US President Donald Trump has said he wants to seek $1 billion in “damages” from Harvard University, intensifying his long-running feud with the Ivy League institution. His comments followed a report by The New York Times that his administration had withdrawn an earlier claim of $200 million for alleged wrongdoing by the university.
Trump did not explain under what legal basis he would seek the $1 billion. (AFP file photo)Posting on his Truth social platform late Monday night, Trump said, “This case will go on until there is a trial,” and accused Harvard of spreading misinformation, calling it the “failed New York Times.”
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Any clarity on the legal basisTrump did not explain under what legal basis he would seek the $1 billion. Harvard University did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his latest claim, Bloomberg reported.
Earlier Monday, The New York Times reported that administration officials dropped the $200 million demand “amid declining approval ratings for Trump and outrage over immigration enforcement tactics and the shooting deaths of two Americans by federal agents in Minnesota.”
In a follow-up post after midnight on Tuesday, Trump dismissed the newspaper report as “completely wrong” and demanded it be corrected.
He also claimed that Harvard was feeding the press “a lot of ‘disobedience’,” sharpening criticism of both the university and media outlets.
Since the beginning of his second term, Trump has taken a hard line against Harvard and several other universities. His administration has accused them of allowing anti-Semitism, particularly in campus protests against Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip.
Conservative groups have long argued that US universities marginalize right-wing voices and ideas, claiming that academia is dominated by a liberal establishment.
Harvard has filed two lawsuits against the federal government and pushed them through the courts. In September, it won an important legal victory when a federal judge ruled that the United States illegally withheld research funding. The judge said the administration “used anti-Semitism as a smokescreen for targeted, ideologically motivated attacks on this nation’s premier universities.”
Although the administration said it would appeal the ruling, most of the frozen research funding was later restored.
Unlike other Ivy League institutions, including Columbia and Brown, Harvard has not reached an agreement with the White House.
In December, Harvard announced that its president, Alan Gerber, would remain in his role until mid-2027. The university said he agreed to stay on “indefinitely” beyond that date, extending his tenure at the oldest and wealthiest university in the United States.
(with input from Bloomberg)
