Trump’s Assault on Universities in America and Abroad: A Video Roundup
Our late-April collection of clips on the White House’s efforts to target institutions of higher learning
Dear Readers:
Next week, President Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver a commencement address at the University of Alabama—which is ironic given his open disdain for the values that higher education stands for. Recently, in a variety of different ways, Trump has gone after universities, and even students themselves, for not conforming to MAGA ideology.
In this week’s video roundup, we highlight three actions that this administration has undertaken:
Threatening elite universities with steep financial penalties for defying its ideologically-driven demands.
Implementing a short-lived plan to force out thousands of international students through mass visa revocations.
Strong-arming even foreign universities into scrubbing language that goes against its anti-DEI ideology for programs that receive any U.S. funding.
Trump is flexing state power to ensure academia advances his political goals like never before.
Give these three videos a watch. Then follow/subscribe to our YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram pages to get our latest clips as soon as they’re released.
Landry Ayres
Senior Producer
Trump Attempted to Terrify Foreign Students Into Self-Deporting
April 25, 2025
The Trump administration abruptly revoked the visas of over 1,700 international students last month without even informing them, generating utter confusion and fear. The students were left in legal limbo, unsure if they could stay in the country without risking masked ICE agents from kidnapping them off the street, as happened to a Tufts University student. But even those not targeted started weighing the costs of finishing their degree versus leaving the country altogether, lest they share a similar fate. Watch my latest video to understand how this all went down.
After this video was posted, we got word that ICE had backed off and was restoring the status of many of the students. ICE’s retreat was no doubt forced by 40 emergency orders by courts blocking it from unilaterally terminating records for foreign students. While this is a win, the impact is yet to be determined, and the process still shows that the Trump administration simply does not care how much havoc it creates and how many lives it upends.
Watch it below or on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
Trump Goes After Harvard's Tax-Exempt Status Because the Univeristy Spurned His Ideological Demands
April 22, 2025
The president doesn’t get to decide who pays taxes based on personal grudges. But that’s exactly what Trump is trying to do. After Harvard University publicly rejected his administration’s new higher education mandates, Trump called for it to be stripped of its tax-exempt status—turning a centuries-old legal protection for academic institutions into a tool for political retribution.
In the following video, which is part of our Executive Watch project, I look at how Trump’s weaponization of the IRS is not just an attack on one university—but a warning shot at the very idea of independent institutions in a democracy.
Watch it below or on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
Trump’s War on Higher Education Goes Global
March 26, 2025
Trump is not confining his crusade to impose his MAGA orthodoxy to American campuses. He’s going international!
As part of its anti-DEI jihad, his administration has pressured Finland’s University of Helsinki to scrub terms like “climate change” and “equal society” from materials about scholarships that receive U.S. grants. But the university pushed back. It is rejecting the funding, which will affect American Fulbright scholars in Finland along will other research collaborations.
Trump doesn’t just want to be King of America. He wants to be Emperor of the World.
Watch it below or on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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