'Go to Trump University or die': The Supreme Court's new radical agenda

President Donald Trump's Supreme Court is continuing to listen to the legal reasoning of a man whose educational philosophy boils down to "Go to Trump University or die."

That, at least, is the analysis of lawyer and judicial commentator Elie Mystal based on his Tuesday report for The Nation. Mystal described the argument of the new conservatives taking this case to the Supreme Court as influenced by Ed Blum, "the functional spokesperson for the entire white and [Asian American and Pacific Islander] grievance movement, legal gadfly."

The position boils down to being that "every applicant in the country should take a test and the person who scores 'the best' should get into their first-choice school and so on and so forth, until the person who scores the worst can either go to Trump University or kill themselves."

As he wrote at the beginning of his think piece, Mystal explained that "one might think that mediocre white folks and the minority of AAPI parents who have decided to join forces with them would be happy after their victory over affirmative action in the 2023 case known as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. They succeeded in their goal of reinterpreting the 14th Amendment as 'colorblind' — notwithstanding the fact that the 14th Amendment was a direct response to over 200 years of slavery and oppression of Black people in the New World — and with it ushered in a new era of 'white makes right' hiring practices."

Mystal reviewed statistics demonstrating that the 2023 Supreme Court decision has effectively ended affirmative action in this country, but added that "despite victory, the victors are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until Black students are drummed out of the system."

The concern, as articulated by Mystal and others, is that one day the same groups dissatisfied with gutting affirmative action will get their case before the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court will be as convinced by Blum’s "Orwellian" solution "to demand 'mandatory public disclosure' of all of a school’s applicants. 'This would include,' he wrote, 'standardized test scores, GPAs, family income, Pell Grant eligibility, AP coursework and other metrics, broken down by race and ethnicity.'"

Mystal asked readers, "Can you imagine applying to a school and, as a result, watching your family’s personal income become a matter of public record? Can you imagine having to share whether or not you are eligible for a Pell Grant with the entire world? Can you imagine having to do all of this because some guy like Ed Blum doesn’t think you belong in school? In three years, Blum has gone from 'universities shouldn’t consider race' to 'universities should make public personal information, broken down by race and ethnicity, for my edification.'"

He concluded, "The goal isn’t just to keep Black and Latino kids out of schools; it’s to discourage them and their parents from even applying."

Mystal is not without cause to be alarmed that the right-wing Supreme Court could once again side with Blum's reasoning on affirmative action issues. In addition to doing so in 2023, they have overturned precedent on a number of other key issues. In July they overturned a precedent more than nine decades ago to effectively empower Trump to fire whoever he wants in the executive branch; they have also helped him construct an illegal White House ballroom, citing a technicality; and gutting the Voting Rights Act to make it easier to disempower non-white votes.