US President Donald Trump’s long feud with Harvard University reportedly stemmed not from Barron Trump’s alleged rejection—as was rumored—but from Trump’s own failure to gain admission in 1964. “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,” Michael Wolff author of bestsellers
Fire & Fury
said at The Daily Beast Podcast.Criticising Wolff’s claims, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson said, “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.”“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,” she added.There’s no official record—public or private—that confirms Donald Trump ever applied to Harvard in the 1960s. In fact, published biographies remain diplomatically silent on the subject.As a young man, Trump reportedly dreamed of attending film school at the University of Southern California—an ambition that never materialized. Ironically, decades later, USC would find itself in Trump’s crosshairs for a very different reason: the university lost $17.5 million in federal research funding after the Department of Education determined it failed to adequately protect Jewish students under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the Daily Beast reported. Trump’s Hollywood aspirations ended after high school, when he graduated from the New York Military Academy. Instead of heading west to chase celluloid dreams, he enrolled at Fordham University in 1964. For two years, he commuted from his family’s estate in Jamaica Estates, Queens, to the Catholic campus in the Bronx—an arrangement perhaps less glamorous than USC, but decidedly more convenient for a future real estate mogul.In recent weeks, the Trump administration has escalated its crackdown on Harvard, first freezing $2.2 billion in federal funding and then suspending the university’s ability to enroll international students. These punitive measures followed Harvard’s failure to comply with government demands to address reported antisemitic incidents and to provide federal officials with lists of foreign students.
