Bill Maher said he supports President Donald Trump’s campaign to punish Harvard University during the latest episode of his HBO show.
The Trump administration has opted to withhold billions in grants and contracts, following Harvard’s leadership’s refusal to comply with a detailed list of federal government demands.
‘Trump has launched an all-out assault on Harvard, and although much of what he does is controversial, there’s a small element of a good idea in this,’ he commented. ‘I’ve been criticizing Harvard long before his involvement.’
It’s a curious point of agreement considering Maher is a graduate of Cornell University, a rival Ivy League school.
CNN host Jake Tapper was a guest on Friday’s show and pointed this out to Maher.
‘You went to Cornell,’ Tapper said.
‘That’s not why,’ Maher said, laughing. ‘No, it’s because Harvard is an a*****e factory in a lot of ways that produces smirking f**k faces.’
In an unexpectedly awkward moment, it was disclosed that Maher’s other guest, Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton from Massachusetts, is a Harvard graduate.
‘He has three degrees from Harvard,’ Tapper said. ‘He’s a f**k face times three.’
Maher’s glee at Trump taking Harvard down a peg is another instance of the liberal comedian cozying up to the man he once likened to an orangutan.
Last month, he had dinner with Trump at the White House alongside UFC owner Dana White and Kid Rock, who organized the meeting.
Maher confirmed that Trump was a ‘different’ person than he’d seen in the public eye over the last decade and even the night before, when the president publicly wondered if the meeting was even a good idea.
‘The guy I met is not the person who, the night before, s***-tweeted a bunch of nasty crap about how he thought this dinner was a bad idea, and what a deranged a**hole I was.’
Trump’s war on Harvard has recently expanded to potentially revoking its tax-exempt status and limiting how many foreign-born students it admits.
The Trump administration attempted to block all international students from obtaining visas to study at Harvard, an action that was blocked by a federal judge on Thursday.
Trump said this week that the school should cut its population of foreign students – a fifth of whom are Chinese – from nearly 30 percent to 15 percent.
This feeds into the White House’s growing fear about Harvard’s opaque links to the Chinese Communist Party.
For instance, officials from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) have attended public health training sessions run by Harvard’s China Health Partnership since 2020.
That same year, the US government slapped the XPCC with sanctions for its role in alleged human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang.
Another one of Trump’s main accusations against Harvard is that university leaders have fostered a breeding ground for antisemitism, making Jewish students feel uncomfortable and unsafe.
A large encampment of pro-Palestine students protesting the Israel-Hamas war formed on Harvard Yard during the 2024 spring semester and lasted for three weeks.
The students wanted the university to divest from the Israeli government and Israeli businesses, but the administration did not acquiesce.
Even before the encampment in April and May of 2024, there were widespread protests at Harvard immediately following the Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
One such protest descended into a confrontation where pro-Palestine demonstrators surrounded a Harvard MBA student and repeatedly shouted ‘shame’ at him.
Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president during much of this turmoil, resigned in January 2025 after she refused to condemn students calling for the genocide of Jews when pressed by members of Congress.
Gay presided over billions of dollars in lost potential donations from wealthy Jewish families appalled by what took place on campus.
That’s now on top of the approximately $3.2 billion in grants and contracts Harvard has lost out on from the federal government since Trump took office.
Harvard sued the Trump administration for the federal funding freeze and denies accusations of alleged bias against Jewish students.
Lawyers for Harvard also argue that the attempted revocation of foreign student visas violates its free speech and due process rights under the US Constitution as well as the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that constrains what federal agencies are allowed to do.
Harvard says the Trump administration is retaliating against it because it refused to obey the government’s demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.
The federal government sent a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber on April 11 claiming that the school has ‘failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.’
The letter demanded university leaders adopt merit-based admissions policies, stop admitting students who are ‘hostile to American values’, enforce viewpoint diversity in all academic departments, and immediately end all DEI programs.
Officials explained that they wanted what amounted to progress reports on these goals sent to them so they could ensure that their orders were being followed.
