As Donald Trump pursues his campaign to make Ivy League schools bend to his will and accept what Harvard’s president said amounted to a federal takeover of the insitutions, his critics say that the Republican Party is leaning fully into hypocrisy.
News broke on Wednesday that the White House plans to escalate its war against America’s most prestigious universities by hitting them where it hurts: their endowments. A report in Semafor revealed that Republicans are looking at ways to tax profits from university endowments while the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) debates stripping Harvard and other universities of their tax-exempt statuses. The Department of Justice formally asked the IRS to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status this week, an agency spokesperson confirmed to news outlets on Wednesday.
“It is past time for American universities to stop supporting foreign adversaries with their investment decisions, much as they should stop granting university access to supporters of terrorism,” read a February memo from the White House reported by Semafor.
The move is a classic case of Trump-style escalation, and comes as Harvard this week said that it would refuse a list of demands issued by the federal government.
Now, critics of the president are attacking Trump and two of his closest allies — Vice President JD Vance and Senator Ted Cruz — for their past statements complaining about supposed politicization of federal agencies by Joe Biden’s administration.
“I will never allow the IRS to be used as a political weapon,” the president vowed in a 2019 clip posted by the publisher of an anti-Trump news site, The Bulwark.
“I will never allow the IRS to be used as a political weapon.” —Donald Trump, Oct 2019 pic.twitter.com/ah9Da5KyW8
— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) April 17, 2025
“If the IRS can go after you because of your beliefs, we'd no longer live in a free country,” Vance, in a resurfaced clip, says to Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
This you @JDVance?
— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) April 16, 2025
"This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country. If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we'd no longer live in a free country.“ pic.twitter.com/fBD4y5V4OS
Cruz, in particular, was on record vowing to “speak out” if a Republican attorney general or IRS commissioner began targeting institutions tied explicitly or implicitly to the left or the Democratic Party — a promise he has not addressed in the midst of the president’s campaign to impose conservative belief systems on America’s institutions of higher education.
Sen, Ted Cruz: "I can also assure you that were this a Republican president, a Republican Attorney General, and a Republican IRS that were targeting Democrats, I at least would speak out just as vigorously against it because if we are going to respect rule of law, the apparatus… pic.twitter.com/LgEIifUkkY
— Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) April 16, 2025
Speaking at a Judiciary Committee hearing in 2014, when Barack Obama was president, Cruz said: “I can also assure you that were this a Republican president, a Republican Attorney General, and a Republican IRS that were targeting Democrats, I at least would speak out just as vigorously against it because if we are going to respect rule of law, the apparatus of the federal government cannot and should not be used as a partisan tool to bludgeon your enemies.”
Democrats have eagerly bashed their Republican opponents over the scope of Trump’s widespread cuts to federal agencies since January, and the reports of billionaires including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos seeking access to the president alongside lavish gifts to his adminsitration and related political causes have only fueled their attacks further.
The president is now setting his party up for an all-out war with the heads of America’s colleges and universities, which (with the early exception of Columbia University) are increasingly using the courts to seek refuge from the Trump administration’s directives.
Administration officials slashed $2.2 billion in federal grants and related funds from Harvard on Monday over the school’s refusal to comply with its demands, which included that it end diversity-based hiring practices, ban face masks on campus, cooperate with federal immigration authorities, and more.
Harvard’s president Alan Garber said in a letter to the university community in response: “No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
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