and minds. The United States needs to be there and not cede the region to Russian influence.”

Orban, who has gravitated toward Moscow, has relished the fight, which has enabled him to appeal to voters as defender of the nation. But he shouldn’t be allowed to walk away unscathed. Although the CEU will almost certainly have to move, crossing such lines must be seen to bring consequences. The options include sanctions and visa bans against those who took part in the CEU decision, many of them achievable by Congress alone. Others have already detailed the way the Global Magnitsky Act can and probably should already have been used to sanction some of the most brazen kleptocrats in Orban’s circle.

Symbols matter. With Trump’s attacks on our European allies almost certain to escalate in the two years before the next presidential election, responsible leaders in Washington must prioritize defending the transatlantic alliance—a partnership that underpins Western democracy, and is crucial for addressing everything from joint security to climate change. Preventing the normalization of Orban’s illiberalism would send a vital signal that Americans can still lead in the world. If they won’t defend this unambiguously positive symbol of international cooperation inside a member of NATO and the EU, what do they stand for?