Trump Escalates War Against Harvard With $1 Billion Demand Following Press Reports Suggesting He Is Backing Down

President Trump, irate over a New York Times article suggesting he has backed down from pursuing a financial penalty against Harvard University, is now demanding an even larger sum to resolve the school’s battle with the administration.“We are now seeking One Billion Dollars in damages, and want nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday night. He added that the case should be “criminal, not civil” and that “Harvard will have to live with the consequences of their wrongdoings.”Mr. Trump’s post disputed a report published in the Times earlier Monday claiming the president “no longer expects” Harvard to hand over $200 million as part of a deal to restore the nation’s oldest and wealthiest private university to good standing with his administration.The president continued to assail the Times article on Truth Social into Tuesday morning, questioning why “the Fake News New York Times” had not yet “adjusted its phony article on the corruption and antisemitism which has taken place at Harvard.” In another post, he wrote that “Strongly Antisemitic Harvard University has been feeding a lot of ‘nonsense’ to The Failing New York Times.”The founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Kenneth Marcus, stresses that “at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter so much whether President Trump gets a big check from the university. The question is whether they commit to changes in the way they do business,” he tells the Sun. Mr. Marcus, whose organization represents Jewish students suing their universities for violating civil rights laws, including at Harvard, notes that the Brandeis Center “was already able to obtain significant commitments when we settled our case with the university.” He cites the school’s agreement in January 2025 to comply with the Trump Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism, which upholds a definition of antisemitism that recognizes denying Jews the right to self-determination as a potentially antisemitic act.The conflict between the White House and Harvard came to a head in April when the administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts after the school refused to implement a list of sweeping reforms to combat antisemitism and anti-conservative bias on campus.The following month, the Department of Homeland Security stripped the university of its student and exchange visitor program certification, which allows Harvard to enroll some 7,000 international students. Both measures pose serious challenges to Harvard’s status as a leading research institution and threaten to disrupt the school’s day-to-day operations. Harvard responded by challenging both moves in federal court and has succeeded in winning injunctive relief in both cases.In the meantime, both sides have engaged in negotiations to settle the dispute outside the courtroom, and Mr. Trump has suggested on several occasions that a deal was imminent. Despite the White House’s repeated claims that they were nearing a settlement — some as recently as November 2025 — the cases have continued.

Trump Escalates War Against Harvard With $1 Billion Demand Following Press Reports Suggesting He Is Backing Down

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