Trump biographer Michael Wolff has suggested that the president has turned his ire on Harvard because he didn’t get into the school.
The Daily Beast reported earlier this week that there’s a running joke in the White House that Donald Trump has set his sights on the Ivy League institution because his son Barron couldn’t get in. But Wolff has suggested that it’s Trump himself who failed to attend.
Baron’s mom, First Lady Melania Trump, said her son never applied to Harvard.
Wolff presented his theory about the president Thursday on The Daily Beast Podcast to host Joanna Coles.
“It’s also odd because so many of the people around Donald Trump went to Ivy League universities. Several of them went to Harvard Business School,” Coles pointed out. “Obviously, JD Vance proudly went to Yale. So it does seem particularly odd, but perhaps he’s also trying to stuff it to them.”
“It’s important not to lend too much calculation and planning to anything he does,” Wolff responded. “But the other thing is that, by the way, he didn’t get into Harvard. So one of the Trump things is always holding a grudge against the Ivy Leagues.”
Trump attended the University of Pennsylvania.
A spokesperson for the White House, Taylor Rogers, blasted the author and the outlet in a statement to The Daily Beast.
“The Daily Beast and Michael Wolff have lots in common — they both peddle fake news for clickbait in a hopeless attempt to amount to something more than lying losers,“ she said. ”The President didn’t need to apply to an overrated, corrupt institution like Harvard to become a successful businessman and the most transformative President in history.”
The White House has previously referred to Wolff as a “lying sack of s***.”
It’s uncertain whether Trump ever applied to Harvard. No published biographies have claimed that he did.
Trump enrolled at Fordham University in 1964 after attending the New York Military Academy. After two years at the school, Trump transferred to the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania.
Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, recorded conversations in 2018 and 2019, reported byThe Washington Post in 2020, with her aunt, the late federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, who said on tape that she did Trump’s homework for him. Trump Barry also said a friend took his college entrance exam for him.
Similarly, Mary Trump wrote in her book published in 2020 that the president paid someone to take his SATs.
“I drove him around New York City to try to get him into college,” Trump Barry said at the time. She added that Trump “went to Fordham for one year and then he got into the University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.”
Trump actually attended Fordham for two years. A White House spokesperson at the time said it was “false” that someone took the SATs for the president.
Responding to The Post’s report about the recordings at the time, Trump said: “Who cares?”
Last month, the White House announced the removal of most of Harvard’s federal funding after the school refused to adhere to the president’s orders to shut down diversity programs at the university.
Trump has claimed that the basis for his fight with Harvard has to do with antisemitism on campus. Subsequently, on May 25, the president demanded the “names and countries” of all international students at the school. Trump said he would find out “how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country.”
Wolff said on the podcast that Trump “needs an enemy. That’s what makes the ‘show’ great, the Trump show. He picks fantastic enemies, actually. And Harvard, for all it represents, fits right into the Trump show.”
He has “done what he set out to do – dominate the headlines,” Wolff added. “What do you do? You go after Harvard, and you go after Harvard in a way that is draconian, dramatic, and existential. It’s threatening Harvard on that level.”
So Harvard “will oppose this and therefore the courts will stop this from happening. But at the same time, that becomes another aspect to the Trump show,” he argued. “He forces them to play their part, which is to oppose him.”