Harvard Trumped

“I will Trump you on that.”—Barack Obama to Eric Cantor, January 2009.

In 2016 and again in 2024, America decided to go with the real Trump and not the phony communist and his henchwomen, Hillary and Kamala. It is likely Trump beat Biden as well.

The real deal is Trumping everyone, everywhere, all the time.

This weekend, Trump trumped on the European Union so bad on the trade deal that Viktor Orbán may take his Hungary and go home: “It wasn’t a deal that President Donald Trump made with Ursula von der Leyen. It was Donald Trump eating Ursula von der Leyen for breakfast.”

That Politico article ended, “German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in a statement that a no-deal scenario would have hit Germany harder, while Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called the deal sustainable.”

Germany is our 4th leading supplier. Italy is 10th. Hungary is 34th. Its exports to the USA were $12 billion last year. Germany and Italy exported a combined $242 billion. I like Orbán but he heads a little country of less than 10 million people. When it comes to his critiquing world economics, he’s nothing but a Budapest.

As the song goes, Everybody Wants To Rule The World.

Trump does. After a decade of persecution culminating in an assassin’s bullet clipping his ear, Trump is smiling, optimistic and playing hardball. He is using all the levers of government this time to Make America Great Again.

A day after Europe fell into line, Harvard did the same.

Some background, Trump halted federal money going to Harvard because the school did nothing to stop harassment of Jewish students and faculty.

CNN reported two months ago:

Harvard University was back in court Monday for a hearing in its funding fight case against the Trump administration, a key step in a battle over restoring more than $2 billion in federal funding for research frozen by the White House this spring.

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs heard opposing arguments over whether to reject or allow Harvard’s funding freeze—and offered her own challenges to the government’s legal rationale for implementing their order cutting off federal funds for the elite university.

The hearing marked a critical moment for what’s become the flashpoint of a major clash over academic freedom, federal funding, and campus oversight—and a belief inside the White House that targeting the country’s most elite academic institutions is a winning political issue for President Donald Trump.

Harvard drew the best judge it could in Burroughs, who in 2013 denied a lawsuit by Asian-American applicants who complained about Harvard’s discrimination. The Supreme Court not only said the case should be heard, but that Harvard engaged in racial discrimination. She is not a Harvard grad but she is an Obama appointee.

Harvard hasn’t learned. Its board made an affirmative action pick of Claudine Gay, a plagiarist whose only qualification is being female and black. Carol Swain, whose work Gay plagiarized, is also a black woman. Harvard should have hired her.

Congress hauled her and two other Ivy League presidents to explain why they did not punish students who protested Israel for reacting to Hamas raping and slaughtering 1,200 Israelis—ending a ceasefire—and taking 240 other people hostage.

Harvard replaced Gay but continued to mollycoddle anti-Semitic protesters. That led to Trump deciding to stop all grants and government awards to Harvard.

The CNN story on the court hearing said:

“It is the policy of the United States under the Trump Administration not to fund institutions that failed to adequately address anti-Semitism in their programs,” the administration has argued.

Trump administration lawyer Michael Velchik, himself a Harvard alumnus, framed the lawsuit as a contract dispute, arguing the federal government has the right to terminate the contract. Harvard, he said, “should’ve read the fine print,” which, he said, stated the government could decide providing funding to the university was “no longer aligned with agency priorities,” pointing to a January executive order from Trump on the issue of anti-Semitism.

Despite drawing Judge Burroughs, Harvard realizes Trump has a good case, and while it could wait him out—getting to the Supreme Court took the Asian-Americans 7 years—it also would go years without getting federal money only to eventually lose the case.

The college has thrown itself on the mercy of The Donald.

The New York Post reported:

Harvard University could pay as much as $500 million in a deal with the Trump administration following months of tense back-and-forths over billions in stripped federal funding and research grants, two sources familiar with the negotiations told The Post.

Last week, Trump said the Ivy League school “wants to settle” after seeing Columbia’s funding restored in exchange for paying a $200 million fine to settle civil rights violations.

The administration had clawed back $2.6 billion in federal funding earlier this year, saying the university had discriminated against Jewish faculty, students and staff by not protecting them from antisemitism on campus.

The New York Times reported, “Although the two sides have made progress toward a deal, Harvard is also skeptical of Columbia’s agreement to allow an outside monitor to oversee its sweeping arrangement with the government. Harvard officials have signaled that such a requirement for their own settlement could be a redline as a potential infringement on the university’s academic freedom.”

Somewhere in hell, Adolf is hitting himself in the head and saying (in German) academic freedom! Why didn’t I think of using that as an excuse? I should have stuck to painting.

Amid our favorite president’s visit to his mother’s homeland, Dr. Ben Braddock tweeted, “Trump is descended from Scottish nobility (Clan MacLeod) and his estate in Scotland includes the ruins of the castle that was birthplace of King Robert the Bruce, who defeated the English and restored Scotland as an independent kingdom.

“Trump is the most powerful Scottish ruler since King James VI.”

I don’t know about that. It seems to me the president has more power than the good king, and Trump knows how to use it.

He is not Obama-ing this presidency.