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Trump admin now blames Harvard demands as a mistake due to its own incompetence [1]

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Date: 2025-04-18

By now many in this country not pathologically glued to Fox News are familiar with the fact that the Trump administration demanded a bevy of onerous concessions from Harvard University as conditional for receiving billions in future federal funding.

Unlike other institutions which had abjectly cowered in the face of such threats, Harvard — which boasts a huge private endowment — told the administration in no uncertain terms, basically, to piss off.

Apparently now the administration — or at least one official within it — is frantically backpedaling, indicating that the “demand” letter sent to Harvard and detailing its extortionate demands was, in fact, sent in error.

As reported by Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender, reporting for the New York Times:

Harvard University received an emailed letter from the Trump administration last Friday that included a series of demands about hiring, admissions and curriculum so onerous that school officials decided they had no choice but to take on the White House. The university announced its intentions on Monday, setting off a tectonic battle between one of the country’s most prestigious universities and a U.S. president. Then, almost immediately, came a frantic call from a Trump official. The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said.

Apparently the line the administration is now taking is that the “demand” letter was “unauthorized,” although it’s not clear who would have authorized it in the first place.

It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.

So what we’re seeing here, apparently, is essentially a case of premature overreach fostered by incompetent buffoons within the administration, eager to burnish their radical bona fides in an effort to impress the Dear Leader. People with approximately zero understanding of the implications of what they were doing, falling over themselves to suck up, no matter how idiotic and destructive the consequences of their behavior.

They weren’t prepared for Harvard’s pushback, so they are now scrambling to blame … “someone” for their incompetence. There has been no reported retraction of the threat to withhold funds, despite this “mistake.” According to the Times report, a Trump spokesperson stated there still is a “potential pathway to resume discussions” if the University ”follows through on what Mr. Trump wants” — whatever that means --- and “apologizes to its students” for its alleged “fostering” of “antisemitism,” as this White Supremacist administration curiously conceives it).

This kind of begs the question... exactly how much serious thought is being brought to the policies of this administration? Is there any degree of serious thought at all? The so-called Iran “nuclear deal” that the press has fixated on this week? The tariff economic “policy” that quite literally impacts hundreds of millions of Americans? How about potentially abandoning Ukraine and the entire NATO alliance to Russia’s tender mercies?

Is there any intelligent thought at all going on here? Or is this simply a demented, fascist and performative cartoon — basically for the LULZ — that Americans are being subjected to, and damn the consequences? Who cares, amirite?

You can say whatever you want about the Biden administration. At least they were competent, and they took their responsibility to the American people seriously.

This regime, apparently not so much.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/18/2317353/-Trump-admin-now-blames-Harvard-demands-as-a-mistake-due-to-its-own-incompetence?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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