The Cabinet was chuckling, but there had to be choking in Cambridge.
As he continues to wage war against the woke in higher education — with Harvard being at the forefront right now — President Donald Trump specifically targeted the Ivy League institution during a meeting with his Cabinet on Tuesday.
While he gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon the floor, he offered some grim words for the Harvard administration — and he did it on camera for the whole country to see.
Check it out here:
“We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard. Don’t negotiate, Linda. They’ve been very bad,” Trump said.
What followed immediately had nothing to do with Harvard. McMahon talked about workforce education initiatives, and Trump contributed a brief digression to announce he wants the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty against any defendant accused of committing murder in the District of Columbia.
But when the subject came back up, it was clear how determined the president is.
Trump has been locked in a death struggle with Harvard since he returned to the White House, accusing the Cambridge, Massachusetts, school of being a “breeding ground for race discrimination” as well as a hotbed of the virulent anti-Semitism raging on college campuses since the murderous Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023, started Israel’s latest war of survival.
Should all colleges and universities protecting anti-Semitism lose all federal funding?
His administration has cut billions in federal grants to the school, restricted visas for foreign students enrolling in the university, and ordered the school to take steps to combat rampant anti-Semitism in its students and staff.
In response, Harvard has been defiant, even going to court claiming its First Amendment rights had been violated, but that has only escalated pressure from Trump’s side.
And Trump’s line about “nothing less than $500 million” was likely not an idle number.
New York City’s Columbia University, a fellow Ivy League institution, faced similar pressures from the administration over on-campus Jew hatred amid Israel’s war against Hamas. In July, Columbia agreed to pay a $200 million fine for violating the civil rights of its Jewish students, as USA Today reported.
According to New York Post’s report on Trump’s Cabinet meeting remarks, Columbia has an endowment of about $14 billion. That’s only about one-third of Harvard’s estimated endowment of $53 billion.
Also in July, Brown University, an Ivy League school in Rhode Island with an endowment of about $7 billion, agreed to pay $50 million to “workforce development organizations” in the Ocean State as part of a deal with the Trump administration to get its federal funding restored, according to the Associated Press.
When less wealthy Ivy League schools are falling into line, is a $500 million payment from Harvard out of the realm of possibility?
Trump clearly doesn’t think so. And liberals, after all, love talking about making the wealthy pay their “fair share.”
And it’s possible the deal is already in the works.
On July 28, a week after the Columbia deal was publicly announced, The New York Times reported that Trump administration officials and Harvard negotiators were close to an agreement where the university would pay $500 million — under terms still being negotiated — to settle outstanding grievances with the administration.
That report noted that “the president has privately told aides that he will not green-light a deal unless the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university agrees to spend many millions of dollars.”
After Tuesday’s Cabinet meetings, it’s clear how “many millions of dollars” are going to be needed — at a minimum — to satisfy Trump.
It’s also clear from Tuesday’s meeting that the Trump administration’s crackdown on ugly anti-Semitism and obnoxious “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in the Ivy League is having an impact on schools outside those rarified environs.
When Trump returned to the question of Harvard at Tuesday’s meeting, McMahon said the ripple effects are becoming obvious.
“Since we’ve been negotiating with some of the Ivy League schools, I have presidents of universities calling every single week. They want to sit down and talk to us about all of the steps that they are taking,” she said.
“So it is having its desired effect.”
That sounded like it was a message Trump wanted to hear. Then he delivered a message of his own.
“Some of these schools are getting billions and billions of dollars and they misbehave, so that’s it,” he said. “One way or another, we’re going to win that whole thing… Straighten them out.”
And no one was laughing then — not in the Cabinet, and definitely not on a certain campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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