An Ivy League university. Distinguished law firms with Fortune 500 clients. The highest levels of government in the nation’s largest city.

As President Trump seeks to extract concessions from elite institutions and punish his perceived enemies, some of New York’s most powerful people are suddenly confronting excruciating decisions.

The hard choices they face seem almost to be pulled from the pages of a college ethics textbook: Fight back and put your institution and even your livelihood in jeopardy? Or yield and risk compromising foundational values and ideals?

Some have sued, or walked away from their jobs. Others have cut deals with the Trump administration, and faced ferocious criticism for what many see as capitulation.

Mr. Trump has sought financial agreements, fealty pledges and other concessions from all across the United States, and even from other countries. But his former hometown, New York City, is a prime target: It is a capital of industrial and cultural institutions — and of the elite liberal establishment that his presidency pits itself against.

The deal-cutting has come as a shock to some leaders.

“I have been surprised at the rush at times to assuage the White House from activity that has gone on from people who I just thought would display more courage,” said David Paterson, a former Democratic governor of New York.

But the choices can be agonizing.

“It becomes a challenge for them to speak out against something they know is wrong,” said Chris Dietrich, chair of the history department at Fordham University. “If they stick their head above the parapet, they feel they could be putting a number of other people at risk.”

He compared the current moment to the McCarthy era, when many stayed silent as Joseph McCarthy, the Red-baiting senator falsely accused citizens of being Communists.

‘Pillars of America’

Last week, sold-out Broadway crowds were leaping to their feet to cheer the actor George Clooney after his rousing performance as Edward R. Murrow, the 1950s-era broadcast journalist. Mr. Murrow famously stood up to Mr. McCarthy.

Just a couple blocks away in Midtown, Brad Karp, the chairman of the top-tier law firm Paul Weiss, was writing a memo to his employees explaining why he had reached a deal with Mr. Trump to do $40 million in pro bono work for causes the White House supports.

Mr. Trump, in an executive order, had threatened to suspend the law firm’s security clearances and bar its lawyers from federal buildings, which would have severely restricted its ability to represent clients in some cases involving the federal government.

Three other elite law firms Mr. Trump threatened — Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Perkins Coie — have fought back by suing the administration. But Mr. Karp argued that in being targeted by Mr. Trump for its ties to the president’s political and legal enemies, the firm faced an “unprecedented threat” and an “existential crisis.” He wrote that he had learned “other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.”

On Friday, another top New York law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono work on issues Mr. Trump supports in an effort to avoid its own punishing executive order.

Earlier this month, Rachel Cohen, a Skadden associate, submitted her notice of resignation after putting together an open letter that was signed anonymously by others from numerous firms in hopes of pressuring their own employers to speak out.

And in response to the actions at Paul Weiss, about 140 alumni of the law firm signed a letter to its chairman, calling the decision to settle “cowardly.”

“It is a permanent stain on the face of a great firm that sought to gain a profit by forfeiting its soul,” the lawyers wrote in the letter.

The firms’ willingness to make deals followed a move by Columbia University, which in the face of being threatened with losing $400 million in federal funding, announced plans to overhaul its protest policies and security practices and make other changes in line with the Trump administration’s demands.

On Friday, a week after the plans were announced, the university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, resigned and was replaced by Claire Shipman, a co-chair of the school’s board of trustees.

Some have welcomed the changes Columbia announced, which were already in progress before Mr. Trump’s demands as part of an effort to combat antisemitism. And Samantha Slater, a Columbia spokeswoman, defended the concessions to the White House.

“We will always uphold the university’s mission and values,” she said.

But the deal incited faculty protests and a lawsuit by faculty groups against the Trump administration saying that the planned cuts “represent an existential ‘gun to the head’ for a university,” according to the complaint.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said institutions like Columbia and major law firms, which he called “pillars of America,” should be role models for resistance.

“When an institution fights back, it makes it easier for everyone else to fight back,” he said. “Giant law firms and a highly endowed Ivy League university — they’re going to be here long after Donald Trump. They have the resources to sustain a fight. If you give in on this one, there will be something else.”

A City’s Identity

New York has a long history of resisting presidents whose policies or actions were viewed as politically unfavorable or damaging to the city: Mr. Murrow called out Dwight D. Eisenhower’s tolerance of McCarthyism; Martin Luther King Jr. led huge protests against Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for the Vietnam War; and Gerald Ford’s refusal to bail out the city during a fiscal crisis in 1975 likely cost him re-election.

But today, some of the city’s strongest pillars are quivering.

“Now,” said Mark Levine, a Democratic candidate for city comptroller, “we’re the center of appeasement.”

The city has been a reliable Democratic stronghold for decades, so much so that some New Yorkers were shocked by Mr. Trump’s electoral gains in November’s presidential election compared with his performance in 2020.

But it’s also a city where adoration of capitalism gave rise to Wall Street billionaires and real estate scions like Mr. Trump himself. Now, some of the city’s leaders and thinkers are wondering whether the responses to Mr. Trump expose more of New York’s true identity.

“We are a city of rollovers, institutionalists who don’t want to rock the boat,” said Richard Flanagan, a political science professor at the College of Staten Island. “Deals before principles. A capitalist city before a progressive one.”

All the backing down has made the Rev. Al Sharpton question whether New York is as tough as he thought it was.

“You never know how strong you are until you’re tested,” he said, noting that civil rights protesters have learned that upholding values often comes at a steep cost. “If people really believed in what they stood for they wouldn’t capitulate. It makes me wonder if they ever believed in the first place.”

But while Mr. Trump’s detractors call him a bully, his supporters say his actions are nothing more than deal-making — that making demands and exerting leverage are the way things get done.

And Mr. Trump has gloated over his wins.

“You see what we’re doing with the colleges, and they’re all bending and saying: ‘Sir, thank you very much. We appreciate it,’” he said on Wednesday. “Nobody can believe it, including law firms that have been so horrible, law firms that, nobody would believe this, just saying: ‘Where do I sign? Where do I sign?’”

A President, a Mayor and a Dilemma

Perhaps no one has brought the ethical dilemmas engendered by Mr. Trump’s deals and demands into sharper relief than Mayor Eric Adams.

Facing corruption-related charges, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, sought to cozy up to Mr. Trump even before the election in what was widely criticized as an attempt to make his criminal case go away.

But when those efforts appeared to pay off, and a Trump appointee at the Justice Department sought to abandon the case against Mr. Adams, prosecutors and city officials found themselves confronted with a difficult decision.

Rather than cut bait on the case, the interim U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned, as did the case’s lead attorney, Hagan Scotten.

Mr. Scotten, who served three combat tours in Iraq as a U.S. Army Special Forces officer and earned two bronze stars, said in a resignation letter that only a fool or a coward would obey the order.

Ms. Sassoon, in her resignation letter, indicated that she believed Mr. Adams and the Trump administration were engaging in essentially a quid pro quo, with the mayor agreeing to help cooperate on the president’s immigration agenda in exchange for the dropped charges.

Concerns about the mayor’s indebtedness to the Trump administration led four deputy mayors to make their own difficult choice: Amid the controversy, concerned that Mr. Adams’s personal interests risked outweighing the interests of New Yorkers, they resigned.

The ramifications spread further. In Washington, five Justice Department prosecutors resigned rather than sign the motion to dismiss the case against Mr. Adams.

In the end, a veteran prosecutor, Ed Sullivan, agreed to file the request in order to save more of his colleagues from losing their jobs, according to three people briefed on the interaction. The judge overseeing the mayor’s case is still reviewing the request.

For some who have chosen to fight Mr. Trump’s demands, much hangs in the balance, and the outcome will not be clear anytime soon.

New York transit officials and Gov. Kathy Hochul have held firm during a standoff with federal officials over the fate of congestion pricing, which seeks to cut traffic and raise money for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority by charging drivers who enter Manhattan’s central business district.

As soon as Sean Duffy, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, sent a letter ordering the M.T.A. to shut down the program, the authority sued and has so far ignored the administration’s deadlines. And Ms. Hochul has invoked the action movie “Rambo” to suggest that Mr. Trump would pay for drawing “first blood.”

Donovan Richards, the borough president of Queens, where Mr. Trump was born, said officials couldn’t stop resisting a president who went against the values of many New Yorkers.

“We have to fight,” he said. “There is enough room for everybody to win here.”

Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.

In the early 1900s, Franz Boas, who is considered one of the founders of American anthropology, became fascinated by a large shrine associated with Indigenous whaling rituals off the coast of British Columbia.

He had been sent a photograph of the shrine, which belonged to members of an Indigenous group called the Mowachaht. It showed a wooden structure on a small island, surrounded by a tangle of cedar and spruce, that sheltered 88 carved wooden human figures, four carved whale figures and 16 human skulls.

Boas decided to acquire it for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was a curator. He was driven by a concept known as “salvage anthropology,” in which researchers saw collecting Native cultural possessions as a way to safeguard them from destruction as Indigenous populations plummeted.

Even at the time, the acquisition was controversial. A researcher named George Hunt traveled to Yuquot, a village near the shrine, to try to purchase it for the museum. According to letters between him and Boas that were published in “The Yuquot Whalers’ Shrine,” Aldona Jonaitis’s 1999 book on the subject, a chief agreed to sell it for $500, only to return the money the next day following objections from his community.

Hunt wrote that he eventually convinced two chiefs to split $500 in exchange for the shrine. But he added that the chiefs made him agree not to take the shrine until much of the community had left the island for the Bering Sea, where they often went seal hunting.

In 1905, the same year that the full collection arrived in New York, Boas left the museum. The museum ultimately decided not to exhibit the large shrine in its entirety. For the next 120 years, it sometimes displayed or lent out some of the carvings, and it created a small model that was on view from the early 1940s to around 2019. Mostly, the shrine was kept in storage.

Its loss was keenly felt by the community it came from, now known as the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation. For decades, there have been calls to repatriate the shrine, and talks over its fate, but those plans never came to fruition.

Until now.

On Thursday, a truck containing the many pieces that make up the shrine began its long journey to Vancouver Island, off the southwest coast of Canada, in one of the most significant international repatriations in the museum’s history.

“We’re ready for it to come home,” said Marsha Maquinna, who is eight generations removed from the Mowachaht chief who presided over the shrine in the early 1900s. “We, as a community, have lots to heal.”

The story of the shrine’s return can be attributed in large part to the museum’s changing approach to its Native collections and the human remains it holds. And it involved an unlikely pair of facilitators: a father and son from California who only recently discovered their connection to the First Nation through Ancestry.com.

Like other major American institutions, the museum had long been criticized for its history of slow progress on repatriation and outdated Native exhibitions.

Efforts to address those criticisms have been going on for years, but the museum’s new president, Sean Decatur, sent a signal that he took them very seriously last year when he closed down two major halls exhibiting Native American objects. He cited a “growing urgency” for museums to change their relationships to Indigenous cultures.

When it comes to Native human remains, funerary objects and other cultural items recovered in the United States, a law passed in 1990 set up a protocol for museums and other institutions to repatriate the holdings in consultation with tribes and descendants. New federal rules that strengthened aspects of the protocol took effect last year. But the law does not apply to international Native groups.

Of the human remains that the museum still holds, more than half of the 12,000 individuals represented are from outside the U.S. In 2023, the museum overhauled its stewardship of the human remains in its collection, emphasizing its commitment to working with communities internationally on repatriation.

Last year, talks to repatriate the shrine — known to some as the Whalers’ Shrine and to others as the Whalers’ Washing House because of its association with purification rituals — took on new urgency.

They had been going on for decades. In the 1990s, representatives from the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation visited the museum to view the collection. Amid a surge of activism around Native repatriation, calls to return the shrine grew louder.

A 1994 documentary about the First Nation, called “The Washing of Tears,” captured the view that the repatriation of the shrine would be a source of spiritual healing for a community trying to save its culture and ways of life.

“It represented our strength,” Jerry Jack, a hereditary chief, said in the documentary. He referred to the shrine by a traditional name: cheesum.

“I think that when that cheesum was taken away from us it was a real shocker for our people,” he said. “It took away our spirituality.”

In the years that followed there were waves of efforts to complete the repatriation, but plans kept stalling.

At times there were disagreements among members of the First Nation over how to carry out the return. And museum officials did not put forward many solutions.

Then, a few years ago, Albert Lara, a retiree living near Sacramento, Calif., began digging into his genealogy. Lara’s grandfather had told him stories as a child about his Indigenous heritage, but Lara, 75, was not aware of his connection to the Pacific Northwest until he sent a cheek swab to Ancestry.com. The results suggested a connection to members of the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation.

Lara reached out to First Nation officials and got in touch with Margaretta James, who was president of a local cultural society and had been involved in the repatriation efforts for more than 30 years.

His son, Alex Lara, remembers himself and his father asking James, “Is there anything we can help you with?”

James replied, “Well, as a matter of fact, there is.”

Both of the Laras had worked with Native American tribes in California during their careers — Albert with Native veterans as part of the state employment development agency — and James saw them as genuine in their desires to help.

Last April, the Laras began communicating with the museum about the shrine. A letter from the First Nation’s chief executive made them authorized representatives for the group.

In the ensuing months, a plan was put together for the most logistically complicated part of the repatriation: transporting the large shrine back to Yuquot. The First Nation decided that a delegation of its members would see it off on its more than 3,000-mile journey from New York.

On Tuesday, in a room off the natural history museum’s Northwest Coast Hall, more than two dozen First Nation members stood among the boxes and crates containing the pieces of one of their most prized cultural treasures.

They had come from a 200-person reserve near the village of Gold River, ranging in age from elders to grade school children. Many remembered how their parents and grandparents spoke about the lost shrine.

“Listening to what my dad said, anything we have doesn’t belong in a place like this,” said Jerry Jack, whose father — who has since died — called for the return of the shrine in the 1994 documentary.

Museum officials signed over ownership of the shrine to the First Nation. Decatur, the museum president, told the delegation that the shrine had been held “far too long here in New York City in this museum, far away from its true home.”

The First Nation representatives offered a series of gifts, including carved wooden masks by local artists. They sang a victory song in their language of Nuu-chah-nulth. A group of men and boys brushed the packages containing the shrine with cedar boughs as part of a cleansing ritual before their departure.

The Laras flew in from California, with Alex Lara overseeing the logistics of the shrine’s shipment. (The transport and the delegation’s trip is being paid for by the Canadian government, which recognized the shrine as a national historic site in the 1980s.)

A century ago, it took months for the shrine to travel from Vancouver Island to New York City. Now, it’ll take less than a week to make its return.

Unwilling to put their ancestors’ remains on a cross-country drive, the 16 skulls were securely placed in reinforced carry-ons that First Nation members took back with them on their flight home, accompanied by documentation to get them through security.

The shipment by truck includes six large cardboard boxes, four wooden crates — the heaviest of which is nearly 400 pounds — and the wooden structure that housed the shrine, which includes several towering poles as tall as 23.5 feet.

Those packages are scheduled to travel west by truck, and then by ferry to Yuquot. From there, according to the current plan, a helicopter service will airlift the pieces to a church, where they will be kept until the community decides on a more permanent resting place.

“It’s been generally known that it’s going to go back to the island from whence it came,” James said. “But it needs to be protected.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

As New York City voters tilt slightly toward the center, the left-leaning Working Families Party hopes that a slate of four mayoral candidates will be better than the one moderate rival currently leading the polls, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

The party on Saturday voted to endorse a slate of four candidates for mayor: Zohran Mamdani, an assemblyman from Queens; Brad Lander, the city comptroller; Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the City Council; and Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn.

Ana María Archila and Jasmine Gripper, co-directors of the New York Working Families Party, said in a statement that the city deserved a mayor who could “leave behind the scandal and corruption of the past and lead with integrity.”

The four candidates “each have a record of fighting for working families, a vision to make New York City safe and affordable for all and the courage to stand up to Trump,” they added.

The slate is the first of a two-part endorsement process that the party has embraced for the June 24 primary. In May, the group plans to throw its support behind a single candidate that its leaders believe is best positioned to defeat Mr. Cuomo.

In the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, the three candidates backed by the Working Families Party failed to make the final round under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system. This year, the group has adjusted its endorsement process in an effort to better leverage its influence.

Candidates vying for the party’s support this year were asked to commit to working collaboratively with one another, and to encourage their supporters not to rank either Mr. Cuomo or Mayor Eric Adams. Six Democrats applied for the party’s endorsement and all agreed to those terms.

Party leaders have not yet decided on a concrete strategy for how to consolidate support around their first choice, but they have weighed obligating other candidates seeking the group’s endorsement to cross-endorse the party’s top choice.

“Our task, and that of every W.F.P.-endorsed candidate, is to remind New Yorkers of Cuomo’s real record, and to communicate to voters they don’t have to settle,” the group wrote in a memo outlining its strategy this month. “They can elect a new mayor who will stand up for working families, not the billionaires.”

The memo defined the contest as “working-families champions vs. the power-hungry, scandal-ridden politicians,” themes that all four candidates hit on in a series of statements on Saturday.

Mr. Lander said he wanted to work with the party to “deliver a safer, more affordable, better-run city so that all working families can build their lives here as I have.”

Ms. Adams referenced growing up in a union household. “That’s where I come from, who I fight for and who I’ll always be accountable to,” she said.

Mr. Myrie said he was “running to make New York more affordable, livable and safe for everyone” by building more affordable housing and creating enhanced child care options.

Mr. Mamdani mentioned Mr. Cuomo and President Trump directly and said that he was “fighting for a city that working people can actually afford.”

The party’s four-headed endorsement is part of a broader strategy among progressives seeking to thwart Mr. Cuomo, even as he garners more endorsements and support from key voting blocs.

On Sunday, the former governor is expected to receive the backing of Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, a onetime ally of the mayor who also serves as chairman of the Queens Democratic Party. Mr. Meeks helped Ms. Adams form a coalition to win the speaker’s role.

“New York has a crisis of affordability, of quality of life and of leadership, and Governor Cuomo is the only person in this race with the proven track record of results to tackle these issues head on,” said Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo.

But the former governor’s foes, including the Working Families Party, hope to seize on a variety of issues of Mr. Cuomo’s own, such as the sexual harassment accusations that led to his resignation in 2021. Mr. Cuomo denies wrongdoing.

The party’s endorsement could also hurt progressive candidates who failed to receive it. They include Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who has struggled to raise money.

Mr. Lander has aggressively attacked Mr. Cuomo but has not risen in the polls. Ms. Adams was a late entrant to the race and lacks name recognition. Mr. Myrie is also struggling in that department.

Mr. Mamdani, whose online persona and relentless focus on affordability in his campaign message, has made strides to counter Mr. Cuomo’s momentum and could add new voters to his coalition as part of that effort. Several recent polls show him second, well behind Mr. Cuomo but leading the progressive lane with impressive fund-raising numbers.