How Trump Is Failing Against Harvard

Or, how to make Harvard look sympathetic.

Photo by Guido Coppa on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has already written at length about the inept, bullying, and impulsive manner in which the Trump administration has gone after higher education in general and Harvard University in particular. Over the weekend, however, some news stories have come out that reinforce a few points about how these attacks are going.

1. The administration has already shot its wad in going after Harvard and has very little left in its cupboard.

2. This anti-Harvard jihad is not going exactly as planned, either legally or politically.

3. The Trump White House has now reached the same point in its dealing with Harvard that it previously reached in its trade negotiations with multiple countries: desperate for a victory that may never come.

This is not to say that Trump is not wreaking carnage. He’s wreaking a tremendous amount of carnage. What he is not doing, however, is winning.

Why do I say the Trump administration has already fired its best shots against Harvard? Well, there’s the long list of actions taken that the New York Times’ Michael C. Bender has compiled. There is simply not a lot left in the coercion cupboard.

Sophia Cai and Megan Messerly’s recent Politico reportage confirms that assessment. Their latest article is entitled “White House convenes meeting to brainstorm new Harvard measures.” The story, however, suggests that their brains are at best producing a weak drizzle:

The White House convened officials from nearly a dozen agencies on Wednesday to brainstorm additional punitive measures, according to one administration official and a second person familiar with the meeting, who were granted anonymity to share details. The administration official said that forthcoming actions are expected from the State, Treasury, Health and Human Services and Justice departments, among others, and could happen as early as next month….

But with the low-hanging policy options already underway, the administration knows it will need to get more creative to keep squeezing the school, according to two administration officials and another person familiar with the talks, who like others in the story were granted anonymity to share details of private conversations.

The administration would not comment on what it is considering but some options include having the Department of Justice expand its investigation into the university’s admissions policies or cutting money to medical institutions affiliated with Harvard.

“The latest moves against Harvard are truly just scratching the surface,” said White House spokesperson Harrison Fields, without specifying what else the administration has to bring Harvard to heel.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Harrison Fields is spouting unadulterated horseshit. To put it gently, the additional steps outlined in the paragraph above are peanuts compared to what has already been done. The Trump administration has hit the limits of its coercive capabilities.

This leads to the second point. So far the courts have sided with Harvard in the ongoing litigation. Harvard is not just winning in the legal system, however, but in the court of public opinion.

This is somewhat surprising! I have been told repeatedly that we live in an age of populism. If that is the case, then the American public should be solidly behind the Trump administration in its confrontation with the snootiest college in America. Just at a gut level, Harvard is villain in the 1980s teen film of preppies vs. underdogs that wears its collars up and sunglasses everywhere. Harvard alums can be insufferable about having gone to Harvard.

I mean, look at this clip and tell me you don’t want to punch everyone in it who utters the word “Harvard”:

And yet op-ed after op-ed shows that Trump’s attacks on higher education are not playing well with elites. Poll after poll shows that it’s not playing well with the American public either:

Furthermore, even the Trump administration sources in the Politico story acknowledge that they’re not winning the war of public opinion:

The relentless focus has some inside the administration worrying that the longer the fight the greater the risk that the White House overplays its hand.

“We’re fighting a losing battle,” one of the administration officials said, acknowledging that the university has the narrative upper hand when it comes to the effort to revoke Harvard’s student visas. “We’ve taken one of the most evil institutions and made them the victim.”

Follow-up reporting by CNN’s Betsy Klein has similar statements from Trump-friendly sources:

Trump administration messengers have offered mixed signals about how the process moves forward.

The source familiar with the higher education response questioned the appetite to proceed at an aggressive pace.

“If you go after Harvard, how hard can you keep going? The universities are being played like a yo-yo for weeks and weeks and weeks. My guess is, at some point, the White House will lose interest in that. Once you’ve taken down Harvard, where are you going to go – Emory? They’re just as conscious of the brands as anybody else,” the source said.

Ultimately, the source added, the market rules: “What’s going to happen to Harvard or Columbia? Record applicants, record yield. I would bet you that if you talked to MAGA voters at Charlotte Country Day School or The Westminster Schools – they may have voted for Trump, but are they turning away from the Ivy League? Hell no. The schools are having record demand.”

Similarly, the Trump administration’s threats and actions have accomplished something exceedingly rare on the Harvard campus: getting the community to put aside longstanding grudges and agree that Trump is making everything worse. According to the New York Times’ Miles Herszenhorn and Vimal Patel:

The Trump administration’s attack on Harvard has infused the campus with a sense of unity it has lacked over the last year and half, as the university prepares for commencement this week.

“School pride is probably at an all-time high,” said Abdullah Shahid Sial, a sophomore from Pakistan and one of Harvard’s two undergraduate student body presidents. He said he had not seen the campus so unified. “I hope it continues.”….

The extraordinary attack has caused many in the Harvard community to set differences aside at what they say is an existential moment for the 388-year-old university.

Wherever one falls on the Middle East conflict, Mr. Sial said, “everyone is on the side that cracking down on international students will not solve any of those issues.”….

Jacob M. Miller, who in 2023 served as the student president of Harvard’s Hillel chapter, a center for Jewish life on campus, frequently appeared on national television after the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel to say Harvard’s administration was not doing enough to combat antisemitism.

At the rally on Tuesday, he said Harvard’s Jewish community rejects the Trump administration’s narrative that the federal government’s actions are intended to protect Jewish students.

“We will not allow our identities to be invoked to undermine institutions of higher education,” Mr. Miller said. “And we will not allow the administration to wield our identities as a pretextual prop in the political persecution of our peers.”

Nuriel Vera-DeGraff, a junior at Harvard who delivered speeches at a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus last year, introduced Mr. Miller at the Tuesday rally. Afterward, he said in an interview that despite their differences, they could “still fight the common fight together.”

And this leads to the last sign that the Trump administration is flailing on Harvard; it is trying to leak stories to the press to say that it’s not flailing at all, that it’s very close to victory.

For example, Klein’s CNN story contains a provocative lede and headline — “Universities quietly negotiating with White House aide to try to avoid Harvard’s fate, source says” — and not a lot of evidence to support it.

Here’s the lede:

College and university leaders have been privately negotiating with a deputy to top Trump aide Stephen Miller in hopes of avoiding the same aggressive targeting of Harvard University, a person familiar with the matter said, as the administration looks to escalate its attacks on the Ivy League institution and other schools.

The higher education leaders, who have had granular conversations with senior White House policy strategist May Mailman in recent weeks, are asking what signals they need to send to stay out of the administration’s crosshairs, the person said. Mailman works closely with Miller – an architect of the administration’s strategy to target colleges over concerns they are not sufficiently policing alleged antisemitism on their campuses.

This qualifies for a “big if true” reaction — a sign that while Harvard is fighting the good fight, other universities are looking to go the way of Columbia and cut a deal with the Trump administration to save their own skin.

Here’s the thing, though — I’m pretty sure it’s false, for multiple reasons.