Donald Trump blew up on Truth Social over a claim from author Michael Wolff that his crusade against Harvard is personal.
Wolff, author of several books about the president, claimed on The Daily Beast Podcast last week that Trump “didn’t get into Harvard” and suggested he’s now targeting the university in part because he holds a “grudge.”
“He needs an enemy,” Wolff said earlier in the podcast. “That’s what makes the show great. The Trump show. He picks fantastic enemies, actually. And Harvard, for all it represents, fits right into the Trump show,” he said.
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“Going after Harvard has proved to be an incredibly reliable headline,” he added. “So he’s on the money. So he’s done what he set out to do. Dominate headlines.”
Trump has gone after the university with gusto, freezing its federal funding, threatening its tax-exempt status and moving to block it from enrolling international students.
The president claimed Wolff’s story is “totally FALSE” and insisted he never applied to the Ivy League school.
“Michael Wolff, a Third Rate Reporter, who is laughed at even by the scoundrels of the Fake News, recently stated that the only reason I’m ‘beating up’ on Harvard, is because I applied there, and didn’t get in,” Trump raged on his social media platform Monday.
“That story is totally FALSE, I never applied to Harvard,” Trump continued. “I graduated from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania. He is upset because his book about me was a total ‘BOMB.’ Nobody wanted it, because his ‘reporting’ and reputation is so bad!”
Trump’s education has been colored by claims from family members that he was a “brat” and that his sister “did his homework for him.”
His higher education began at Fordham University in 1964. He studied for two years at the Bronx Catholic private school before transferring to the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at Penn. He graduated from the Ivy League university with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1968.
His late sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, told her niece Mary Trump that she “drove him around New York City to try to get him into college.”
She said he attended Fordham briefly “and then he got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take his exams.” Those claims were denied by the widow of Joe Shapiro, the man who was said to have taken the test for Trump.
The president’s father and brother also helped him to get into the school through a connection, The Washington Post reported in 2019.
Trump has long boasted of his time at the Wharton school, claiming it was one of the “hardest school to get into” and that he graduated top of his class, a claim that the evidence suggests is dubious at best.
Trump has had a long-running beef with Wolff, who wrote Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House and Siege: Trump Under Fire, among other titles.
In February, Trump called Wolff’s latest book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, a “total FAKE JOB, just like the other JUNK he wrote.”
“He called me many times trying to set up a meeting, but I never called him back because I didn’t want to give him the credibility of an interview,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time.
Even before Wolff floated the claim that the president was snubbed by Harvard, speculation ran rampant over the reason for his vendetta.
A White House spokesperson shot down the idea that Trump was rejected from the school, telling USA Today last week, 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.”
Trump has accused Harvard of liberal bias and antisemitism, using those claims to justify his offensive.
According to Wolff, a running joke in White House circles held that Trump’s war on the prestigious school stemmed from the rejection of another Trump: his youngest son, Barron.
The narrative apparently made its way to first lady Melania Trump, whose spokesperson issued a statement last Tuesday calling the claim that Barron applied to Harvard “completely false.”
The 19-year-old recently finished his freshman year at New York University, where he studied at its Stern School of Business.
