with CHARLIE HARPER

During the recent Joe Biden administration, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that Biden had racked up some really significant achievements for which he was given scant credit.

According to this narrative, the president’s success in directing the American economy out of the mire of the COVID-19 epidemic; passing landmark technology, environmental and economic stimulus legislative packages, and standing firm against bloodthirsty Vladimir Putin were all lauded.

But Biden failed to manage America’s southern border, ignoring the degree to which immigration demand had surged under the repression of the first Trump administration, and Biden persisted with a widely unpopular embrace of human rights, even as an immigrant wave turned into a perceived tsunami.

Biden also couldn’t reduce inflation until it was too late for his reelection prospects. Consumers just rebelled against prices that seemed to have an upward momentum of their own, sometimes confounding economists.

All of these theories dominated the political news cycle until Biden crashed and burned at the end of June in what must have been the most calamitous televised presidential debate performance in the 65 years of this widely watched event.

That night 11 months ago propelled Donald Trump back to the White House. He’s been back in office for four months and this time, we are witnessing many of the same characteristics in his direction of the federal government that we saw the first time around.

But as has been widely reported, Trump’s focus is sharper. And while his grifting and retribution receive most of the media coverage of his second administration, he risks obscuring some real achievements – actual and potential.

If he isn’t careful, Trump might experience a fate similar to that of his predecessor.

It’s now pretty widely acknowledged that Trump is the ablest demagogue in American political history. He has a real claim on another dubious title – his corruption and influence peddling are conducted so brazenly and so lucratively that observers have almost lost their astonishment and outrage at the extensive, open nature of the president’s quest for ever more personal wealth.

Trump wants to accept a replacement presidential aircraft from a Middle Eastern nation whose interest in bestowing this gift is transparently corrupt. Trump professes to see no moral or ethical issue. But others do.

Then Trump hosts a dinner for 220 special guests who have invested massive sums of money in a cryptocurrency scheme whose purpose seems to be to gain access to Trump and his key policy advisors. The White House press secretary brushes off reporters’ questions with the remark that the dinner was “on the president’s personal time.”

This is taking “Pay to Play” to new extremes.

Trump is also, perhaps even more ominously, indulging in his passion for retribution to an unprecedented degree. For instance, he’s still pursuing James Comey, the FBI director he inherited from Barack Obama who, ironically, may have delivered to Trump the 2016 election by gratuitously refocusing attention on Hillary Clinton’s security lapses just before that election.

But it’s Trump’s revenge tour against many of the most prestigious US universities that has many observers worried that the president will somehow manage to forfeit America’s greatest asset – its intellectual property.

Harvard has been most in the spotlight recently. In directly confronting one of America’s oldest, most prestigious and powerful institutions, Trump is betting that if he triumphs, he will so intimidate other universities to such a degree that they will abandon the liberal bias that admittedly prevails on most campuses.

Trump has been gradually escalating his attacks on mostly Eastern universities since he was elected. Initially, he delivered most of his attacks through House of Representatives ally Elise Stefanik, a central Hudson Valley New York congresswoman and Harvard graduate who has steadily risen in the ranks of congressional Trump supporters.

Stefanik and some of her GOP colleagues pushed the presidents of both the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard itself into premature resignations after her attacks flustered them into imprudent House testimony. Maybe such a capitulation only whetted Trump’s appetite for more Ivy League blood.

Late last week, the Trump administration revoked Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, ordering that thousands of current students must transfer to other schools or leave the country.

In its announcement, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security said Harvard has created an unsafe campus environment by allowing “anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators” to assault Jewish students on campus. The department also accused Harvard of training members of a Communist Chinese paramilitary group as recently as 2024. “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status,” according to an agency statement.

Harvard enrolls almost 6,800 foreign students at its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts - more than a quarter of its student body. Most are graduate students, coming from more than 100 countries. Like many prestigious universities in the US and elsewhere, Harvard takes pride in the geographic breadth and diversity of its students.

“This retaliatory action threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and our country, and undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission,” the university said in a statement.

According to news reports, this most recent dispute began with an April 16 request from Homeland Security Secretary and former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. The letter demanded that Harvard turn over information about foreign students that might implicate them in violence or protests that could otherwise lead to their deportation.

The Trump administration also revoked Harvard’s certification in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which allows schools to sponsor international students to get their visas and attend school in the United States.

The federal government has responded by cutting a reported $2.6 billion in federal grants at Harvard, forcing it to self-fund much of its sprawling research operation. Trump has said offhandedly that he wants to strip the university of its tax-exempt status.

With a current estimated endowment of $53 billion, Harvard boasts the largest university endowment in the world. Proposed higher endowment taxes and a cutoff of federal aid will hurt.

The source for most of the federal punishments directed at Harvard have come through a federal antisemitism task force. According to this task force, Harvard has failed to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence during a nationwide wave of pro-Palestinian protests.

Those protests followed the massive, continuing Israeli response to a Hamas sneak attack on Jewish border settlements near Gaza last October.

“I worry that this is sending a very chilling effect for international students deciding whether to come to America for education,” said the president of a group fostering international student exchanges.

Harvard has forcefully pushed back against Trump and his administration. The university’s guiding Board of Directors is reportedly ready to defy the president, and the school is challenging Trump’s actions in federal court.

But even if Harvard wins its legal challenges in court, it might only harden Trump’s demands for retribution. The president’s willingness to continue to launch investigations, including from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security, is only going to hurt Harvard.

An estimated half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. One pundit asked, “If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question?”

Harvard may have the biggest Trump target on its back, but other schools are watching and worried. For example, Yale has the second largest university endowment in the US. Here are some excerpts from a letter to alumni by the university’s new president:

“The US House of Representatives has passed legislation that proposes to raise the tax on the investment income of Yale and a number of other universities from 1.4% to 21%. Each year, this increased endowment tax would strip from Yale’s budget hundreds of millions of dollars that currently fund student financial aid, research, scholarship, and teaching.

“This legislation presents a greater threat to Yale than any other bill in memory. Today, I ask you to join me in defending the research that saves lives and keeps America competitive, and the students who keep our future bright.

“The endowment tax will undermine our country’s global leadership in technology. Universities perform fundamental research that has led to advancements that define modern life, including MRI, GPS, the internet, smartphones, and artificial intelligence, to name just a few.”