18 posts from Monday, May 5, 2025

He's going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail. He ain't no lame duck, if anything, he's a soaring eagle. 47 means business. He's a man of his word. My administration has launched the most sweeping border and immigration crackdown in American history. We will make America wealthy again. The White House is holding all the cards. My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Our country will be woke no longer. President Trump's been clear, we are turning the page on DEI. We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government. I'm going to close the Department of Education and move education back to the states. He is gutting liberal Washington, D.C. in a way that they say could be permanent. We're going to also slash something else, the waste in our bloated federal bureaucracy. After that, India has created the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency. Those savings $162 billion. We will strengthen and modernize our military. The U.S. military is on a recruiting comeback. The Navy says it's on track for its best year since 2002. Over 50,000 recruits have raised their right hand to join the Army so far this fiscal year. We will keep men out of women's sports. From now on, women's sports will be only for women. I will terminate Lion Kamala's electric vehicle mandate and end immediately the green new scam. He pulled the plug on Joe Biden's failed energy policy. Biden-era regulations be gone, leases will now be expedited, and permits will be streamlined from here on out. This is what it looks like when you do have a president who number one keeps his promises, is willing to fight. You can't say that he's coming and not try to deliver on what he at least believes was his promises on the campaign trail, and he's doing so in historic fashion. Donald Trump is crushing his to-do list.

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-Every year, hundreds of young football players have their dreams come true as the NFL teams across the land, and you just saw that last week. Select the best young players in America to join their ranks. Hundreds of thousands of football fans will travel all across our country to cheer them on in person. We expect, would you say, more than 100,000 people. I think -- What is the capacity would you think it can hold? Because them all can actually hold up to a million people, if you go all the way back. What do you think? -Over three days, we'll be over a million. -Oh, yeah, you're gonna be.

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I'm pleased to reveal that the 2027 NFL draft, that's a big thing, will be held right here in our nation's capital, Washington, D.C., on the National Mall. And you get a little glimpse of it. I don't think, I was just saying to Roger, I don't think there's ever been anything like that. That's a good idea. Maybe we could use it for other things also. I have an idea. It's going to be beautiful. It's going to be something that nobody else will ever be able to duplicate that. I don't suspect. It's very exciting.

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>> The president believes we can achieve more together. This is the abundant vision he has for the future. He wants everyone to be a part of it. Thousands of businesses are now catching the president's vision. Since he assumed office in January, companies have pledged to invest trillions into the US economy. President Trump has secured more investment for our country in 100 days than President Biden did during all four years. Entrepreneurs too are starting to understand what the president is trying to accomplish. March saw one of the highest levels ever recorded for new business applications. Many of these men and women, like many of you, are grasping that America First is the blueprint for a more abundant world.

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Bill, I'm just, you know, you're an alumnus. What would, what should Harvard do where you'd say, okay, to get back in your good graces, what does the university need to do at this point? - Sure, so the right thing to do, or I should say the wrong thing to do is receive a letter from the administration and write back saying, we're doing nothing. In fact, we're gonna sue you. Okay, that's what Harvard did. What Harvard should have done, it should have said, you know, President Trump, you make some good points, right? You know, taxpayer money coming to Harvard, that's a privilege, it's not a right. And, you know, taxpayer money, you know, going to an institution, the institution cannot have massive amounts of administrative bloat, waste, bureaucracy, and we're gonna eliminate it. We're gonna hire Alex Partners, a restructuring firm. We're gonna take a 3G, a zero-based budgeting approach to the way we run our, you know, administration. Things that are not, inefficiency is causing harm, and we're wasting taxpayer money. Mr. President, you're right. Harvard has become, you know, there is not viewpoint diversity at Harvard. Students are self-censoring their remarks in classrooms. Faculty are doing the same, 'cause people are afraid to have real conversations. You can't learn, you go to college to be exposed to a broad array of ideas. And I guess maybe I should be looking at Joe. A broad array of ideas. And you're not, that's not happening at Harvard. You know, free speech is not happening at Harvard. So you acknowledge the areas where the president is absolutely correct, and you say, look, we're gonna fix those areas, okay? We wanna make a deal, Mr. President. What have we seen from Trump? He asked for the moon, kind of shock and all, okay? Same thing true for Harvard, the most recent letter. No, you could argue it's certainly overreaching in some of the elements, but he wants to make a deal. Make a deal with the president. Commit to fix these things, which, by the way, your alumni want you to fix. It's in the best interest of Harvard. And treat shareholder and taxpayer money like as a fiduciary, and they're not doing that. And, you know, Harvard is not in a good financial position. This is something I think is not well appreciated. They nominally have a $53 billion down. I don't believe the carrying values of their endowment. 80% of the assets are invested in real estate, private equity, and venture capital. - So it's not liquid? - It's not liquid. And they're apparently selling us a billion dollar slice of their private equity. Watch where that gets priced relative to the carrying value of the portfolio. My guess is it could be 30, 40% below the current carrying value to get a bid. In my business, if I owned a slice of something, I sold a piece of it at a 30, 40% discount, I'd have to remark my entire portfolio. So one, the endowment, in my view, is massively overstated in terms of what it's really worth. The second thing is no one talks about the fact that Harvard now has $8 billion of debt. I read the prospectus for the recent bond issue. So you have 53 billion overstated assets that are liquid, and you have $7.9 billion of debt, which you owe, as a donor. Do you want to give money to a nonprofit institution, which is going to go into the institution, going to go out the door to pay money, interest to bond holders? My experience is nonprofits that borrow money, it doesn't end well. And then you have, what do they rely on for current funding? Money every year from the US government, money every year from donations. Donations, I don't know. I have to believe they're down meaningfully. And tax-exempt status. Another reason it induces people to give money to their university is they get a tax deduction. - They're unfair to try to take the tax-exempt status away. - I think it's fair, again. Harvard became, over time, a political advocacy organization for one party. When a university goes from being a university to affecting, becoming a political advocacy organization, it doesn't deserve a nonprofit status. And they have to, Harvard should be a place where students go to learn and the best research gets done. It shouldn't be a place that is allowing pro-terrorist organizations on campus that only allows certain kinds of thinking and speech on campus. That's a political advocacy organization, it's not a university. So I don't think we're gonna end up there where Harvard loses its tax-exempt status. I want Harvard to succeed. It's been very important to me over time. But really, it got itself to a very bad place and Alan Garber is a good president, but he's not managing. The mismanagement here is Penny Pritzker, if this were any other kind of corporation, the notion that she's still chairman of Harvard leading the charge here, in terms of how Harvard managed everything from COVID, I know we have to go, but it's an important topic, to endowment management, to waste, to free speech, to who they hired as president of the university. It's time for a change in leadership and the board at Harvard.

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Our country was hollowed out by losing tens of thousands of factories, five million jobs. We are seeing a renaissance in this country of manufacturing, of onshoring, and strengthening the supply chains that we should have done after we saw the COVID impacts to our supply chains. President Trump is taking action now to do that, because for the last four years, the Biden administration ignored these problems. They let our trade deficits grow to $1.2 trillion. That was a 20 percent increase. This was going in the completely wrong direction. Small businesses are back in the driver's seat thanks to President Trump and his belief in the American worker, American industry, and Main Street.

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What the president is trying to say is we got to put the American worker back. We're not making things here, and we have lost thousands of jobs because of our unfair trade deals we've had with countries since World War II. Listen, Nixon talked about this, Ford talked about this, Jimmy Carter talked about this, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. The only president that hasn't talked about this is Biden, how we have been getting ripped off in this country, and we're no longer making products, and it's a serious issue. President Trump is the first one, first president we've had that actually has a backbone strong enough to stand up and say we've got to right this wrong, start manufacturing goods here. China has got rich off of our country. We have spent trillions of dollars building China's economy, 40% of all their goods they manufacture are sold back here in the United States, and they rip us off all the time. They rip off our technology, they rip off our companies that do business there, they have unfair business deals, and then they also take advantage of our farmers that ship goods over there by canceling products all the time, and then renegotiating the deal once they're already on the ships in the Pacific. So President Trump is standing up to the bully China and saying enough is enough, and by the way, we've all heard about the Belt and Road Initiative. China was trying to do that to make all countries dependent on them. What President Trump is doing is blowing holes all in the Belt and Road Initiative right now which good on President Trump.

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