Biographer Michael Wolff suggests Donald Trump’s resentment toward elite universities may stem from a personal grudge.

Amid Donald Trump’s ongoing push to limit international student enrollment at Harvard University, biographer Michael Wolff has suggested that the former president’s long-standing resentment toward elite universities may stem from a personal grudge.

Appearing on The Daily Beast podcast, Wolff, who has authored four books about Trump’s time in the White House, referenced the popular theory that Trump is targeting top-tier institutions because they did not accept his son Barron. 

However, Wolff claimed the animosity might go back even further, alleging that Trump himself was unable to get into Harvard. “It’s important not to lend too much calculation and planning to anything he does. 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 League,” Wolff said.

White House dismisses claim

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers dismissed the claim, stating Trump did not “need to apply” to Harvard to achieve success. “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 wrote in an email to The Daily Beast.

Trump and Harvard: What we know

But is the claim true? While there are no publicly available records proving Trump applied to Harvard in the 1960s, it’s known he initially hoped to attend the University of Southern California, which recently lost $17.5 million after Trump pulled the grants from federal research funding.

He eventually enrolled at Fordham University in 1964, which, according to his sister Maryanne Trump Barry, was because “that’s where he got in. Barry, who passed away in 2023, said so in Gwenda Blair’s book “The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate.”

A 2024 book titled Lucky Loser revealed that Trump’s grades at Fordham were average but “sufficient” to meet the transfer requirements of Wharton at the time, long before it became the prestigious business school it’s known as today. In 2016, Trump’s then-attorney, Michael Cohen, wrote to Fordham University to prevent the release of Trump’s academic records during his campaign.

Interestingly, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was accepted to Harvard not long after his father, New Jersey real estate mogul Charles Kushner, made a $2.5 million donation to the university.