Category: UW Experts in the News

“The act of naming is a way that presidents can reshape their vision of the nation,” said Allison Prasch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies political rhetoric.

Trump’s choices in his second term send a clear message about his priorities too, she said. “It is elevating a very nationalist, imperialist vision of the United States,” Prasch said.

When this kind of data is taken away from journalists, researchers and the public, it can have big consequences for what we are able to learn, University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communications professor Michael Wagner said.

“Being able to use public data to write stories that can hold the powerful to account is the lifeblood of good journalism and so journalists need to have access to public data to tell their audience how our leaders are using,” Wagner said. “And so to take these down and prevent journalists and researchers from using them, makes it a lot harder for us to hold power to account.”

We aren’t yet in a constitutional crisis, but we are in the middle of a constitutional revolution, says Howard Schewber, an emeritus professor of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Trump’s barrage of executive orders is radical, according to Schweber, because it denies Congress the authority of its power over the president.

“We tend to be going more and more towards a real brutal capitalism, I think everywhere,” said Barbara Bowers, a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Nursing. “And it’s fine if it’s about the quality of your television set. But it’s a different issue when it’s the quality of somebody’s life. I think we treat this as any other commodity, which is really unfortunate.”

As it stands, there have been no moves by the Trump administration or the Supreme Court to do away with equal marriage rights for LGBTQ+ couples. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, said Howard Schweber, a political science professor and law school affiliate faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

But UW Health Kids pediatrician and researcher Dr. Megan Moreno said schools should take care to do what’s best for their students. She said when it comes to social media and mental health, there isn’t a population-level impact.

“So when kids are feeling really anxious or over stimulated, a lot of patients that I see have really well-developed mechanisms that they can use their phone to calm down,” Dr. Moreno said.

Dorothea Salo, academic librarian and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Register we’ve been here before, citing how the prior Trump administration all but disappeared the US Environmental Protection Agency.

“That apparently made him happy enough to try to disappear half the federal government this time,” she said. “As happened last time, lots of citizens and citizen groups are rescuing what they can. It’s organically fairly decent preservation practice – the rescued work is being duplicated in widely geographically disparate places, which lowers the odds that sheer bad luck wipes it out. The difficulty is discovery – who’s got what data [and] where? If, as I hope, US leaders someday return to a belief that government transparency is important to democracy, putting the jigsaw puzzle back together will be a huge lift.”

The Laken Riley act requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain people who are living in the U.S. without legal permission who have committed crimes or have been accused of committing a crime, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School Clinical Professor of Law John Gross.