Latest news with #TheDailyBeastPodcast
Time of India
a day ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Why does Donald Trump hate Harvard so much? His biographer reveals 'real reason'
US President Donald Trump 's long feud with Harvard University reportedly stemmed not from Barron Trump's alleged rejection—as was rumored—but from Trump's own failure to gain admission in 1964. 'But the other thing is that, by the way, he didn't get into Harvard. So one of the Trump things is always holding a grudge against the Ivy Leagues,' Michael Wolff author of bestsellers Fire & Fury said at The Daily Beast Podcast. Criticising Wolff's claims, Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson said, 'The Daily Beast and Michael Wolff have lots in common—they both peddle fake news for clickbait in a hopeless attempt to amount to something more than lying losers." 'The President didn't need to apply to an overrated, corrupt institution like Harvard to become a successful businessman and the most transformative President in history,' she added. There's no official record—public or private—that confirms Donald Trump ever applied to Harvard in the 1960s. In fact, published biographies remain diplomatically silent on the subject. As a young man, Trump reportedly dreamed of attending film school at the University of Southern California—an ambition that never materialized. Ironically, decades later, USC would find itself in Trump's crosshairs for a very different reason: the university lost $17.5 million in federal research funding after the Department of Education determined it failed to adequately protect Jewish students under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Trump's Hollywood aspirations ended after high school, when he graduated from the New York Military Academy. Instead of heading west to chase celluloid dreams, he enrolled at Fordham University in 1964. For two years, he commuted from his family's estate in Jamaica Estates, Queens, to the Catholic campus in the Bronx—an arrangement perhaps less glamorous than USC, but decidedly more convenient for a future real estate mogul. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has escalated its crackdown on Harvard, first freezing $2.2 billion in federal funding and then suspending the university's ability to enroll international students. These punitive measures followed Harvard's failure to comply with government demands to address reported antisemitic incidents and to provide federal officials with lists of foreign students.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
James Carville Blasts AOC, Bernie and ‘Pronoun' Democrats
Democratic strategist James Carville torched Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in a new interview with The Daily Beast, branding them as unelectable and accusing them of dragging the party down with out-of-touch messaging. 'You know what they don't do? Win elections,' Carville declared of progressive candidates on The Daily Beast Podcast. 'All they do is impress other journalists. They never beat a Republican!' 'Every time that you see a Democrat that is out there screaming and pounding the podium, ask yourself: 'Have they ever beat a Republican?'' he said. (While not at the national level, Ocasio-Cortez has fended off Republican challengers in her district four times—despite millions of dollars spent to oust her. Sanders has also beaten his Republican opponents in past House and Senate races.) Carville slammed AOC and Sanders' 'Fighting Oligarchy' tour, which has drawn large crowds across the country, as 'counterproductive,' arguing it plays into the image of the Democratic Party as 'old', 'coastal' and 'urban.' 'I've got a great idea,' he said sarcastically. 'Let's send an 83-year-old and a congresswoman from Queens out in the country.' Even using the word 'oligarchy'—meant to capture anti-Trump, anti-billionaire sentiments—is a misstep, according to the 80-year-old strategist behind Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign: '90 percent of people in the country have no idea what they're talking about.' 'And that's a problem with Democrats particularly,' he told host Joanna Coles. 'The more 'identity,' the more 'pronoun' you get, the more you try to use language that no one else uses.' Yet—much to Carville's dismay—AOC continues to dominate early conversations on who might emerge as the leader (and 2028 candidate) to lift the beaten-down Democratic Party out of its current unpopularity. 'There's a lot more to the Democratic Party than AOC and Bernie,' he said frustratedly, citing a number of his preferred figures. Coles noted that AOC and Sanders have something many other Democrats lack: name recognition. So looking ahead at the 2028 presidential election, Carville advocated for a 'mini convention'—scheduled closer to the 2026 midterms—for the public to better get to know a range of Democratic candidates. 'What we have to do is set up ourselves as the party that is simply trying to help people who are trying to make it,' he said. New episodes of The Daily Beast Podcast are released every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Follow our new feed on your favorite podcast platform at and subscribe on YouTube to watch full episodes.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Scaramucci: President Trump Is ‘Laughing' at These 2028 Democrat Hopefuls
In the years since his (short) tenure in Donald Trump's first White House, Anthony Scaramucci has become a vocal advocate against the 'dangerous' President and his agenda. But he's not just holding a grudge. The financier feels uneasy about Trump's rise to power—and the creeping authoritarianism he now embodies—and sees many better alternatives out there, across the political landscape. The long-time registered Republican voiced support for former President Joe Biden's campaign and did so again in 2024. And he has his eyes on at least one Democrat widely expected to enter the 2028 presidential race. 'I like Pete Buttigieg,' Scaramucci said on this week's episode of The Daily Beast Podcast. 'I think he's their most talented person, and I would vote for him tonight.' But as a 'political realist,' Scaramucci is nervous about Buttigieg's sexuality affecting his campaign. 'I'll probably get canceled now that I said that, you know... It doesn't matter to me. I'm just being honest about the culture and the zeitgeist of the American society that we live in,' he continued, citing 'Christian conservatism' as an obstacle the likely candidate will have to overcome. Another 'viable' option for the Mooch? California Gov. Gavin Newsom. 'I think he is an attractive guy in so many different ways,' he said. 'I'm not talking about his physicality. I think he's got good messaging. He's a good governor.' Newsom has recently shocked long-time supporters with attempts to reframe his reputation and political positions. In an attempt to appeal to the political center—and the right, he's invited a slew of Trump allies and even the farthest-of-the-far-right MAGA members on his new podcast. Scaramucci's betting comes as the Democratic party faces record-low favorability ratings and a slew of candidates are clawing their way into the spotlight in the hopes of making the 2028 ticket. There's at least one candidate that Scaramucci didn't seem too optimistic about: New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While she's risen in popularity among progressives and emerged as the frontrunner in several national polls, AOC has become a laughing stock among the MAGA movement, said Scaramucci. Their ridicule has only grown in the months after she hit the road with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on a 'Fighting Oligarchy' tour. 'Just so you know, Trump is laughing at them because he knows where the country is,' admitted Scaramucci. 'He knows it's primarily a center-right country.' He recalled a moment he shared with Trump, who called the 'guys on Wall Street' a 'bunch of imbeciles.' 'He said, 'Well, you're a social liberal and you're a fiscal conservative.' I said, 'That's true,'' he shared with podcast host Joanna Coles. 'He goes, 'Yeah, you're a dummy. You know what my base is?... My base is socially conservative and fiscally liberal.' He understands his base better than you do, and better than I do, frankly.' Even still, Scaramucci is holding out hope that the MAGA base Trump has secured will see its influence wane. 'My priority is my patriotism. Patriotism and love of country first over partisanship,' he said. 'I know how dangerous Donald Trump is. So I would like the Constitution to sustain itself.' New episodes of The Daily Beast Podcast are released every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Follow our new feed on your favorite podcast platform at and subscribe on YouTube to watch full episodes.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump Biographer: This Is the ‘Real Reason' He Hates Harvard
There's a running joke going around the White House that President Donald Trump is out for Harvard's blood because his son Barron didn't get in—one scotched by First Lady Melania Trump in an unprecedented piercing of her veil of privacy. But presidential biographer Michael Wolff has suggested a very different explanation for Trump's vendetta: he's the one that couldn't attend the prestigious Ivy League. Wolff, author of bestsellers Fire & Fury and this year's All or Nothing advanced the suggestion on Thursday's episode of The Daily Beast Podcast in a discussion with host Joanna Coles about his war on Harvard and other elite colleges. 'It's also odd because so many of the people around Donald Trump went to Ivy League universities. Several of them went to Harvard Business School,' Coles said. 'Obviously, JD Vance proudly went to Yale. So it does seem particularly odd, but perhaps he's also trying to stuff it to them too.' 'It's important not to lend too much calculation and planning to anything he does,' Wolff said. 'But the other thing is that, by the way, he didn't get into Harvard. So one of the Trump things is always holding a grudge against the Ivy Leagues.' Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, was critical about Wolff's claim. She did not, however, confirm on the record whether or not Trump applied to Harvard. 'The Daily Beast and Michael Wolff have lots in common—they both peddle fake news for clickbait in a hopeless attempt to amount to something more than lying losers," she said in an email. 'The President didn't need to apply to an overrated, corrupt institution like Harvard to become a successful businessman and the most transformative President in history.' The White House has previously called Wolff 'a lying sack of s--t,' which he has laughed off. There are no publicly available records or reports which would shed light on whether Trump did apply to Harvard in the 1960s. Published biographies have not made that assertion. The potential that his war on Harvard is motivated by personal grudge may appear to be trivial, but his moves against the university are already at the center of high-stakes litigation and questions of motivation would be likely to be closely scrutinized by Harvard's counsel. What is known about his higher education is that as a young boy, Trump dreamed of going to film school at the University of Southern California, a school that's also borne the brunt of his recent attacks. The institution has lost $17.5 million after Trump stripped money from federal research grants after the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights said it did not 'fulfill their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus.' After finishing high school at the New York Military Academy, Trump's dreams of attending film school were dashed. He enrolled at Fordham University in 1964, commuting to the private Catholic school in the Bronx from his family home in Jamaica Estates, Queens. 'I'd been away at school for five years, and I wanted to see my parents,' Trump said in Gwenda Blair's The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate, noting that the school was close to home. According to his sister Maryanne Trump Barry, who passed away in 2023, he opted to attend Fordham because they let him in. At Fordham, his grades were average, wrote The New York Times investigative journalists Ross Buettner and Susanne Craig in their 2024 book Lucky Loser. Trump did not make the dean's list in his first year, which only required a GPA of 3.5, or the equivalent of a B+. After only two years at Fordham, Trump's brother Fred called in a favor. His good friend, Jim Nolan, had just taken a job at the University of Pennsylvania's admissions office. 'Freddy requested a favor. Could Nolan schedule an interview to get his kid brother into the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce?' wrote Buettner and Craig. Nolan agreed. When Trump and his father showed up, they were gracious and warm, 'but it was all show,' Nolan added. Nolan said that Trump's grades from Fordham were 'sufficient' to meet the Wharton standards of that era. 'I would say we probably accepted thirty, forty percent of the people who applied,' Nolan said. Only later did Wharton become the highly sought-after institution it is today, the book noted. Trump's then attorney Michael Cohen wrote to Fordham in the run-up to the 2016 election to demand that it keep his transcripts secret. Trump graduated from UPenn in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics. Trump's two older sons, Don Jr. and Eric, went to UPenn but his son-in-law Jared Kushner attended Harvard. He was accepted months after his father, New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner, pledged $2.5 million to the university. Daniel Golden quoted a number of people at Kushner's high school as saying he did not have the GPA or SAT scores to get accepted into Harvard in his book, The Price of Admission. The war on Harvard is now one of Trump's most high-profile campaigns. In April, the White House stripped the university of much of its federal funding after Harvard refused to bend the knee to the president's orders. Trump had already succeeded in his attempts to exert control over other Ivy Leagues like Columbia, forcing them to change their policies, staff, and curriculum to stamp out rhetoric related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices or anything that was deemed anti-Israel sentiment. On May 25, Trump demanded the 'names and countries' of all international students enrolled in Harvard, later vowing to determine 'how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country.' 'But have no fear, the Government will, in the end, WIN!' he wrote on Truth Social. Wolff suggested that aside from potential grudge, the reality TV star's instincts as a producer are key to understanding his actions. 'He needs an enemy,' he said, adding: 'That's what make the show great, the Trump show. He picks fantastic enemies, actually. And Harvard, for all it represents, fits right into the Trump show.' The president loves the drama, Wolff said. 'He's done what he set out to do,' he said. 'Dominate the headlines. What do you do? You go after Harvard and you go after Harvard in a way that is draconian, dramatic, and existential. It's threatening Harvard on that level.' Wolff added that even when the higher institutions and federal judges fight back, it's all part of the president's scheme to stay in the spotlight. 'So [Harvard] will oppose this and therefore the courts will stop this from happening. But at the same time, that becomes another aspect to the Trump show,' he said. 'He forces them to play their part, which is to oppose him.'
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Biographer: This Is What Trump Really Thinks About Black People
Donald Trump's biographer has given some insights into the way he thinks the president perceives the Black community. 'Clearly, he has some issue with Black people,' Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast Podcast on Thursday. 'The world is a better place to him without Black people, or without having to be aware of Black people, without Black people somehow in what he considers a zero sum game with white people.' The president has a long history of incendiary rhetoric and actions described by his critics as racist, though he stringently denies those allegations and even told reporters back in 2018 he was 'the least racist person you have ever interviewed.' In 1973, the Department of Justice sued Trump and his companies for discriminating against Black renters, and under the Obama administration he was one of the most vocal proponents of the 'birther' conspiracy theory. He's also continued to maintain that the Central Park Five, a group of mostly Black teenagers, were responsible for the rape of a white woman in 1989, despite all five men having been fully exonerated in 2002. He launched his 2016 election campaign with a speech accusing Mexico of deliberately sending 'criminals' and 'rapists' across the border into the United States. The following year, he described participants at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as 'very fine people,' before in 2018 referring to African countries as 's---holes' during an Oval Office meet about immigration. 'Trump certainly regards Black people as profoundly different from white people,' Wolff further said during his sit-down with the Daily Beast. 'I mean the word racist now becomes in the Trump world a kind of high praise, because it's meant to suggest the liberal overreach and the liberals call anybody racist.'
