Trump says Harvard should no longer receive federal funds as university pushes back – US politics live
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
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In a memorandum, Trump increased pressure on fraud prosecutor programs to ensure undocumented immigrants aren’t receiving Social Security funds.
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Former president Joe Biden dedicated his first major speech since leaving the White House to the importance of social security.
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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.
