Trump vs. Massachusetts: How one state represents everything the president despises

Boston Globe

27-05-2025

Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
Massachusetts may be uniquely positioned to suffer in President Trump's second term. And not just because the president has slashed
Advertisement
Our economy is deeply reliant on elite colleges, elite hospitals, and the elite minds who come here from around the world. In Massachusetts — like it or not — we have built an economy on expertise, excellence, and education.
Advertisement
In the early 2000s, after graduating from high school outside of Chicago, Wu was drawn — like so many others — to the educational opportunities here. Her parents 'didn't know too much about America' when they arrived in the 1980s from Taiwan. She says that they, 'like so many, held such a reverence for the institutions that in some ways symbolized the American dream for them. Harvard was one of them.'
Now, the magnets that have attracted talent to Massachusetts have become liabilities. ' Boston is at the center of many of the most targeted industries and communities,' Wu says. 'And so we're feeling it very much — very urgently.'
The mayor notes that the city is 'trying to plan for unpredictability. And so our city budget this year includes preparations for worst-case scenarios.' Although Boston's financial foundation is 'quite strong,' Wu says, 'we need to be prepared for immediate, significant impacts to federal funding or larger macroeconomic impacts.'
We're living, she says, under 'a cloud of chaos.'
In epic tales, heroes and villains often have a lot in common — even if they can't initially see it. Think Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Or King Arthur and his son — and mortal enemy — Mordred.
For the Trump administration, the ultimate foe just might be liberal elites. These are the folks, conservatives argue, who brought you 'Latinx,' pronouns in email signatures, and unruly campus protests. They supported lengthy COVID shutdowns and set up diversity, equity, and inclusion offices.
Advertisement
Of course, those lamenting the consequences of elitism are often products of elite institutions themselves, from Trump (a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania) to Elon Musk (also a Penn graduate) to Fox News host Laura Ingraham (a Dartmouth alum).
And the president tends to embrace the trappings of the upper, upper crust. He makes executives pledge fealty at his ornate, 62,000-square-foot Mar-a-Lago estate. He has drenched the Oval Office in gold. And just after the stock-market-wrecking 'liberation day,' he spent the weekend playing that most elite of activities: golf.
In such a war — elite vs. elite — there's one obvious place to pitch the tents: a state where academia shapes the skyline and the job market. A place where legions of PhDs pore over texts, try to understand diseases, and build next-generation robots. A place where both identity and money are tied to the embrace of education.
Donald Trump with his father, Fred, after he graduated from Wharton in May 1968.
Globe archives
Not only is Massachusetts home to more than 100 colleges and universities, it also boasts the highest percentage of college graduates of any state in the nation. Educated liberals are certainly not a majority in America, but they feel ubiquitous in Massachusetts. Without academia, this would be a profoundly different state.
Which isn't necessarily that impressive to Trump supporters. In 2023, the venture capitalist and fervent Trump booster Marc Andreessen portrayed universities as, essentially, exercises in ridiculousness. Why would you pay,
Advertisement
Still, over the last couple of years, in passionately-fought battles over truth, justice, and the American way, the pedigrees of the warring sides have felt shockingly similar — especially considering that the overwhelming majority of Americans do not attend these sorts of elite, highly competitive schools.
Consider Harvard-educated financier Bill Ackman taking on Harvard's then-President Claudine Gay. Or Harvard-grad and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slashing the amount of National Institutes of Health money that supports Harvard's labs. Or Yale-educated Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defending the president's tariffs, while they're attacked by Brent Neiman, a University of Chicago economist (educated at Penn and Harvard)
Sometimes, it's hard to find anyone in these skirmishes who didn't attend the same eight or 10 schools. And yet, Trump has seen the enemy — and it is us.
Those the president considers elites will be brought to heel, and — significantly — cut down to size. University elites must bow to the will of executive-branch elites. And any form of resistance will meet with punishment — all of which could have painful consequences for Massachusetts. Wu pointed out to me that Boston alone has 42,000 jobs tied to universities. And across the state, four of the five top employers are in health care or education,
Advertisement
'To the extent that Trump is destroying universities, and cutting health funding,' says Boston University economist Adam Guren, 'I think the local economy is going to hurt. I think it's going to hurt a lot. This is a particularly scary time for Massachusetts.'
In 1966, when Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California, he pledged to 'clean up the mess' at the University of California Berkeley, noting that 'a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brought such shame to and such a loss of confidence in a great university.'
During the preceding couple of years, Berkeley students had launched massive protests against the Vietnam War, and had resisted the school's attempts to curtail their ability to speak freely. Reagan, an affable Hollywood star and former Democrat, had spent decades drifting to the right, and he finally decided it was time to run for office. During his campaign, he argued that California needed to infuse good, wholesome values into an out-of-control campus.
'This has been a longtime theme and popular sort of statement,' says Lawrence Katz, who has taught economics at Harvard for nearly 40 years. He brings up Reagan's campaign as we sit in his office. In Katz's own experience, the current backlash against universities 'has been building for some period.' He remembers talking to moderate Republican governors 10 or 15 years ago, and, 'There were just a lot who had been traditional supporters of higher education. And they felt in their states, they no longer could support spending on higher education.' Many voters couldn't relate to what went on at universities; a strong cultural divide had emerged.
Advertisement
The economics of the country have also changed radically, Katz says. Increasingly, the path to a well-paying job runs through college. And that connection 'has just become stronger over decades. I think for those who feel they haven't had the opportunities, that's clearly played a role in some of this resentment.'
While many universities may suffer in the months to come, Trump has reserved remarkable ire for a small circle of schools. Of the seven schools that the administration initially
' I can't look deep into the souls of people and say what's a true thing built out of experience, and what is a strategic political right decision,' Katz says. But when he considers how many folks in the administration attended elite schools, he notes that those 'who felt that they were an outgroup are often the ones who are most vehement. They think they understand the rot in the place.'
'Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost-primal scorn,' Vice President JD Vance wrote in his 2016 book,
Hillbilly Elegy.
When he handed in a poorly-written paper at Yale Law School, he recalled that his professor 'circled a large paragraph and wrote in the margin, 'This is a vomit of sentences masquerading as a paragraph. Fix.''
Vance said he 'heard through the grapevine that this professor thought Yale should accept only students from places like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton: 'It's not our job to do remedial education, and too many of these other kids need it.'' Vance had attended Ohio State.
But Katz points to a significant irony: People take these leaders seriously 'because they went to these places and have a forum. And it's hard to believe they would actually be in the position they [are] in now without it. But it also gives them some cred to denounce it.'
So, given where things stand, can elite schools weather the storm?
'You could imagine for several years supporting [universities] by running down endowments and trying to keep the infrastructure up,' Katz says. 'You couldn't do that permanently.' He says one great danger is the enormous — 35 percent — tax on large endowments that
Harvard University campus on April 16.
Sophie Park/Bloomberg
Another financial landmine for Harvard is nearly underfoot: the Trump administration's
In April, Harvard raised money by issuing $750 million in bonds, which Luis M. Viceira, an economist at Harvard Business School,
Though Katz argues that the Boston area has tremendous strengths and a huge range of universities and hospitals underpinning it, he acknowledges that there have been 'authoritarian-leaning governments who have destroyed research universities as independent sources of dissent.' Indeed, if you rewind a century, German universities were dominant. Brilliant Americans went to Germany to understand cutting-edge science. And yet, Katz says, 'It's 80 years later and [German universities] still haven't come back. So yeah, if you have political purges of all serious scientists, as they did in that period, you can destroy a university system.'
The same week that the National Institutes of Health told staff to stop all grants to Harvard, Brown, Cornell, and Northwestern, Beth O'Neill Maloney got a call from Brussels. Business leaders there wanted to visit Kendall Square to better understand how to collaborate with US companies, particularly those in biotech and medtech.
Maloney, the executive director of the Kendall Square Association, wasn't surprised.
During the previous few weeks, groups from Australia, Japan, England, Denmark, and Norway had all toured Kendall. And Maloney had just returned from a meeting in Mexico of The Global Institute on Innovation Districts, which brought together 50 innovation districts around the world. Kendall Square won the Lighthouse Award, one of three major prizes.
'I see Kendall Square as the beating heart of the innovation economy in Massachusetts,' Maloney says. And she has confidence that it can ride out the turbulence ahead.
Even so, Maloney acknowledges the going has already gotten rough.
'Is everyone gonna make it? I can't answer that. But what's frustrating is that what got us here, what made us a great country, is the investments that we've made in people and in science and technology. And that's what's brought us some really incredible therapeutic drugs that are making a difference in people's lives, whether they have a rare disease or are battling cancer, or high blood pressure.'
'Up until a couple of months ago,' says Cait Brumme, the CEO of MassChallenge, 'Massachusetts was a really attractive place to be.' Over the past 15 years, the Boston-based nonprofit has incubated nearly 5,000 companies, and Brumme is now concerned about 'the best and brightest researchers' going elsewhere to do research.
'I feel like there's a risk people will feel like: You may not be welcomed here,' Brumme says. She worries about researchers deciding they'll head to Toronto or Oxford.
Mayor Michelle Wu delivers the State of the City address on March 19.
Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe
'Every organization I've spoken to has had very painful and tough conversations internally with their team members,' says Mayor Wu. 'For those employees who might be on a green card, talking to them about not leaving the country because who knows what might happen at various customs checkpoints? And for others who are making decisions about whether to come for that fellowship or job or semester — everything is in limbo.'
Rachel Sha sees that danger up-close. When she thinks about the biggest risk for the Boston area, she says, 'There are other governments that are stepping in and trying to attract that talent, provide funding, trying to streamline the review process.'
Sha is the CEO of Vaxess Technologies, a biotech company built on expertise and talent coming out of MIT, Tufts, and Harvard. Vaxess has developed a patch that can administer medication through your skin, using an array of super-tiny needles. (I asked Sha if they hurt. She said they don't.)
Though much of the early work at Vaxess centered on administering vaccines — which, with the patch, don't have to be refrigerated and can therefore be shipped all over the world — the company is now working on using the patch to administer GLP-1s, the popular class of weight-loss drugs.
'Our company was built here in Massachusetts,' Sha says. 'We want to be able to introduce these products for the US.' But Vaxess has investors, and they have to consider which regulators might be able to help them get the company's products approved as efficiently as possible.
Over time, Vaxess has raised about $100 million, with about 70 percent of it coming from venture capital and 30 percent from (mostly government) grants. Sha points out that government money has been critical, as it is for so many companies, in helping researchers prove the scientific validity of what they're doing and attract private funding. Government grants are a sign of 'validation' and 'credibility,' Sha says. 'I think both the talent and the investment necessary to work on hard things seem fragile in this moment,' says Brumme, of MassChallenge. 'And they're reinforcing. It's a network effects thing. If we lose one, you start to lose the other as well. To me, maybe the risk and opportunity is that the ecosystem which has been in balance — the universities, the talent, the large companies, the great place to live — if one or two of those pillars start to really weaken, the network effects that come with that, I think, are at risk of unwinding.'
Jeffrey Flier has had his issues with Harvard. He has been
Flier, an endocrinologist, served as dean of Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016.
'It's not like we have been perfect,' he says. But what has shocked him is how quickly the government's approach to research institutions has shifted. A few months ago, it was trying 'to promote the best possible biomedical research for the good of the country.' Now, government officials are trying 'to bludgeon institutions because [they] are opposed to them in various ways — even if the ways have relatively little to do with the research that's going on. You're gonna just try to bludgeon them because you can.'
Flier — like Guren and Katz — worries that tensions with Harvard, reductions in NIH grants, and the inability to recruit the most elite minds in the world will take a considerable toll on Massachusetts. At least since World War II, he says, the United States 'has been the leader in biomedical research, in innovation, in discovery. And those have also led to health advances, new therapies, new diagnostics, new companies.'
'It's not that that whole process is unique to Boston and Cambridge,' he says. But he believes that the area is 'the most glorious of all of those places and systems for carrying out all that stuff.'
When I spoke with Flier, he told me about a local hospital where about 80 percent of the doctors who provide patient care hail from abroad. 'And a very substantial fraction of those people who have been accepted into [the hospital's] program to start in June are from Turkey.
'These were the best people that wanted to leave Turkey and come to the United States. Many of them in other years have gone on to be very successful leaders in American medicine,' Flier says.
On May 22, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem told Harvard it could no longer enroll students from other countries.
Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press
The hospital was initially concerned about the doctors' willingness to even live in the United States, given what happened to Turkish citizen Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts doctoral student who was pulled off a Somerville street in late March and held in ICE custody for nearly six weeks.
Flier says the hospital hopes most of this year's Turkish doctors will indeed begin work as scheduled, because many are already in America doing research — but that may not hold true in future years as research funding dries up and newer crops of researchers encounter visa problems.
On May 22, the precarity of depending on foreign talent became clear when Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem told Harvard it could no longer enroll students from other countries, and existing foreign students 'must transfer or lose their legal status.' As of press time, a federal judge had
Wu says it's just hard to believe what has happened. 'There's so much about right now that seems unimaginable,' she says.
I ask her what she thinks about the Trump administration's duel with Harvard — where she earned both an undergraduate and a law degree.
A poster taped to a light pole outside of Harvard University in Cambridge.
David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
'We,' she says, 'are a city of revolution.' Harvard decided to stand and fight, and she believes it made the right choice.
But the choice will have consequences.
On April 11, when the Trump administration famously
Harvard refused.
Trump may be a man who shifts positions — on issues ranging from abortion to tariffs — but he is consistent when it comes to retribution. If he has been spurned, he will retaliate.
Massachusetts rejected the president at the ballot box. Harvard rejected his administration's demands. And, predictably, a raft of retaliatory action has ensued.
It will be hard for the state — and some of its most significant institutions — to win the battles of the next three-and-a-half years. The question is whether they can hold on long enough to win the war.
Follow Kara Miller