Trump Slaps Harvard With Brand New Lawsuit as War on School Escalates

Donald Trump continues to go after the university after it refused to bend to his demands.

By Finn Hartnett, The New Republic

The Trump administration is once again suing Harvard University, contending that “for several years, Jewish and Israeli students endured a hostile educational environment” at the Ivy League school.

The lawsuit, filed in Massachusetts federal court on Friday and first reported by The Washington Post, alleges that students were stopped from entering campus buildings by “antisemitic demonstrators” in 2023 and 2024, and that some Jewish students felt pressured into wearing baseball caps to hide their yarmulkes. The federal government cites this as evidence that Harvard violated civil rights laws and its own code of conduct by discriminating against Jewish and Israeli students.

Harvard rejected the accusations. “We will defend the University against this lawsuit, which represents yet another pretextual and retaliatory action by the administration for refusing to turn over control of Harvard to the federal government,” the university wrote in a statement.

As usual with Donald Trump, there is a monetary component to the suit. The federal government wants to “recover billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution.”

It’s yet another battle in what has been a long-running war between Trump and the university. Since the start of his second term, Trump has denounced Harvard as an example of an institution infecting American youth with liberal ideas. This has resulted in various social media posts attacking the school, multiple attempts to freeze federal funding for the university, and, of course, frequent claims that Harvard promotes antisemitism and “anti-American” ideology.