US President Donald Trump said that Harvard University is “extremely anti-Semitic” and demanded compensation of US$1 billion for “losses and damages”, after the newspaper The New York Times inform that the government had given up asking for US$200 million from the institution to end the dispute between the two.
The Republican leader said in a publication in the early hours of Tuesday (3) that “the New York Times report on Harvard University was completely wrong.”
According to Trump, “Strongly anti-Semitic Harvard University has been feeding the New York Times a lot of ‘nonsense’. Harvard has been behaving very badly for a long time!”
In another post, the American president declared that the government will now demand US$1 billion in damages, “and we do not want to have anything to do with Harvard University in the future.”
The confrontation between Harvard and the Trump administration
Trump’s confrontation with Harvard began at the beginning of the Republican’s second term in the White House, when he decided to freeze more than $2 billion in federal funds granted to the institution for what he called its anti-Semitic policy.
The measure, which also affected other universities, was revoked in court, which motivated Trump to continue pressuring Harvard with lawsuits, although, according to the Times, the government had finally given up.
In early 2025, the Trump administration demanded that Harvard oversee its admissions and hiring, eliminating the woke agenda from the processes, which the university refused, leading to the freezing of more than US$2 billion in federal funds.
The institution then filed a lawsuit arguing that the cut affected medical, scientific and technological research programs. Trump intensified the pressure by trying to ban the enrollment of foreign students at the center, a measure that was also blocked in court.
