AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
President Trump gave the commencement address at West Point yesterday, touting the hike in defense money and the GOP spending bill.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One trillion-dollar military budget, General. Do you know that? - one trillion. Some people say, could you cut it back? I said, I'm not cutting 10 cents. There's another thing we can cut. We can cut plenty of others.
RASCOE: Trump also had high praise for graduating cadets, even pointing out the Rhodes Scholars among them. This just days after his administration ratcheted up attacks on another institution of higher education - Harvard. Let's bring in NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So the president is praising scholars at West Point, but he's also trying to revoke Harvard's ability to enroll international students. And then at 12:51 a.m. today, Trump also posted, why isn't Harvard saying that almost 31% of their students are from foreign lands - emphasis on foreign lands - continuing, we want those names and countries. What do you make of this?
LIASSON: Well, the ostensible reason that the administration says it's doing this is because Harvard and other institutions haven't done enough to combat antisemitism. The president is also cutting billions of dollars in research funding that goes to Harvard. He is trying to get rid of Harvard's tax-exempt status, and he also wants to make Harvard and other universities pay a much higher endowment tax.
Now, his opponents say the way to view these attacks on elite institutions - not just universities like Harvard, but law firms and cultural institutions and nonprofits - is that he wants to dominate any institutions he sees as potentially opposing him. He sees universities - elite universities - as incubators of liberal voters.
And, you know, way back in 2016, Trump famously said, after the Nevada primary, while he was ticking through the different groups that he had won, citing how well he did with highly educated and the poorly educated, he said, I love the poorly educated. So maybe that's a clue.
RASCOE: Well, is this something - is this some sort of a presidential flex, like, pressing for executive power, no matter the Constitution? Harvard has called the president's actions a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
LIASSON: Right. Well, we're going to find out if that is true or not. You know, Trump's opponents say that every time Trump cuts money for research - whether it's at Harvard or NIH, or bars the best and brightest students in the world from coming to the U.S. to get educated and then go on to start world-class companies, as they have - is just a big gift to China, who's already racing ahead of the U.S. in technology and manufacturing. We do know that if these cuts go through, they will be crippling even to a university with as big an endowment as Harvard. But what we don't know is whether the Supreme Court will allow this to happen in the end.
RASCOE: Mara, President Trump kind of capped off last week with a couple of social media posts about tariffs, and the markets reacted. Like, what's going on with that?
LIASSON: Well, Trump reverted to his previous pattern of conducting trade policy on social media. And for a while, the markets had relaxed. It looked like he was handing the trade negotiating portfolio to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But now Trump is back to that chaotic, head-spinning tariffs on one day, tariffs off the other. He said he wanted 25% tariffs on Apple if they don't start making their iPhones in the United States. Apple said that would be difficult, if not impossible, and it would raise the price of phones above $2,000. He's also recommending a 50% tariff against the EU starting in June, and that sent markets, as you said, into a tizzy as they have done in the past. But what we've learned is that the only person in charge of trade policy is Donald Trump.
RASCOE: And there was some news about former President Biden last week - right? - dominating the news?
LIASSON: That's right. He did. He has a cancer diagnosis just at - as the same time as a book is coming out alleging his staff covered up his physical and mental decline. But then Trump took over the media narrative, as he often does, with the dressing down of the South African president in the Oval Office, repeating unsupported accusations of white genocide in South Africa and, of course, those big new tariffs.
RASCOE: And really quickly, what's your take on the GOP tax and spending bill that just passed the House?
LIASSON: Well, it was a big win for Trump. It showed his rock-solid hold on the Republican Party. Now this bill goes on to the Senate, which will want to make changes. But it's certain that this tax cut bill is going to become Exhibit A in the midterm elections. It does skew to the wealthy with cuts to Medicaid, and both Democrats and Republicans think the politics of this bill are - is going to work for them in the midterms.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Mara Liasson. Thank you so much.
LIASSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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