Transcript: Trump’s Rage at Harvard Darkens with “Alarming” New Attack

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

President Trump’s assault on universities has now merged with his attack on immigrants. In an extraordinary escalation of his fury at Harvard, the Department of Homeland Security has just put Harvard on notice that the administration will stop it from receiving foreign students if the university doesn’t provide information on students to the government. It’s deeply sick stuff. Meanwhile, on another front, GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski openly admitted that the current climate is chilling speech by creating a widespread terror of retaliation. She said, “We are all afraid.” Taken together, these developments make it clear that the success or failure of Trump’s authoritarian takeover will turn in no small part on whether people and institutions crumble in the face of the climate of rage and fear Trump and his movement are trying to create. Today we’re talking to Jeffrey Sachs from Acadia University, who is one of the best commentators out there on the intersection of authoritarianism and threats to free speech. Jeffrey, really good to talk to you.

Jeffrey Sachs: Pleasure to be here.

Sargent: Trump had already gone to war with Harvard, and the university has stated categorically that it will not buckle to Trump’s insane efforts to exert extraordinary control over its teaching. That got the tinpot tyrant very angry. Now The New York Times reports that the administration is threatening to stop Harvard from enrolling foreign students unless it turns over extensive information about students at the school. Jeffrey, what do you make of this? Has the United States government done anything like this ever before?

Sachs: No, this is honestly without precedent. The way that the Trump administration has gone after Harvard—and higher ed in general—doesn’t really have any precedent in U.S. history that I know about. The energy, the focus, and frankly, the resourcefulness with which the administration is targeting these institutions is deeply alarming.

Sargent: Yeah, that’s a very interesting way to frame it. They’re actually pulling out all the stops. They’re putting everybody in the government to work. It’s a whole-of-government approach to authoritarianism intimidation, isn’t it?

Sachs: It really is. And that’s what I wasn’t expecting. For observers like myself and analysts, we were expecting the Civil Rights Office of the Department of Education to be leading the charge because that is the body tasked with investigating universities that, for instance, fail to protect students from discrimination or harassment. We thought that’s where the attack was going to emerge from. Instead, we’re seeing the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and now DHS—the Department of Homeland Security. So we’re really seeing every tentacle, every arrow in the quiver of the government all firing at once at Harvard and institutions like it.

Sargent: So let’s bear down a bit on what Trump is actually trying to do with this particular attack. DHS’s letter to Harvard cites the role of the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which is a government program that monitors whether particular schools can receive foreign students. The letter then makes an extraordinarily sweeping demand: It directs Harvard to provide information about each student visa holder’s illegal, dangerous, or violent activity, or threats to other students, or any deprivation of the rights of other students. Failure to do this, the letter says, will result in withdrawal of the university’s ability to receive foreign students. And there are many other demands DHS makes as well. Jeff, what is the government really demanding here? And is there any way a university could even meet these demands?

Sachs: OK. This program—the Student and Exchange Visitor Program—lays out certain qualifications and certain information that universities and colleges have to provide to the federal government as a condition of receiving student visa–bearing students. And the issue here is that the government is demanding from Harvard information that they are not required to provide. In fact, the information that the program requires universities to provide are pretty straightforward: things like student’s full name, their address, their academic status—for instance, [whether] they [are] maintaining a full-time or part-time course load. The idea being that if a student is patently not attending class, if they’re using their student visa as a pretext to participate in the workforce, DHS wants to know; if they’re no longer a student in good standing, DHS wants to know. And that would all be above board if that’s what Harvard was being asked to produce.

What’s actually being asked though goes far beyond that. As you already stated, they’re being asked to furnish the government with information about whether or not students have engaged in “known dangerous or violent activity,” whether they’ve issued threats, whether they have obstructed the school’s learning environment. None of this falls under the categories of information that schools are obligated to provide. These are private records, which universities gather and maintain for their own purposes. They are under no obligation to provide them to the federal government. In fact, the only information that’s even vaguely related to this that Harvard will be required to produce would be whether or not a student has been disciplined by Harvard as a result of being convicted of a crime. But as long as there’s no big conviction of a crime, then Harvard has no record that it needs to provide to the federal government of this nature.

Sargent: Does the federal government have the power to make Harvard’s ability to receive foreign students contention on this? It seems to me that there’s going to be a major legal challenge here, or at least the potential for one, no?

Sachs: Yes. I can’t say for certain how any judge will rule in a matter like this, because I’ve never known of a case where a university received a letter of this nature. It’s completely out of the ordinary. The statute in question lays out the sorts of information and records that universities must provide to DHS upon request. And the information is, again, generally straightforward: the school’s name, the student’s name, the student’s address, their attendance record, what their status is—full-time or part-time. But what they’re being asked to furnish in this case goes far and beyond anything contained in the statute. So it’s hard to see how a judge would look at the law and agree that Harvard must produce this information.

I’m not going to say it’s not going to happen because there’s been no example where the government has demanded information of this nature. There’s no precedent that we can point to. What I can tell you is that there’s nothing from my read of the statute that would give DHS a right to the information they’re demanding.

Sargent: So Jeff, Harvard can essentially say this is a wild abuse of the statute, correct?

Sachs: I would think so, and I hope that they would. I’ve been very impressed by Harvard’s willingness to stand up to the bullies in the government. Over the last 48 hours, we’ve seen some remarkable pushback from Harvard administrators. And here, I think they have a very strong legal footing to continue to push back.

Sargent: Well, I think we know for a fact that this is exclusively about bending Harvard to Trump’s will. There’s no substantive vision behind this of any kind. Trump had this wildly crazy tweet on Truth Social earlier where he said, “Harvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE.” He said “leftist dopes” are teaching at Harvard. And then he said, “Harvard can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning, and should not be considered on any list of the World’s Great Universities or Colleges ... Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds.” I want to get into the federal funds question in a sec—but what we can see here is that Trump is signaling to the world, to all institutions in the country, that if you don’t bend to his will, you will be subject to this kind of campaign, right?

Sachs: Yeah, I don’t think it’s any mistake that he’s picked a high-profile fight. First, obviously, with Columbia, and now with Harvard. He’s trying to send a message to smaller universities that don’t have Harvard’s endowment, its resources, its legal team. And if he can bend Harvard, then the sky’s the limit. He can go after anybody he wants. And you’re right. He’s singled out Harvard. He’s described it as being a hotbed of Marxist brainwashers. He’s described it as pushing political and ideological terrorist-inspired sickness upon people. And the goal, I’m sure, is to browbeat and intimidate Harvard into complying. And if Harvard complies, then every other domino—I’m sure they hope—will fall with every other university.

Sargent: Well, Jeffrey, you’re a shrewd observer of this stuff. You’re pretty plugged into it. What’s the real game plan here? Donald Trump doesn’t have any vision of what he wants universities to do. The idea is preposterous. He has no idea what he’s talking about. He has no idea what goes on at colleges. But there are people in the shadows here who really do have a vision of what they want to happen to higher education in the U.S. They really want to cripple institutions, especially liberal institutions across the country. What do you think’s really at work here? What’s the goal, and how do they see themselves getting there via this thing that Trump’s doing now?

Sachs: Yeah, I think that the key actor here is Stephen Miller, who is the White House deputy chief of staff and also an advisor in DHS. Miller is somebody who believes passionately in the need to retake what he would call “key cultural institutions”: the Smithsonian, public schools, museums, libraries, and, of course, higher education. Miller is somebody who—in his comments and in his writings, both during the first Trump administration and now in the second—feels that if the right can either shatter these cultural institutions or take them over, the political payoff downstream will be enormous. Miller is somebody who I think is probably pushing this more than Trump himself.

For Trump though, I think that this particular new development in Harvard probably has special appeal. It’s a collision of two interests. It is, on the one hand, an assault on higher ed—which plays very well with one faction of his base. It also makes a play for issues relating to immigration. So this is a way that he can work both of those issues simultaneously. I’m sure that for Trump, that’s a huge part of the appeal. For Miller though, I really think that he views this as part of a larger war on Harvard for these cultural reasons.

Sargent: Right, the radical authoritarian right is doing their own long march through our institutions, aren’t they?

Sachs: They are. No end of ink has been [spilled] about Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute and his influence on all this. I honestly think that it’s easily overplayed. He is somebody who is influential, but I think Miller is much more in the driver’s seat. Miller is probably, if anybody, the architect of this. Someone like Rufo is important, but the voices within the federal government at this point don’t need any direction; they don’t need any encouragement. And I think we’re going to see a lot more like this, especially if Harvard buckles.

Sargent: A lot is at stake here. I want to raise one other thing about this Harvard standoff. I think it’s plainly obvious that the administration is setting Harvard up in a certain way. It’s making these demands—like turning over information about any students depriving others of their rights—which are ridiculously vague, and so Trump allies are going to swoop in and say, Look, this conservative student’s rights were violated by that shadowy, dark foreign student over there, and Harvard didn’t report it. It’s going to create this atmosphere where MAGA figures are encouraged to go in and “find” examples of this or invent them: Hey, look, that foreign student did something dangerous. Why didn’t Harvard say anything? Isn’t that the game plan here as well, Jeff?

Sachs: It’s funny you mentioned that. I’ve been gaming out in my head what exactly the goal here is for the administration because there’s nothing that I can find in the statute that would require the university to turn over this information. It’s hard to see how this ends—short of total capitulation by Harvard—with the government winning. It reminds me immediately about how, just three days ago or so, we learned that the government had also issued a letter to Harvard demanding that all these internal reforms be implemented immediately within Harvard. And some of them were just flat-out contradictory.

In this letter that the government sent to Harvard, they require, for instance, that Harvard adopt a strict meritocracy for purposes of hiring and admissions. Then just one paragraph down, they also demanded that the university take active steps to essentially hire more conservatives, to diversify the ideologies of faculty. Now you can’t reconcile those two, right?

Sargent: Right.

Sachs: You can’t, on the one hand, have total meritocracy in hiring and admissions, and then, in the next breath, demand affirmative action for conservatives.

Sargent: Well, there is a way to reconcile those things if you think about it, Jeff. They’ll just say it’s meritocratic to hire more conservatives.

Sachs: I think it gets pretty difficult to satisfy, for the purposes of the court, how these can be reconciled. Again, it makes me wonder if the game here is not so much to get Harvard to capitulate because, again, these demands in the case of this letter three days ago are contradictory; the demands from the letter today from DHS are not legally enforceable, at least from my read of the statute. I’m not sure to what extent what the government is after is to actually prevail in these specific issues so much as it is to bludgeon and demoralize Harvard—to drain it through lengthy legal battles. In a way, gaming out how this finally ends, it might not be with Harvard losing in court. More likely, it’s just going to be an attempt to demoralize, undermine, humiliate, and really—frankly, from the government’s point of view—milk politically this issue as much as possible for as long as possible.

Sargent: That brings me to Senator Lisa Murkowski because she addressed what’s happening in a big picture way. She was talking to constituents, and she said this, “We are all afraid. We are in a time and place where I certainly have not been here before. I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real.” Now Murkowski didn’t mention Trump directly, but the meaning is plain. This Republican senator is personally afraid to criticize Trump or his administration because of threat of retaliation. The atmosphere is the thing here. It’s to make everyone feel as if they’re perpetually on thin ice; they always have to snitch on each other. I think that’s what they’re really after: to try to make the culture a much more violent and fraught place.

Sachs: Yeah, I don’t disagree. And I was also alarmed by Senator Murkowski’s comments today. If senators can’t stand up and speak their minds, then they’re not representing their constituents and they have no business in office. It’s simultaneously depressing and deeply distressing for her to make those remarks. I don’t know to what extent she is referring to personal threats of violence that she might face, or whether she’s imagining a legal assault or funding cuts for her state.

We’re already seeing something like that happening with Maine after Maine’s governor stood up to Trump on Title IX issues relating to trans students and their participation in athletics. And there, he’s just been relentless. The government has gone after Maine and sought to humble and humiliate and bludgeon that state. So I don’t know if that’s what Murkowski is imagining happening to Alaska if she crosses Trump the wrong way, but I wouldn’t put it past her to also be fearing for her own safety. Didn’t we see representatives making similar comments about their own safety during the first administration as well?

Sargent: I think Mitt Romney said somewhere that he had to spend a huge amount of money on personal security.

Sachs: Yeah.

Sargent: Jeff, I want to try to end on a somewhat optimistic note here. I think there’s a chance that they’re really overreaching in a big way. Not just politically, and not just legally, but the whole project is overreaching. You’ve got these law firms right now that capitulated to Trump and, of course, predictably, Trump has simply gone back and demanded more. That’s encouraging other law firms to rethink whether they should capitulate. You’ve got Harvard looking at the absolutely ludicrous nature of the demands that Trump made the other day and saying, No, we’re not doing that. And I think that sends a signal to other institutions—not just of higher learning—to start to stand up and take this moment more seriously. So the ludicrous nature of what they’re doing is actually bringing together the resistance in a bigger way than you might’ve thought. What do you think, Jeff? Is that overly optimistic? Can you talk about this possibility?

Sachs: I do feel a similar sense of encouragement as you because, again, if I know that Trump is going to demand more and ignore the agreement that I struck with him, why would I bother ever engaging in another agreement? And to that extent, yeah, it really undermines the incentive. On the other hand, not every institution is going to have Harvard’s resources. Currently about 60 universities and colleges in the U.S. are being investigated by the government around allegations relating to antisemitism; the vast majority of those are small. These are small universities that don’t have Harvard’s resources. They will be easier to push around.

So, yes, Harvard can stand up; these marquee law firms might be able to push back. But we’re four months into a four-year term, and a lot of pressure can still be expended. I think this only really ends successfully if the political incentives for the White House change. That’s going to mean a broad-based, across-the-board resistance. It’s going to mean diving approval numbers for the White House. It’s going to mean some really humiliating defeats in court. It’ll take a lot, and I just don’t think it’s going to happen overnight.

Sargent: I agree. It’s going to take a string of real losses and a slide in approval, which I think is already underway. The numbers are looking bad for Trump. Jeffrey Sachs, I think we got a chance to get through this, but I certainly wouldn’t bet my life on it. Really good to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.

Sachs: My pleasure, Greg.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.