# Post ts_114455776425590388

- Post ID: `ts_114455776425590388`
- Platform: Truth Social
- Posted: 2025-05-05T14:49:09.461Z (UTC)
- Deleted: no
- Repost: no
- Canonical URL: https://trump.fm/post/ts_114455776425590388
- Analysis page: https://trump.fm/post/ts_114455776425590388/analysis
- Audio narration: https://static.trump.fm/audio/ts_114455776425590388.mp3 (a synthesized voice reading the post text, not a recording)

## Post text

> BILL ACKMAN ON HARVARD AND UNIVERSITY FUNDING, THIS MORNING ON SQUAWK BOX…

## What the media says

**Video transcript** (4:59), transcribed automatically, so names and numbers may be wrong. Speakers aren't identified, so a voice in it may not be his:

> 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.

## Media

- video: https://static-assets-1.truthsocial.com/tmtg:prime-ts-assets/media_attachments/files/114/455/764/761/478/333/original/0f8b7c028f803fbc.mp4

## Engagement

- Likes: 4,918
- Reposts: 1,420
- Replies: 414
- Views: unknown
- Metrics collected: 2026-02-01T01:19:51.311Z (UTC)

# Analysis

_Machine-generated by trump.fm on 2026-03-22T01:19:57.136Z (UTC): a model's reading of this post, not his words. Its psychological terms describe the language, not a clinical assessment of him._

## Analysis: Signal-Boost of Bill Ackman on Harvard/University Funding

This post is a straightforward amplification of a cable news segment featuring billionaire investor Bill Ackman discussing Harvard and university funding on CNBC's Squawk Box. The post consists of a brief descriptor and an attached video clip.

### Authorship
The post appears at 10:49 AM ET (Trump likely at Mar-a-Lago or White House), during business hours. The formatting is clean — all caps but grammatically correct, no typos, no emotional commentary. This is consistent with an aide (likely Dan Scavino) clipping and sharing morning cable news segments. The lack of any personal editorial comment is uncharacteristic of authentic Trump posts, which almost always add opinion or emphasis.

### Psychological Context
This fits a broader pattern visible in the surrounding posts: marshaling allies and validators. Ackman has been a vocal critic of Harvard and DEI — sharing his commentary serves Trump's ongoing conflict with elite universities. The post functions as supply-gathering through proxy validation rather than direct self-expression.

### Rhetorical Function
Simple appeal to authority — leveraging Ackman's billionaire credibility to bolster the administration's anti-university funding stance. No original rhetoric to analyze.

### Clinical Significance
Minimal. This is routine content curation with no emotional or cognitive markers to assess.

## Authorship Analysis

**Aide-Written** (score: 15%)

### Indicators

- Business hours posting (10:49 AM ET)
- No personal commentary or opinion added
- Clean formatting with no typos
- Simple video share with descriptor
- Professional media clip curation pattern

## Psychological Profile

### State

**Grandiose State**

**Trigger:** Maintenance

Sentiment: +0.30

### Clinical

**Malignant Narcissism:**
- Narcissistic: 20%
- Antisocial: 0%
- Paranoid: 0%
- Sadism: 0%

**Defense Mechanisms:**
- idealization (immature)

**Cognitive Complexity:**
- Complexity: 10%

**Parasocial Techniques:**
- proxy validation
- appeal to elite authority

## Tags

- university-funding (80%)
- proxy-validation (70%)
- aide-authored (85%)

## That day

_From trump.fm's machine-generated digest of the day, not his words._

**Victory Lap Day: Curated Praise and a Self-Contradicting WWII Holiday Decree**

Trump spent the day in sustained self-congratulatory mode, celebrating his first 100 days with a stream of praise quotes from allies and policy announcements. The evening before brought brief flashes of irritation — sharing an article about a Wall Street critic being publicly shamed by MAGA allies, and attacking Karl Rove as a "total Loser." The day's most notable moment came in the evening with a grandiose announcement of new national holidays for both World War victories, built on a false grievance that America "never took credit" — despite Veterans Day already commemorating the WWI armistice. The NFL Draft coming to Washington in 2027 got four separate posts in two hours. Overall a low-intensity day dominated by self-promotion with very little original content.

Full digest for 2025-05-05: https://trump.fm/date/2025-05-05/analysis

## Citation

- APA: Trump, D. J. (2025, May 5). BILL ACKMAN ON HARVARD AND UNIVERSITY FUNDING,... [Social media post]. Truth Social. trump.fm. https://trump.fm/post/ts_114455776425590388
- MLA: Trump, Donald J. "BILL ACKMAN ON HARVARD AND UNIVERSITY FUNDING, THIS MORNING..." Truth Social, 5 May. 2025. trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/ts_114455776425590388. Accessed 9 Oct. 2026.
- Chicago: Donald J. Trump, "BILL ACKMAN ON HARVARD AND UNIVERSITY FUNDING, THIS MORNING...," Truth Social, May 5, 2025, archived at trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/ts_114455776425590388.

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