Donald Trump insanely pulls the country even deeper into the rabbit hole.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s two most significant and repeated promises to the American people were that he would cure the country’s economic problems and end the war in Ukraine immediately upon taking office. Actually, he said he would end the war “on day one.”
Earlier this week, 87 days into Trump 2.0, a Russian missile attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih killed at least 18 people and left dozens wounded, Ukrainian officials said. Nine of the dead were children, said President Volodymyr Zelensky, who grew up in Kryvyi Rih. And that, friends, probably explains the location of the attack.
Regarding President Trump’s promise to end the war “on day one,” no one can deny that after nearly three months, his stunningly persuasive diplomatic skills, as well as his close personal bromance with ex-KGB killer Vladimir Putin, have moved Russia to meaningful negotiations toward a just peace with only nine more kids murdered.
With respect to his pledge to end the country’s economic woes — the ones it didn’t have — on Wednesday of this week, the Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq all continued their slide down negative alley after Fed Chairman Jerome Powell delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in which he noted a potentially grim situation developing from Trump’s helter-skelter tariffs in which prices are pushed higher. At the same time, growth and a likely weakening in the labor market leave both inflation and employment further away from the Fed’s desired levels.
Powell called Trump’s tariff plans “fundamental changes” that don’t provide businesses and economists with any clear parallels to study. What they do provide is uncertainty, the one thing business leaders hate most.
And in a profoundly ironic note, Powell intimated that the U.S. began the year with the Biden administration handing off to Donald Trump nearly full employment with inflation expected to continue falling to the Fed’s target of 2%.
What was Donald Trump’s reaction to Powell’s speech? Three things. First, America’s self-appointed world’s greatest economist said the Chairman of the Fed didn’t know what he was talking about; second, he said Powell’s “termination couldn’t come soon enough.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has spoken with Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor, about potentially ousting Powell before his term ends next year and possibly selecting Warsh as his replacement, according to people familiar with the matter. Warsh’s advice? Let Powell be.
The third thing our president did was what he always does when faced with potential catastrophe. He changed the subject by launching a few hand grenades at enemies he’s worked hard to create: federal judges and elite universities. And one university in particular, one that has called his bluff — Harvard.
Trump is not the first wannabe dictator to try to emasculate Universities and their academic freedom. He could take lessons from Adolf Hitler. Within four months of assuming power, Hitler had successfully gone after every professor and university leader with whom he differed ideologically in his Aryan cultural revolution. In 1933 alone, the first year of Nazi power, Jews like Albert Einstein, Gustav Hertz, and Max Born, as well as 20 past or future Nobel Prize winners left the country. They became migrants to America.
With the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels and the Brownshirts led by Hermann Göring and Ernst Röhm, Hitler got his revolution, and America was gifted some astonishing brainpower that contributed significantly to creating the American Century.
Today, Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt provides the propaganda, migrants take the place of Jews, El Salvador delivers the concentration camps, and ICE stands in for the Brownshirts. It’s much more subtle this time; it’s been modernized. There’s less overt, blood-in-the-street violence, but it’s still the same old song.
Right on cue, in a letter sent to Harvard a week ago, the Trump administration outlined demands that Harvard would have to satisfy to maintain its funding relationship with the federal government. These demands include audits of academic programs and departments, as well as of students, faculty, and staff, and require changes to the University’s governance structure and hiring practices — all familiar from 90 years ago.
Unlike Columbia, Harvard said “No” to Trump’s demands that threaten $9 billion in research funding, arguing that the changes pushed by the government exceed its lawful authority and infringe on both the University’s freedom of thought and its educational mission.
“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a message to the community.
He added: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” In other words, if the University went along with the regime’s demands, it would still be Harvard, but in name only.
And then Trump brought out the big guns. He gleefully assigned his wolfpack of ruthless public policy vampires the task of bringing Harvard to its knees, which is his one-and-only modus operandi for dealing with anyone or anything that pushes back against him. Retribution has been the fingerprint of his life.
Last Monday night, the Trump administration’s Antisemitism Task Force said it was stripping more than $2 billion in research funding from Harvard and cutting more than $60 million in contracts. These funds had already been awarded, but not yet conveyed. This is precisely what Trump’s DOGE has done with every agency it has done its best to eviscerate on the way to our own cultural revolution.
Next, through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Trump ordered the IRS to investigate whether Harvard has abused its non-profit tax status. Federal law prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” telling the Internal Revenue Service to conduct specific tax investigations. Nonetheless, the I.R.S. is still weighing whether to revoke the exemption, according to people familiar with the matter. It would not strain credulity to assume that the IRS, like every government agency, has been brought to heel by Trump and his MAGA sycophants.
This morning, the Boston Globe reported the Trump Administration is now reviewing foreign gifts and donations to the university. It demanded that Harvard’s leaders turn over records.
As if all this weren’t enough, the Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday it may shut down Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. Harvard has a higher percentage of international students than the average American college. About a quarter of its roughly 25,000 students, both graduate and undergraduate, are foreign.
If the IRS strips Harvard of its tax-exempt status, and an appeal by the University fails, it would cost the largest endowment in the nation dearly. It would also cost the world, as Harvard would be less able to conduct its medical and scientific research with the same vigor it has since the end of World War II, when the highly successful partnership between university research and the federal government began.
If the Trump Administration succeeds in prohibiting international students from enrolling, the University, the countries from which students matriculate, and America, itself, will suffer a crippling body blow, and all because of spite.
This week, George Q. Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School, said that biomedicine has long depended on the over 75-year partnership between the federal government and America’s universities, a partnership that has paid off for Americans in life-saving advances. “Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere,” he said. “All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom.”
True, but apparently not all of us care.
Let’s give a cheer for Harvard.
Lest we not grasp the enormity of the stakes in Trump’s infantile battle with Harvard, perhaps a quick review is in order, just like in a college classroom.
It was 28 October 1636, nearly 389 years ago. On that day, a vote by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony approved the founding of America’s first college, Harvard.
John Adams was a distinguished Harvard graduate, prominent American founder, second U.S. President, and principal author of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution — the first state constitution in the nation and ultimately the model for the Constitution Donald Trump is now doing all he can to blow up. Adams included in his State Constitution a recognition of Harvard’s role in educating its citizens for public service.
Harvard has produced eight U.S. presidents, the most of any college or university in the United States. It has more Nobel laureates among its alumni, faculty, and affiliated researchers than any other school — 161. The next closest is MIT with 97. The University is responsible for more medical and scientific breakthroughs than any other institution, beginning with Benjamin Waterhouse’s introduction of the smallpox vaccine to the United States in 1799. Harvard researchers invented anesthesia, the electrocardiograph, heart valve surgery, the iron lung, the Pap smear, and many other groundbreaking medical advancements.
Its critics decry Harvard as an “elite” institution. It is. It is the most elite educational institution in America for all the right reasons.
Yes, it is wealthy with an endowment of $53 billion. But with that endowment, it has done much good in the world, saving millions of lives.
And yes, its faculty can be smarmy and often act like the smartest people in the room, which, in most cases, they are. I admit that Harvard could do with a little more humility and a lot less pride.
Still, since 1636, Harvard has set the standard for education in America. What a cataclysmic tragedy if Trump succeeds in hollowing out the soul of this great University.
I would note here that Donald Trump is not among its graduates.