As part of a broader offensive against higher education in the United States, the Trump administration recently approached Harvard the way organized crime figures approach extortion targets. The White House provided the university with 10 demands on a wide variety of topics, including a “request” to install outside auditors who would monitor the school’s academic departments.

There was no subtlety to the proposition: Harvard realized that failure to comply with the ridiculous demands would result in governmental punishment. The university balked anyway.

The retaliation was swift. On Monday night, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in multi-year grants to Harvard. There are federal requirements in place when imposing financial penalties like these, and the Republican White House appears to have ignored those requirements.

It was the first step, not the last. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also canceled nearly $3 million in agency grants to Harvard, while simultaneously demanding that the university turn over records on foreign students alleged to have engaged in “illegal and violent activities.” Failure to cooperate would jeopardize Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification, which allows schools to admit international students.

As for Donald Trump, the president published an item to his social media platform on Tuesday that read in part, “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”

One day later, The New York Times reported:

The Internal Revenue Service is weighing whether to revoke Harvard’s tax exemption, according to three people familiar with the matter, which would be a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s attempts to choke off federal money and support for the leading research university. … Some I.R.S. officials have told colleagues that the Treasury Department on Wednesday asked the agency to consider revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status, according to two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

While the reporting hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and CNN published very similar reports.

There’s no shortage of angles to a story like this. For example, there’s still some question as to why, exactly, the White House has launched an attack against Harvard. The official administration line said it has something to do with antisemitism, but Trump himself published an online rant this week that suggested the real motivation is his disgust for the university’s faculty and his perceptions of the school’s ideological leanings.

We could also talk at length about what it would mean for the future of the IRS to have the White House explicitly use the tax agency as a partisan weapon — a tool that could presumably be used by future Democratic administrations to target tax-exempt institutions on the right.

I could similarly write a long blog post about all of the many times Republicans expressed hysterical concerns about the very idea of an administration using the IRS as part of a partisan vendetta. In one especially memorable instance, a prominent GOP politician — I believe his name was JD Vance — told a national television audience, “If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we’d no longer live in a free country.”

But I’m also struck by the fact that when Richard Nixon privately tried to sic the IRS on his perceived political opponents, it was seen by members of Congress as an impeachable offense. Indeed, it was literally included in the articles of impeachment.

A half-century later, Trump appears to be taking an eerily similar step — not in private, but in public.

As Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut recently noted in an unrelated matter, “Just because the corruption plays out in public doesn’t mean it’s not corruption.”