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?”