{"id":539,"date":"2026-09-01T15:11:55","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T15:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=539"},"modified":"2026-09-01T15:11:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T15:11:55","slug":"governance-by-shakedown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=539","title":{"rendered":"Governance by Shakedown"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In late February, a routine contract dispute between the Pentagon and the artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic escalated into something far more extraordinary. For months, Anthropic and the Department of Defense had been negotiating the terms under which the Pentagon could use the company\u2019s large language model, including safeguards barring domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. When Anthropic refused to relax those restrictions, the Trump administration responded with sweeping coercive measures: President Trump directed federal agencies to phase out Anthropic technology, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the company a national security \u201csupply-chain risk,\u201d effectively excluding it from large portions of the defense contracting ecosystem.<\/p>\n

Read more White House Unveils Program to Authorize Private-Sector Cyber Surveillance and Disruption Operations<\/a><\/p>\n

The message was unmistakable: Accept the government\u2019s preferred terms, or face a reputationally damaging designation and exclusion from business with the federal government. Anthropic sued, and a federal district judge granted a preliminary injunction, writing that \u201c[n]othing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government.\u201d Yet months later, the case remains in litigation, and Anthropic remains excluded from the list of AI firms approved to deploy their capabilities on the Defense Department\u2019s classified networks.<\/p>\n

The episode is unusual in its details, but it is only the most recent in a growing number of similar\u2014and normatively troubling\u2014cases. Across both domestic and international arenas, the administration has deployed discretionary executive authority aggressively as leverage against a wide range of targets, threatening or imposing harm as an instrument of coercive bargaining, and seeking changes in the target\u2019s behavior\u2014often in the form of a purportedly voluntary agreement, settlement, or \u201cdeal\u201d acceding to the administration\u2019s demands in return for relief from executive action.<\/p>\n

Universities have faced threats to grants and tax status unless they accepted intrusive governance reforms. Major law firms have confronted executive orders tied to their representation choices and internal policies. Broadcasters are warned of regulatory retaliation unless they curb disfavored speech. Foreign governments face punitive tariffs unless they \u201cvoluntarily\u201d consent to dramatic U.S. tariff increases in bilateral deals. And most famously, in 2019 Trump linked congressionally appropriated military aid for Ukraine to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy\u2019s public announcement of politically useful investigations into Trump\u2019s rivals. These episodes vary dramatically in substance, legality, and outcome. Yet they share a common structure.<\/p>\n

Commentators have increasingly reached for mafia metaphors to describe this governing style. The Economist has described the president\u2019s foreign policy as a \u201cmafia-like struggle for global power\u201d; Martin Wolf has characterized his trade and monetary strategy as \u201ca protection racket\u201d; and Anne Applebaum, surveying the administration\u2019s tactics, observed: \u201cThis is not how a representative government works. It is how the mafia works.\u201d<\/p>\n

The metaphors capture something real. But \u201cshakedown\u201d deserves to be treated as more than invective. It names an analytic category: a distinct and recurring mode of executive rule, with a specific anatomy that can be identified, tracked, and studied across policy domains that are usually analyzed in isolation. Call it governance by shakedown.<\/p>\n

The Playbook<\/strong><\/p>\n

Governance by shakedown has three defining elements.<\/p>\n

First, the executive invokes a nominal legal or policy predicate\u2014antisemitism, discrimination under diversity and inclusion guidelines, national security, trade reciprocity, supply chain risk\u2014and uses it to activate a discretionary lever of state power against a specific target. Such levers include control over federal funding, contracting eligibility, regulatory enforcement, licensing authority, security clearances, prosecutorial discretion, and tariffs. The predicate may be real, exaggerated, pretextual, or fabricated; what matters is that it supplies the ostensible justification for executive action.<\/p>\n

Second, that lever is used to impose, or credibly threaten, serious harm on the target: freezing grants, terminating contracts, excluding a firm from procurement markets, opening investigations, revoking licenses or clearances, imposing tariffs, suspending aid. In some cases the harm is imposed immediately; in others, the credible threat of its imposition is sufficient. The executive branch\u2019s institutional capacity to impose substantial costs quickly, and often unilaterally, is what makes the threat bite.<\/p>\n

Third, the threatened actor is offered contingent relief if it grants concessions sought by the administration. Those concessions may involve policy changes, public statements, contractual commitments, financial transfers, governance reforms, or withdrawal from disfavored activity. The resulting arrangement is typically framed as a voluntary settlement or a mutually beneficial \u201cdeal,\u201d even though the concessions would never have occurred absent the preceding coercive pressure. Such bargains exemplify what legal scholar David Pozen has described as \u201cregulation by deal.\u201d\u00a0 The concept of governance by shakedown, in turn, captures the coercive process through which the executive seeks such deals\u2014including cases in which the target resists and no bargain is ultimately concluded.<\/p>\n

The three elements thus form a common sequence: A nominal predicate activates a discretionary lever; the lever imposes or threatens targeted harm; and relief is offered in exchange for concessions\u2014sometimes producing a deal, sometimes provoking resistance instead.<\/p>\n

What Governance by Shakedown Is Not<\/strong><\/p>\n

Three boundaries matter. First, governance by shakedown is not ordinary policymaking, in which the executive uses delegated authority to pursue broadly applicable objectives. Presidents routinely reinterpret statutes, reverse regulations, and shift enforcement priorities in ways that affect whole sectors. Whatever one thinks of such decisions, they operate generally rather than against a specific actor, and they are not paired with individualized demands for concessions.<\/p>\n

Nor is it ordinary law enforcement\u2014the administration\u2019s own preferred description of many of these actions. Enforcement, like a shakedown, targets specific actors and often ends in settlement. But three features distinguish them. Ordinary enforcement generally adjudicates before<\/em> it punishes: Investigation, findings, and an opportunity to respond typically precede the sanction. The shakedown inverts the sequence, imposing harm first and negotiating afterward. Ordinary enforcement selects targets by evidence of violation, applied evenhandedly, whereas a shakedown selects targets strategically\u2014often by perceived enmity, vulnerability, or their value as examples. Ordinary enforcement, finally, tethers the remedy to the violation; in a shakedown, by contrast, the demands are disproportionate to and have at best a weak nexus to the predicate, serving less to remedy the alleged violation than to secure concessions aligned with the administration\u2019s broader political priorities. Hence, the wider the gap between the stated predicate and the demanded concession, the more clearly an episode has moved from ordinary law enforcement into shakedown.<\/p>\n

Nor, for that matter, are the administration\u2019s actions simple retaliation, in which the machinery of government is directed against adversaries with no pathway to escape. The objective in retaliation is punitive rather than transactional. A retaliatory act says, in effect, \u201cYou will suffer because you opposed us.\u201d A shakedown says, \u201cYou can avoid or end that suffering if you give us what we want.\u201d Governance by shakedown occupies the middle ground: Like retaliation, it targets particular actors; unlike retaliation, it contains an offer. And it differs from ordinary hardball bargaining\u2014a budget veto, a hard-nosed trade negotiation\u2014because the lever is deployed outside its expected institutional purpose, converting authority granted for one end into leverage for unrelated concessions.<\/p>\n

The Pattern, Case by Case<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even within this restrictive definition, the Trump administration\u2019s many shakedowns, in both domestic and foreign affairs, are easy to identify. In addition to the Anthropic case above, consider the following cases.<\/p>\n

Ukraine, 2019<\/em><\/p>\n

The canonical case. The administration abruptly withheld nearly $400 million in congressionally appropriated military aid to a country at war and dependent on U.S. support. In the July 25, 2019, phone call, Trump asked Zelenskyy to \u201cdo us a favor though\u201d by opening investigations into then Vice President Biden and the 2016 election. Ukraine\u2019s leadership, highly vulnerable, moved toward compliance\u2014drafting statements, planning a CNN announcement\u2014until a whistleblower complaint and congressional investigation exposed the scheme. The aid was released, and the announcement never came. The House impeached the president, the Senate acquitted him, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the aid hold violated the Impoundment Control Act. In this case\u2014and exceptionally\u2014congressional guardrails kicked in just in time to prevent a successful shakedown; in Trump\u2019s second term, that avenue has thus far failed as a meaningful constraint on the administration.<\/p>\n

Read more Lawfare Daily: How Terrorist Groups are Using Artificial Intelligence<\/a><\/p>\n

The <\/em>Law Firms<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the opening months of the second term, the administration turned the same governance playbook inward. Executive orders targeted five elite firms\u2014Perkins Coie, Paul Weiss, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey\u2014suspending their security clearances, restricting building access, and directing reviews of the firms\u2019 and their clients\u2019 federal contracts. Four firms sued, won rapid interim relief within days, and ultimately won permanent injunctions from four different district judges, who converged on the central point: The executive orders unconstitutionally punished protected advocacy, association, and representation. (The consolidated appeals are now awaiting judgment in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.) Paul Weiss took the other path, folding, in the words of Benjamin Wittes, \u201clike a cheap suit.\u201d Its chairman, describing the order as an \u201cexistential risk\u201d to the firm, negotiated directly with the president and settled within a week, pledging $40 million in approved pro bono work. Eight more major firms then settled preemptively\u2014without ever being formally targeted\u2014bringing the administration\u2019s total haul to nearly a billion dollars in committed legal services, plus commitments on hiring, DEI, and client representation.<\/p>\n

The <\/em>Universities<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The campaign against higher education followed the same template at a greater scale. Invoking civil rights enforcement\u2014including Title VI antisemitism claims, Title IX athletics disputes, and DEI investigations\u2014the administration froze or threatened billions in research funding at eight elite institutions and sent warning letters across the sector. The demands reached far beyond the predicates: governance restructuring, admissions audits, monitoring, and payments. Columbia settled, paying roughly $221 million and agreeing to sweeping conditions and federal oversight. Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Penn reached their own agreements to restore funding. Harvard refused, sued, and won that called the administration\u2019s charges a \u201csmoke screen\u201d; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) also resisted, and University of California faculty and unions successfully challenged in court the administration\u2019s efforts to pressure the university into a proposed $1.2 billion settlement. Then, in October 2025, the White House generalized the model, offering nine universities a \u201cCompact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education\u201d: preferential federal funding in exchange for ideological and governance commitments\u2014episodic coercion upgraded to standing conditionality.<\/p>\n

The <\/em>Broadcasters<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Federal Communications Commission\u2019s chairman deployed licensing, enforcement, and merger-review leverage\u2014along with public threats\u2014against broadcasters airing disfavored speech. The clearest episode was the pressure on Disney and ABC over Jimmy Kimmel, whose show was suspended and then reinstated after intense public and commercial backlash. The case shows both that the shakedown can operate through informal regulatory threats rather than formal orders, and that targets can reverse course when audience pressure outweighs regulatory fear.<\/p>\n

The <\/em>Tariffs<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Returning to the foreign policy realm, the administration scaled the playbook to the world. Invoking emergency and national-security authorities, it imposed a 10 percent global baseline tariff and country-specific rates reaching 20 percent for the European Union, 34 percent for China, and 46 percent for Vietnam\u2014then offered relief through bespoke bilateral \u201cdeals\u201d in which target countries would \u201cvoluntarily\u201d accept higher U.S. tariffs in violation of World Trade Organization rules, one-sided market opening, and large purchase and investment pledges. Eighteen such deals were concluded before the the underlying tariff authority in Learning Resources v. Tr<\/em>ump<\/em>, threatening to bring yet another international shakedown to an end. The administration\u2019s response, however, was not to unwind the deals but to reconstruct the leverage, pivoting to Section 122, 301, and other statutory authorities while insisting that partners honor agreements negotiated under duress. So far, those countries, faced with potentially massive new tariffs on pretexts such as forced labor, have indeed done so. In the administration\u2019s terms, the shakedown has been tumultuous but highly effective and surprisingly durable\u2014although whether it benefits the American people remains a separate question.<\/p>\n

The Fed<\/em><\/p>\n

The Federal Reserve constitutes an edge case\u2014a variant with no explicit settlement on offer. In this case, the administration deployed Justice Department investigations and removal pressure directed at Governor Lisa Cook, and sustained public and legal pressure on then-Chair Jerome Powell. Here the demanded concession is not a signed deal or settlement but conformity to the president\u2019s wishes\u2014an implicit shakedown of an institution whose independence is the point of attack. In April, the Justice Department ended its investigation of Powell in order to unlock the confirmation of his successor Kevin Warsh, and the Supreme Court in June . In early August, however, the administration renewed its effort to fire Cook, making the shakedown\u2014or at least intimidation\u2014of the Fed an ongoing project.<\/p>\n

Illegal, Yet Effective<\/strong><\/p>\n

Illegality is not part of the definition of governance by shakedown\u2014some uses of executive leverage may be lawful though normatively troubling\u2014but it is a recurring empirical feature of the cases. The GAO found the Ukraine aid pause unlawful. Four district courts held the law firm orders unconstitutional. Harvard and UCLA won significant judicial relief. The Supreme Court struck down the administration\u2019s tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and Trump\u2019s initial effort to fire Cook from the Fed. Again and again, the administration has asserted executive authority in ways that federal courts ultimately rejected.<\/p>\n

And yet the legal weakness of Trump\u2019s executive actions did not make them ineffective. That is the puzzle at the heart of the phenomenon\u2014and the key to understanding it.<\/p>\n

Fast Pain, Slow Guardrails<\/strong><\/p>\n

The administration\u2019s leverage is immediate: Aid can be frozen, grants canceled, security clearances suspended, clients frightened, tariffs imposed, merger plans threatened almost at once. Institutional guardrails, by contrast, are slower and uncertain. Congress may investigate, markets or publics may react, and legal rulings may eventually vindicate the target\u2014but those protections often arrive only after the target has already suffered harm or faced a credible threat of escalation.<\/p>\n

This temporal asymmetry explains why legally weak, even blatantly unconstitutional, measures can be effective instruments of coercion: The target must decide whether to accommodate now or gamble on relief later. Temporary restraining orders in the law firm and university cases mattered precisely because they shortened that gap; the months-long delay before the Supreme Court\u2019s tariff ruling mattered because it did not. Governance by shakedown exploits not only executive discretion, but time: The administration can impose pain quickly, while constitutional guardrails work slowly.<\/p>\n

Does It Work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The record is mixed\u2014and that mix is itself the finding. The administration repeatedly failed to secure universal compliance and frequently lost in court: Ukraine never announced the investigations; four firms and two universities resisted and won; Kimmel returned to the air.<\/p>\n

But failure on those measures does not mean the shakedowns failed. The campaigns extracted nearly a billion dollars from the legal profession, hundreds of millions of dollars and structural concessions from universities, and \u201cagreement\u201d to asymmetric trade terms from much of the world. They also produced highly visible victories that Trump and the White House eagerly claimed: a \u201cmassive\u201d trade deal with the EU, a \u201chistoric\u201d settlement with Columbia, \u201cGreat News for America\u201d when ABC suspended Kimmel, and, in the White House\u2019s words, Big Law continuing to \u201cbend the knee to President Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most important effects, however, may lie beyond<\/em> the named targets, in the diffuse, difficult-to-measure caution of every institution not yet targeted but keenly aware of the costs of crossing the administration. Governance by shakedown can lose in court, fail to obtain some ultimate objectives, and still succeed in extracting concessions, reshaping behavior, and spreading fear.<\/p>\n

Recognizing the Shakedown Playbook<\/strong><\/p>\n

That is why the greatest danger lies not in any individual abuse, but in the possibility that the tactic becomes legible, repeatable, and normalized. Once targets understand that executive power may be used selectively against them, and once others observe the costs of resistance, the practice disciplines behavior well beyond the cases in which sanctions are actually imposed. Governance by shakedown thus operates as both coercion and demonstration: It extracts concessions from immediate targets while teaching everyone else to anticipate and avoid presidential retaliation.<\/p>\n

Kim Lane Scheppele, writing about \u201cautocratic legalism,\u201d argued that the first task in confronting contemporary threats to constitutional democracy is to \u201cstare into the face of the new autocracy to track in detail how it works,\u201d because \u201cwe need to stop taking for granted that constitutions can defend themselves.\u201d Recognizing the shakedown playbook\u2014the pretextual predicate, the discretionary lever, the targeted harm, the proposed deal\u2014is that first task. The pattern is visible across law firms, universities, broadcasters, tech companies, central bankers, and foreign governments. Making that pattern legible is the beginning of understanding how to recognize it, when it succeeds, when it fails, and how the gap between fast pain and slow guardrails might be closed.<\/p>\n

Read more Lawfare Live: The Trials of the Trump Administration, August 28<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How the administration converts legal pretexts into coercive leverage\u2014and why the tactic works even when courts say no.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":538,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-executive-branch"],"yoast_head":"\nGovernance by Shakedown - National Consumer Reports<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=539\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Governance by Shakedown - National Consumer Reports\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How the administration converts legal pretexts into coercive leverage\u2014and why the tactic works even when courts say no.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=539\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"National Consumer Reports\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-01T15:11:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"14 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\\\/?p=539#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\\\/?p=539\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/ef6e8820a5e2e961e9b8cda481436ac0\"},\"headline\":\"Governance by Shakedown\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-01T15:11:55+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\\\/?p=539\"},\"wordCount\":2834,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\\\/?p=539#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/ff5e655d0ca06faf527c60a132b11703.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Executive Branch\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\\\/?p=539#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\\\/?p=539\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\\\/?p=539\",\"name\":\"Governance by Shakedown - 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