There’s a running joke going around the White House that President Donald Trump is out for Harvard’s blood because his son Barron didn’t get in—one scotched by First Lady Melania Trump in an unprecedented piercing of her veil of privacy.
But presidential biographer Michael Wolff has suggested a very different explanation for Trump’s vendetta: he’s the one that couldn’t attend the prestigious Ivy League.
Wolff, author of bestsellers Fire & Fury and this year’s All or Nothing advanced the suggestion on Thursday’s episode of The Daily Beast Podcast in a discussion with host Joanna Coles about his war on Harvard and other elite colleges.
“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 said. “Obviously, JD Vance proudly went to Yale. So it does seem particularly odd, but perhaps he’s also trying to stuff it to them too.”
“It’s important not to lend too much calculation and planning to anything he does,” Wolff said. “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.”
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, was critical about Wolff’s claim. She did not, however, confirm on the record whether or not Trump applied to Harvard.
“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 in an email. ”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 called Wolff “a lying sack of s–t,” which he has laughed off.
There are no publicly available records or reports which would shed light on whether Trump did apply to Harvard in the 1960s. Published biographies have not made that assertion.
The potential that his war on Harvard is motivated by personal grudge may appear to be trivial, but his moves against the university are already at the center of high-stakes litigation and questions of motivation would be likely to be closely scrutinized by Harvard’s counsel.
What is known about his higher education is that as a young boy, Trump dreamed of going to film school at the University of Southern California, a school that’s also borne the brunt of his recent attacks. The institution has lost $17.5 million after Trump stripped money from federal research grants after the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said it did not “fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus.”
After finishing high school at the New York Military Academy, Trump’s dreams of attending film school were dashed. He enrolled at Fordham University in 1964, commuting to the private Catholic school in the Bronx from his family home in Jamaica Estates, Queens. “I’d been away at school for five years, and I wanted to see my parents,” Trump said in Gwenda Blair’s The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate, noting that the school was close to home.
According to his sister Maryanne Trump Barry, who passed away in 2023, he opted to attend Fordham because they let him in.
At Fordham, his grades were average, wrote The New York Times investigative journalists Ross Buettner and Susanne Craig in their 2024 book Lucky Loser. Trump did not make the dean’s list in his first year, which only required a GPA of 3.5, or the equivalent of a B+.
After only two years at Fordham, Trump’s brother Fred called in a favor. His good friend, Jim Nolan, had just taken a job at the University of Pennsylvania’s admissions office.
“Freddy requested a favor. Could Nolan schedule an interview to get his kid brother into the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce?” wrote Buettner and Craig.
Nolan agreed. When Trump and his father showed up, they were gracious and warm, “but it was all show,” Nolan added.
Nolan said that Trump’s grades from Fordham were “sufficient” to meet the Wharton standards of that era.
“I would say we probably accepted thirty, forty percent of the people who applied,” Nolan said. Only later did Wharton become the highly sought-after institution it is today, the book noted. Trump’s then attorney Michael Cohen wrote to Fordham in the run-up to the 2016 election to demand that it keep his transcripts secret.
Trump graduated from UPenn in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics.
Trump’s two older sons, Don Jr. and Eric, went to UPenn but his son-in-law Jared Kushner attended Harvard. He was accepted months after his father, New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner, pledged $2.5 million to the university. Daniel Golden quoted a number of people at Kushner’s high school as saying he did not have the GPA or SAT scores to get accepted into Harvard in his book, The Price of Admission.
The war on Harvard is now one of Trump’s most high-profile campaigns. In April, the White House stripped the university of much of its federal funding after Harvard refused to bend the knee to the president’s orders.
Trump had already succeeded in his attempts to exert control over other Ivy Leagues like Columbia, forcing them to change their policies, staff, and curriculum to stamp out rhetoric related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices or anything that was deemed anti-Israel sentiment.
On May 25, Trump demanded the “names and countries” of all international students enrolled in Harvard, later vowing to determine “how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country.”
“But have no fear, the Government will, in the end, WIN!” he wrote on Truth Social.
Wolff suggested that aside from potential grudge, the reality TV star’s instincts as a producer are key to understanding his actions. “He needs an enemy,” he said, adding: “That’s what make the show great, the Trump show. He picks fantastic enemies, actually. And Harvard, for all it represents, fits right into the Trump show.”
The president loves the drama, Wolff said. “He’s done what he set out to do,” he said. “Dominate the headlines. 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.”
Wolff added that even when the higher institutions and federal judges fight back, it’s all part of the president’s scheme to stay in the spotlight.
“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 said. “He forces them to play their part, which is to oppose him.”
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