President Donald Trump has furiously denied claims that he is attacking Harvard because he didn’t get in.
Trump lashed out at Michael Wolff, the biographer who made the claim and has written about the president extensively, in a Truth Social post Monday evening.
“Michael Wolff, a Third Rate Reporter, who is laughed at even by the scoundrels of the Fake News, recently stated that the only reason I’m “beating up” on Harvard, is because I applied there, and didn’t get in,” Trump said.
“That story is totally FALSE, I never applied to Harvard. I graduated from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania,” Trump continued. “He is upset because his book about me was a total “BOMB.” Nobody wanted it, because his “reporting” and reputation is so bad!”
Wolff presented his theory about the president last week 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.”
It comes as the Trump administration has been accused of waging a “campaign of retribution” against the university.
The administration rescinded Harvard’s permissions to enroll international students and forced currently enrolled foreign students to leave the university or risk losing their legal status in the country.
Harvard immediately filed a lawsuit accusing the administration of violating the First Amendment with “immediate and devastating effect for Harvard and more than 7,000 visa holders.”
The Department of Homeland Security claims Harvard “has created an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students, and otherwise obstruct its once-venerable learning environment.”
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office last week, the president said “Harvard has to behave themselves, Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect.”
