Trump takes aim again at Harvard, saying it should not receive federal funds
Donald Trump has gone on yet another rant about Harvard University on his social media platform Truth Social this morning.
It comes as the US education department said it was freezing about $2.3bn in federal funds to the Ivy League school.
The announcement followed Harvard deciding to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations, including shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In the president’s typically rambling style, he posted:
Everyone knows that Harvard has “lost its way.” They hired, from New York (Bill D) and Chicago (Lori L), at ridiculously high salaries/fees, two of the WORST and MOST INCOMPETENT mayors in the history of our Country, to “teach” municipal management and government.
These two Radical Left fools left behind two cities that will take years to recover from their incompetence and evil. Harvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and “birdbrains” who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called “future leaders.”
Look just to the recent past at their plagiarizing President, who so greatly embarrassed Harvard before the United States States Congress. When it got so bad that they just couldn’t take it anymore, they moved this grossly inept woman into another position, teaching, rather than firing her ON THE SPOT. Since then much else has been found out about her, but she remains in place.
Many others, like these Leftist dopes, are teaching at Harvard, and because of that, Harvard can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning, and should not be considered on any list of the World’s Great Universities or Colleges.
Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Key events
Associated Press accuses Trump administration of defying court order restoring its access to White House press events
The Associated Press accused aides to Donald Trump of defying a court order restoring its access to press events in the White House after a judge found the news agency had faced unlawful retaliation.
In a court filing on Wednesday, lawyers for the AP accused the White House of continuing to exclude its journalists from the small pool of reporters that travels with the president and attends events in the Oval Office in violation of US district judge Trevor McFadden’s order lifting those restrictions while a lawsuit moves forward.
McFadden found the White House had discriminated against the AP for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage rather than the Gulf of America as ordered by Trump. The court said the White House had probably violated free speech protections under the US constitution and ordered the White House to restore full access to the Associated Press to presidential events.
The White House has appealed McFadden’s ruling to a federal appeals court, which is set to hear arguments on Thursday.
The White House said on Tuesday all wire services, including Reuters and Bloomberg, would no longer hold a permanent spot in the press pool. The AP argued the new policy was in clear violation of the prior order and was a pretext for further retaliation against the AP.
Reuters and the AP both issued statements denouncing the new policy, which puts wire services in a larger rotation with about 30 other newspaper and print outlets.
Other media customers, including local news organizations that have no presence in Washington, rely on the wire services’ real-time reports of presidential statements as do global financial markets.
The AP says in its stylebook that the Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years and, as a global news agency, the AP will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.
White House envoy Steve Witkoff and secretary of state Marco Rubio will visit France soon, French government spokesperson Sophie Primas told reporters.
Primas said they would broadly discuss issues in the Middle East with French officials, saying: “All subjects regarding the Middle East will be on the table.”
A French diplomatic source told Reuters Rubio would meet with his French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, on Thursday during his visit to Paris, where they would discuss the war in Ukraine, the situation in the Middle East and the Iran nuclear talks.
Vice-President JD Vance will visit Italy and India from 18 to 24 April, the White House said on Wednesday, adding that he will discuss “shared economic and geopolitical priorities with leaders in each country”.
Vance is expected to meet with Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome and with Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin. In India, he is set to meet prime minister Narendra Modi and visit New Delhi, Jaipur and Agra.
Harvard’s stand against the Trump administration appears to have rallied other universities, after the likes of Barack Obama and Yale yesterday threw their support behind the Ivy League school’s rejection of an attempt at “government regulation”.
KTVU reports that Stanford said it supports Harvard after the university announced that it will not eliminate its DEI initiatives, though officials stopped short of saying how they plan to respond to demands to eliminate DEI by the Trump administration. Stanford’s president Jonathan Levin and provost Jenny Martinez said in a joint statement:
America’s universities are a source of great national strength, creating knowledge and driving innovation and economic growth. This strength has been built on government investment but not government control. The Supreme Court recognized this years ago when it articulated the essential freedoms of universities under the First Amendment as the ability to determine who gets to teach, what is taught, how it is taught, and who is admitted to study.
Universities need to address legitimate criticisms with humility and openness. But the way to bring about constructive change is not by destroying the nation’s capacity for scientific research, or through the government taking command of a private institution. Harvard’s objections to the letter it received are rooted in the American tradition of liberty, a tradition essential to our country’s universities, and worth defending.
Columbia, which caved to demands by the Trump administration as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in grants, has vowed to reject any deal that erodes its independence, the New York Times (paywall) reports. The university’s acting president said talks were continuing as the White House is seeking to place the university under judicial oversight.
Yesterday we reported that faculty at Yale University asked its leadership “to resist and legally challenge any unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and … self-governance”, while a statement from former president Obama read:
Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.
Announcing the Trump administration’s civil lawsuit against the Maine department of education, US attorney general Pam Bondi said women were being discriminated against in sports. “This is about sports, but this is also about women’s safety,” she said.
The state of Maine is discriminating against women by failing to protect women in women’s sports. Pretty basic stuff.
Bondi said the administration is also looking at “Minnesota, California, we’re looking at many, many states, but they’re the top two that should be on notice, because we have been communicating with them”.
US to take legal action against Maine over Trump executive order on transgender athletes
US attorney general Pam Bondi on Wednesday unveiled legal action against Maine, in an escalation of Donald Trump’s conflict with the state for refusing to ban transgender athletes from participating in women’s and girls’ sports.
Reuters reports that the lawsuit comes five days after the administration tried to cut off all of Maine’s federal funding for public schools and its school lunch program over the issue, following a 21 February meeting of Trump and a group of US governors where he clashed with Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills.
At the meeting, Trump threatened to withhold funding from Maine if the state refused to comply with an executive order he had signed barring transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.
His threat prompted Mills to reply: “We’re going to follow the law, sir. We’ll see you in court.”
Out of 510,000 athletes competing at the collegiate level, fewer than 10 publicly identify as transgender, NCAA president Charlie Baker said in January.
The US Department of Agriculture notified Maine on 2 April that it was freezing school lunch funding, citing violations of Title IX, which affords legal protections against sex discrimination.
A US district court judge temporarily blocked the USDA from choking off funds after Maine sued the federal government. Earlier on 2 April, the Department of Education announced it was cutting off the state’s $250m in K-12 public education funds as part of an administrative proceeding.
The Department of Education also said it was referring the matter to the justice department for a possible enforcement action under Title IX.
Maine’s assistant attorney general, Sarah Forster, told the Department of Education in an 11 April letter that the state would not sign a proposed draft resolution or any revisions. She wrote:
Nothing in Title IX or its implementing regulations prohibits schools from allowing transgender girls and women to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams. Your letters to date do not cite a single case that so holds.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio and White House envoy Steve Witkoff will travel to Paris on Wednesday and Thursday to meet with their European counterparts about ending Russia’s war in Ukraine, the state department said in a statement.
Witkoff, who has taken a leading role in the ceasefire talks, met with Vladimir Putin last Friday, their third meeting in recent months. He told Fox News on Monday that the meeting was “compelling” and said he saw a deal “emerging”.
It was a compelling meeting. And toward the end, we actually came up with – I’m going to say ‘finally,’ but I don’t mean it in the way that we were waiting, I mean it in the way that it took a while for us to get to this place – what Putin’s request is to get, to have a permanent peace here.
Without detailing Putin’s demands for a permanent truce Witkoff said the peace deal “is about these so-called five territories”, adding that “there’s so much more to it”.
How will funding cuts impact universities?
The impact of the Trump administration’s freezing of $2.3bn in federal research grants for Harvard will be felt most immediately by researchers at the Ivy League school and its partner institutions, the Associated Press reports.
What research will be affected?
Harvard has not released a list of affected grants, and it’s possible the university doesn’t yet have a clear idea of what might be frozen. At other campuses hit with funding freezes, the details of the cuts only became clear over time as work orders were halted.
At Harvard, an Education Department official said hospitals affiliated with the university – who research is funded largely by federal grants – will not be affected.
But the work that could be vulnerable to cuts includes research at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which says 46% of its budget last year was funded through federal grants. Among other things, this paid for research on cancer, Alzheimer’s, stroke and HIV.
Why doesn’t Harvard use its sizable endowment to pay for research?
Harvard has a $53bn endowment, the largest in the country. But Harvard leaders say the endowment is not an all-purpose account that can be used for anything the university pleases.
Many donors earmarked their contributions for a specific goal or project. And Harvard has said it relies on some of the endowment to help subsidize tuition costs for middle class and low-income students.
Last week, Harvard started working to borrow $750m from Wall Street to help cover general expenses. The university has described the effort as part of contingency planning for a range of possible scenarios.
What will this mean for undergraduate students?
Losing federal research grants could mean fewer research opportunities for Harvard undergraduate students. If the funding cuts drive away faculty, it could also mean less exposure to top-tier researchers.
Just last month Harvard expanded financial aid so middle class families wouldn’t have to pay as much for tuition, room and board. It’s not clear whether losing federal grants might affect those plans.
Outsiders have suggested Harvard and other universities should cut back on top-tier amenities to students to free up money for research.
Here’s a quick recap via the Associated Press on the high-stakes standoff between the Trump administration and Harvard, the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university. Both sides are digging in for a clash that could test the limits of the government’s power and the independence that has made US universities a destination for scholars around the world.
On Monday, Harvard became the first university to openly defy the Trump administration as it demands sweeping changes to limit activism on campus. The university frames the government’s demands as a threat not only to the Ivy League school but also to the autonomy that the supreme court has long granted American universities.
No university is better positioned to put up a fight than Harvard, whose $53bn endowment is the largest in the nation. But like other major universities, Harvard also depends on the federal funding that fuels its scientific and medical research.
For the Trump administration, Harvard presents the first major hurdle in its attempt to force change at universities that Republicans claim have become hotbeds of liberalism and antisemitism. Some conservatives have suggested that if Harvard wants independence, it should follow the example of colleges that forgo federal funding to be free of government influence.
Trump takes aim again at Harvard, saying it should not receive federal funds
Donald Trump has gone on yet another rant about Harvard University on his social media platform Truth Social this morning.
It comes as the US education department said it was freezing about $2.3bn in federal funds to the Ivy League school.
The announcement followed Harvard deciding to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations, including shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In the president’s typically rambling style, he posted:
Everyone knows that Harvard has “lost its way.” They hired, from New York (Bill D) and Chicago (Lori L), at ridiculously high salaries/fees, two of the WORST and MOST INCOMPETENT mayors in the history of our Country, to “teach” municipal management and government.
These two Radical Left fools left behind two cities that will take years to recover from their incompetence and evil. Harvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and “birdbrains” who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called “future leaders.”
Look just to the recent past at their plagiarizing President, who so greatly embarrassed Harvard before the United States States Congress. When it got so bad that they just couldn’t take it anymore, they moved this grossly inept woman into another position, teaching, rather than firing her ON THE SPOT. Since then much else has been found out about her, but she remains in place.
Many others, like these Leftist dopes, are teaching at Harvard, and because of that, Harvard can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning, and should not be considered on any list of the World’s Great Universities or Colleges.
Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Michael Sainato
In a series of late-night posts on X last week, Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” revealed the seemingly startling findings of their “initial survey” into unemployment benefits.
They cited examples of claimants who were deceased, between one and five years old, or not born yet. They even cited one case of someone with a listed birthday in 2154 allegedly claiming $41,000.
News of the claims swept across rightwing media, including Fox News and Breitbart, and were attributed to Doge. They were repeated by the secretary of labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who declared during a cabinet meeting with Donald Trump that the revelations were the latest to be “exposed by our partners at Doge”.
“Your tax dollars were going to pay fraudulent unemployment claims for fake people born in the future!” Musk wrote on X, his social network. “There was no sanity check for impossibly young or impossibly old people for unemployment insurance.”
But there was, in reality, a “sanity check” of unemployment claims years before Doge launched its blitz of the federal government – including under Joe Biden. People previously involved with the process say Doge’s claims are lifted from it.
“They’re coming up like they uncovered something brand-new,” Andrew Stettner, who served as the director of unemployment insurance modernization at the US Department of Labor in the Biden administration, told the Guardian. “Going back in 2020 to say there was a lot of fraud – that’s the definition of old news.”
President Donald Trump said Japanese government representatives will be arriving in the US on Wednesday for a meeting to negotiate over tariffs and the cost of military support.
Trump said he would attend the meeting with his trade and commerce secretaries, in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
Lauren Gambino
Joe Biden on Tuesday accused Donald Trump and his billionaire lieutenant, Elon Musk, of “taking a hatchet” to the social security administration as they moved at warp-speed to dismantle large swaths of the federal government.
In his first public remarks since leaving office, the former president avoided any explicit mention of Trump – his predecessor and successor – but he was sharply critical of the new administration for threatening social security, which Biden called a “sacred promise” that more than 70 million Americans rely on each month.
“In fewer than 100 days, this new administration has done so much damage and so much destruction,” Biden said, addressing the national conference of Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled in Chicago. “It’s kind of breathtaking that it could happen that soon.”
He said Trump administration had applied the Silicon Valley concept of “move fast and break things” to the federal government: “They’re certainly breaking things. They’re shooting first and aiming later.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered a probe into potential new tariffs on all US critical minerals imports, a major escalation in his dispute with global trade partners and an attempt to push back on industry leader China.
The order lays bare what manufacturers, industry consultants, academics and others have long warned Washington about: that the US is overly reliant on Beijing and others for processed versions of the minerals that power its entire economy, Reuters reported.
China is a top global producer of 30 of the 50 minerals considered critical by the US Geological Survey, for example, and has been curtailing exports in recent months.
Trump signed an order directing Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to begin a national security review under section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. That is the same law Trump used in his first term to impose 25% global tariffs on steel and aluminium and one he used in February to launch a probe into potential copper tariffs.
US dependency on minerals imports “raises the potential for risks to national security, defense readiness, price stability, and economic prosperity and resilience,” Trump said in the order.
Trump claims inflation falling and tariffs bringing in ‘record numbers’
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We begin with Donald Trump having claimed that the cost of all products including gasoline and groceries have been coming down as the US takes in “record numbers” in tariffs.
The president also claimed inflation in the US is down, without disclosing any specific data, according to a post on social media platform Truth Social.
US government data released on 10 April showed consumer prices unexpectedly fell in March, before Trump’s so-called Liberation Day.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has reported that the US wants to use trade negotiations with countries to limit their trade with China.
This strategy includes asking over 70 nations to block Chinese goods from passing through their territories, discourage Chinese companies from setting up operations there and resist importing low-cost Chinese industrial products.
The broader goal is to weaken China’s economic position and reduce its leverage ahead of possible high-level negotiations between Trump and Xi Jinping.
It comes as Chinese state media said the US needs to “stop whining” about being a victim after “taking a free ride on the globalisation train”, as the trade war between the two countries continued to spiral.
In figures earlier today, China revealed better than expected growth of 5.4% for the first quarter, before the effect of Trump’s tariffs.
In other news:
-
Trump signed a series of new executive orders and memorandums, taking action on a range of issues including social security fraud, federal contracts and the import of critical minerals.
-
The Trump administration is “looking into” the legality of deporting American citizens to El Salvador if they commit violent crimes, a view the president reiterated in an interview on Fox News today.
-
The White House also said Harvard “should apologize for antisemitism on its campus” as Trump threatened to remove the university’s tax-exempt status. Trump said the school “should be taxed as a political entity” after it refused to cave in to pressure from his administration to adhere to a list of demands including banning face masks, closing its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and cooperating with federal immigration authorities. Trump responded by cutting $2.3bn in federal grants to the university.
-
A federal judge ruled that Trump could not bar the federal government from working with Susman Godfrey, the law firm that won a $787m settlement from Fox News for a voting machine maker over lies aired about the 2020 election.
-
The Associated Press has still not been allowed in the White House press pool even after a judge overturned a ban from Trump blocking the news agency.
-
The justice department will have to prove it tried to comply with a federal judge’s order to facilitate the release of Kilmar Ábrego García from a Salvadorian prison, after the Trump administration claimed it was powerless to force the return of the accidentally deported refugee who had legally lived in the US for nearly 25 years.
-
In a memorandum, Trump increased pressure on fraud prosecutor programs to ensure undocumented immigrants aren’t receiving Social Security funds.
-
Former president Joe Biden dedicated his first major speech since leaving the White House to the importance of social security.
-
Following Biden’s speech on the importance of Social Security, a person running the Social Security Administration social media accounts posted a thread accusing the former president of lying.
