Trump Holds University Funding Hostage Unless They Meet His Demands

The Trump administration is making colleges and universities promise to stop being “woke” if they want to gain priority access to special federal funding.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the White House released a 10-point memo making “multiple positive benefits,” like “substantial and meaningful federal grants,” contingent upon schools capitulating to Trump in his right-wing culture war. The memo demanded universities institute colorblind admissions, cap international student acceptance at 15 percent, standardize testing requirements, and freeze tuition for the next five years. The memo also orders schools to create a “vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus” that is kinder to the right-wing, and even eliminate entire departments if they “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

The memo was first sent out to Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona, Brown University and the University of Virginia. None of them have responded publicly yet.

This is an absolute, all-out crackdown on any speech that the Trump administration deems left-wing. Dangling federal funding in the face of schools unless they cave to your demands, while at the same time designating anything vaguely anti-American as “domestic terrorism,” is a recipe for authoritarianism.

“Who decides if the intellectual environment is vigorous and open-ended? This is not something the federal government should be involved in and adjudicating,” American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell told the Journal. “The implications for free speech are horrifying.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson admitted that President Donald Trump has become “unhinged” and “unwell” when confronted by a House Democrat on Capitol Hill.

Pennsylvania Representative Madeline Dean approached Johnson off the House floor on Tuesday to sound the alarm about Trump’s erratic behavior ahead of the government shutdown—and the speaker didn’t push back.

“The president is unhinged. He is unwell,” Dean said.

“A lot of folks on your side are too. I don’t control him,” Johnson shrugged.

“Oh my God, please,” Dean scoffed. “That performance in front of the generals?”

“I didn’t see it,” Johnson sighed.

“That is so dangerous. You know, I serve on Foreign Affairs and Appropriations. This is a collision of those two things. Our allies are looking elsewhere. Our enemies are laughing,” Dean warned.

Trump delivered a radical far-right screed at Quantico on Tuesday, begging his audience of top U.S. military brass to clap for him as he directed them to use the U.S. armed forces against immigrants and American citizens.

CNN’s Manu Raju reported on X Tuesday that Dean and Johnson also had argued about Trump’s first post about Hakeem Jeffries, showing the House minority leader wearing a sombrero, with an exaggerated handlebar mustache, while mariachi music played in the background. Trump has since posted a second.

“I think it wasn’t my style,” Johnson admitted about the stunt the New York Democrat had called “racist.”

“Not your style? It’s disgraceful. It’s negative. It’s racist. You should call it out!” Dean hit back.

Dean later told Raju that Johnson had asked rhetorically, “Is that really racist?”

“Is it racist?” Dean exploded in the video. “You put a sombrero on a Black man who’s the leader of the House? You don’t see that as racist? We need you desperately to lead!”

But Johnson has been a steadfast defender of Trump and isn’t likely to fold now. The House speaker spent the following few hours doing interviews on every network being brutally fact-checked for claiming that Democrats had shut down the government because they wanted to lavish undocumented immigrants with free health care.

There was a time on the campaign trail when Donald Trump was trying to distance himself from Project 2025, but that has long since passed.

The president is now openly bragging about having Project 2025 officials in his administration—and carrying out their goals. Trump announced in a Truth Social post Thursday morning that he’d be meeting with Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought—who he boasted was tied to the Christian nationalist agenda—to discuss which “Democrat agencies” would be getting the ax in the coming days.

“I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent,” Trump posted. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity. They are not stupid people, so maybe this is their way of wanting to, quietly and quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Several senior Trump administration officials have said that mass layoffs are on the horizon for federal employees, now that Congress has initiated a government shutdown.

In a private call Wednesday with members of the GOP, Vought said that “consequential” layoffs would begin in “a day or two,” reported NOTUS’s Reese Gorman.

Hours before the government shutdown began, over a bipartisan disagreement on funding Trump’s agenda, the president warned that it would be Democrats in executive branch agencies who would face the consequences for the congressional failure—even though it is Republicans who currently control every branch of the federal government.

The White House has so far issued internal agency emails and changed the official White House website to place the blame for the bipartisan shutdown fully on Democrats. That kind of divisive and partisan language not only defies long-standing presidential tradition but is in violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, according to ethics experts. It could also be in potential violation of the Hatch Act, which is designed to limit partisan messaging from federal employees.

Donald Trump’s commerce secretary completely contradicted the Trump administration’s official story on Jeffrey Epstein during an appearance on a New York Post podcast published Wednesday.

The late notorious sex criminal was “the greatest blackmailer ever,” Howard Lutnick told the Post, after detailing a skin-crawling experience in 2005, when he moved in next to Epstein and was shown the disgraced financier’s “massage room.”

Lutnick expressed his belief that Epstein blackmailed powerful individuals in his social circle by videotaping them during massages: “They get a massage, that’s what his MO was. ‘Get a massage, get a massage,’ and what happened in that massage room, I assume, was on video. This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever, blackmailed people. That’s how he had money.”

The commerce secretary speculated that Epstein used blackmail to secure a controversial 18-month sentence in 2008 (which he notably got in a plea deal negotiated by then–U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, who eventually served as labor secretary in Trump’s first term).

“How could he get 18 months and be able to go to his office during the day and have visitors and stuff? There must have been a trade,” Lutnick speculated. “So, my assumption, I have no knowledge, but my assumption is there was a trade for the videos, because there were people on those videos.”

Lutnick’s remarks are at odds with the administration’s official narrative on Epstein. Last month, FBI Director Kash Patel told a Senate committee “there is no credible information” that Epstein trafficked victims “to other individuals.”

In a July memo, the FBI and Justice Department also said their investigation into Epstein yielded “no credible evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” Nor did they uncover a “client list” or “evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

The memo challenged what had become an article of faith among Epstein conspiracy theorists (many of them Trump supporters) and thus ignited a still-simmering scandal for Trump. The rest is history: The president disowned his Epstein-concerned supporters, news reports have revealed additional details about his former relationship with Epstein, and his allies are still fighting against pressure from the public and Congress to release the “Epstein files” in full.

Pro-Israel MAGA conservatives are fuming as the Trump administration offers protections to longtime U.S. ally Qatar in the wake of Israel’s bombing of their capital, Doha, last month. 

“Over the years, the United States and the State of Qatar have been bound together by close cooperation, shared interests, and the close relationship between our armed forces,” the administration said in an executive order. “In recognition of this history, and in light of the continuing threats to the State of Qatar posed by foreign aggression, it is the policy of the United States to guarantee the security and territorial integrity of the State of Qatar against external attack.

“The United States shall regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of the State of Qatar as a threat to the peace and security of the United States,” it stated further. 

This set off a very interesting group of people on the online far right. 

“What about assuring our own safety from Qatar?” wrote the raving far-right commentator Laura Loomer. “Every single day, Qatar floods our country with billions of $ of funding for radical left, communist, & Islamist causes on college campuses and major institutions. Qatar also financed Iran before they tried to assassinate Trump.

“Terror-funding Qatar, which has been running an elaborate anti-Israel and pro-Qatar disinformation campaign in the United States, has now succeeded at being the most effective investment in foreign influence history,” said January 6 insurrectionist defense attorney Marina Medvin. “The White House just pledged American lives to protect Qatar.” 

“Our new protectorate, Qatar,” Fox News host (and hard-core Zionist) Mark Levin opined dramatically. “If the leadership of Hamas in Qatar is killed by Israel, are we going to war with Israel?  Wouldn’t it have been better to condition any military defense of Qatar on some basic requirements? For example: Turnover the Hamas leaders; no more funding of terrorists worldwide: no more funding of Marxist-Islamist groups in the United States. This is the bare minimum.”

The United States is showing protection (for whatever reasons Trump has) to an ally that just got unilaterally bombed by Israel, and the initial reaction of these people is fear for Israel instead.

“By the way, there is no similar guarantee for Israel. American troops have never died for Israel,” another right-winger posted on X. “Are you ready to die for Qatar?”

Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday refused to explain President Trump’s seeming threat that federal firings during the government shutdown would be based on political affiliation.

A day earlier, CBS’s Weijia Jiang had asked the president why he’d said government employees would have to be let go during a shutdown, given the massive reductions to the federal workforce enacted earlier in the year by his so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.”

In response, the president said many people will be laid off, and “they’re going to be Democrats,” leading Jiang on Wednesday—the first day of the shutdown—to ask Vance whether terminations would be ideologically motivated.

“Has the administration asked agencies to target federal workers who they believe to be Democrats in these reductions of forces?” Jiang asked.

Vance denied that the administration is “targeting federal agencies based on politics,” and said federal workers would be fired only if the shutdown “drags on” long enough.

“So what did he mean by, ‘They are going to be Democrats’?” Jiang asked, quoting Trump. Vance, taking the next question, did not answer.

Whether or not possible layoffs will be explicitly politicized, the Trump administration has already used the shutdown as a cudgel against Democrats.

On Wednesday, White House budget director Russell Vought said he was freezing $18 billion earmarked for infrastructure projects in New York—the state represented by both of the top-ranking Democrats in Congress. Shortly after, Vought announced the cancellation of nearly $8 billion in climate projects across 16 states, each of which just happen to be blue states that did not vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

In doing so, the budget director was simply following through on Trump’s threat to punish Democrats during the shutdown by “cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.”

Vice President JD Vance struggled to defend Donald Trump’s racist AI slop about House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries by saying he thought it was “funny.”

The president posted videos on Truth Social both Monday and Tuesday that showed Jeffries wearing a sombrero, with an exaggerated handlebar mustache, while mariachi music played in the background—a stunt the New York Democrat called “racist.”

Speaking at a White House press briefing Wednesday, Vance was asked how he squared the president’s pathetic posting with claims that the Trump administration had attempted to engage in “good faith” negotiations with Democratic leaders.

“Oh, I think it’s funny! The president’s joking and we’re having a good time. You can negotiate in good faith while poking a little bit of fun at some of the absurdities [in] some of the Democrats’ positions. And even poking some fun at the absurdity of the Democrats themselves,” Vance said.

“I mean I’ll tell Hakeem Jeffries right now: I make this solemn promise to you, that if you help us reopen the government the sombrero memes will stop. And I’ve talked to the president of the United States about that,” he continued.

Shortly after, Vance circled back to “the sombrero thing,” saying, “Hakeem Jeffries said it was racist. And I know that he said that, and I honestly don’t even honestly know what that means. Like, is he a Mexican American that is offended by having, like, a sombrero meme?”

Jeffries is African American, and the first Black man to lead a major party in either chamber of the U.S. Congress. And Jeffries isn’t the only Black politician to be targeted with the racist sombrero meme: The Trump War Room X account also posted an AI-generated photo of Democratic Representative Maxine Waters, who is also not Mexican. But you don’t need to be of a specific ethnicity to recognize that using stereotypes from that ethnicity’s culture to imply someone is weak or stupid is, inherently, racist.

The set-dressing was in reference to Republicans’ claims that Democrats shut down the government because they want to extend health care benefits to undocumented immigrants. In fact, Democrats shut down the government because they want Americans to keep theirs.

Vance is no stranger to defending racist remarks. On the campaign trail, he elevated the false conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their white neighbors’ pets.

In February, he argued that a DOGE employee should be reinstated after he quit over racist comments online. “I obviously disagree with some of [Marko] Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance wrote on X. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back.”

Meanwhile, Vance has cheered on a doxing campaign for people making jokes about the death of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk.

Vance has often used offensive gestures at comedy to appeal to the culture warriors in Trump’s base. There are those of us who still remember his weak attempt to rib cancel culture over his choice of Diet Mountain Dew, or his sexist “childless cat lady” comment. Recently, Vance has attempted to make light of extrajudicial killings of Venezuelans. Trump’s caricatures of Jeffries are blatantly racist, and exactly the kind of shitposting his troll-laden base feeds on.

The Trump administration is yanking green energy and infrastructure funding away from blue states on day one of the Republican-led government shutdown. 

“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled. More info to come from @ENERGY,” Office of Management and Budget Director and Project 2025 author Russ Vought announced on X on Wednesday. “The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.” 

Each of these states voted against President Trump in 2024 and is represented by two Democrats in the Senate (where the shutdown fight just happens to be stuck). Not only that, but they also make up a massive bulk of the U.S. gross domestic product. This appears to be yet another petty, retributive move against states and senators that Trump considers to be his enemy. 

The Department of Energy has yet to follow up on Vought’s statement.  

This also comes as the Trump administration freezes a whopping $18 billion in infrastructure and transportation funding to New York City, another massive middle finger to a blue region. Vought announced a cut to those funds earlier Wednesday, claiming the projects are using “unconstitutional DEI principles.” 

Targeting blue states and cities isn’t very “America First” of the Trump administration. But it has become increasingly obvious that it never really cared about that, especially when revenge is on the table.

Federal employees can expect layoffs by the end of the week, according to senior Trump administration officials.

In a private call Wednesday with members of the GOP, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought announced that “consequential” layoffs will begin in “a day or two,” reported NOTUS’s Reese Gorman.

That timeline was confirmed by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who informed journalists later Wednesday that layoffs were “imminent.”

“They are, unfortunately, a consequence of this government shutdown,” she said.

She did not elaborate on the scope of the layoffs, which agencies would be targeted, or what percentage of the workforce was at risk of losing their jobs. But one demographic is in danger of getting axed: Democrats, according to Donald Trump.

Hours before the government shutdown over a bipartisan disagreement on funding Trump’s agenda, the president warned that it would be Democrats who would face the consequences for the congressional failure—even though it is Republicans who currently control every branch of the federal government.

“The Democrats want to shut it down,” Trump commented during a news conference at the White House Tuesday afternoon. “So, when you shut it down, you have to do layoffs. So, we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected. And the Democrats, they are going to be Democrats.”

Vice President JD Vance brushed off Trump’s threats when he joined the press conference Wednesday, suggesting that the president should not be taken at his word.

“Has the administration asked agencies to target federal workers whom they believe to be Democrats in these reduction in workforce—” asked a reporter.

“We’re not targeting federal agencies based on politics,” Vance insisted in a sprawling answer that continued to point blame at Democratic leadership.

“We’re targeting the people’s government so that as much as possible of the essential services can continue to function,” he continued. “That is the question the president has asked the entire government is—fundamentally—okay we’re going to shut down. That causes some problems: The troops aren’t getting paid, there’s nothing we can do about that while the government is shut down, but there are some essential services that we want to make sure—as much as possible—they still continue to function. That is the principle that is driving us forward during this shutdown.”

“He said, ‘They are going to be Democrats,’” a reporter reiterated.

The divisive and partisan language espoused thus far by the Trump administration during this shutdown not only defies longstanding presidential tradition, but is also in violation of the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch, according to ethics experts. It could also be in potential violation of the Hatch Act, which is designed to limit partisan messaging from federal employees.

President Donald Trump intends to shield his sweeping immigration enforcement operations from the effects of the government shutdown, as well as other key facets of his policy agenda, Politico reported Wednesday.

Through a series of interviews with former and current White House officials and analysis of agency documents, Politico learned what programs and offices Trump plans to keep intact—and spoiler alert, they’re not the essential government programs that Americans rely on. 

The Department of Homeland Security expanded the number of employees it is permitted to retain during a shutdown by 2,300, and has plans to keep 95 percent of its total employees in the office during the shutdown. Two years ago, it was only allowed to keep 88 percent. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, charged with carrying out Trump’s sweeping raids for undocumented immigrants and extrajudicial deportations, will continue to operate without interruption, two administration officials told Politico. 

“ICE will be fine during a shutdown,” one of the administration officials told Politico. “Most of what ICE does will continue.” Border Control would also remain mostly operational. 

In previous shutdowns, the Commerce Department and U.S. Trade Representative’s office were deemed non-essential—but this time, both have announced their intention to continue working on Trump’s economic policy agenda. 

Commerce has indicated that it will continue to allow import licensing for steel and aluminum, which was not a protected activity under the agency’s 2023 shutdown plan. The USTR will keep administration tariff programs running using 60 percent of its workforce, compared to the 40 percent it would have retained under its 2024 plan. 

NASA’s Artemis moonshot program will also continue to receive funding, as will the Department of the Interior’s processing of applications for drilling permits.  

Meanwhile, Trump intends to target Democrats—and punish Americans—by stripping federal programs that actually help people.

That means hundreds of thousands of federal workers will be sent home from the Social Security Administration, the Health and Human Services Department, the Department of Education, and other federal agencies. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has suspended operations, and the Federal Drug Administration has halted its long-term food safety initiatives and pre-market safety reviews of novel animal food ingredients. 

Additionally, if you are one of the estimated 200,000 Americans who filed for an extension on filing your tax returns, the deadline is still October 15—but if you have any questions about that, you may struggle to get a hold of an actual IRS employee in their office.