Trump Is Out for Revenge

President Trump’s threat to Harvard University’s tax-exempt status was brazen, even by the standards of this law-breaking administration. It also seems simply bizarre. Why would a president — even this president — go to such lengths to attack America’s leading research universities? And why use the Internal Revenue Service as a weapon?

Among Trump’s most passionate supporters, however, the move makes perfect sense. For decades, Christian nationalists have seethed about a case from the 1980s that many other Americans have forgotten.

To understand Trump’s no-holds-barred animus toward Harvard, we need to step back to a very different chapter in the history of American higher education. Bob Jones University was founded in the 1920s in the wake of the Scopes Trial. The founder, Bob Jones Sr., was one of America’s leading conservative preachers. As he recalled, he opened his own university because he no longer trusted mainstream colleges like Harvard. “Fathers and mothers,” Jones promised, “who place their sons and daughters in our institution can go to sleep at night with no haunting fear that some skeptical teachers will steal the faith of their precious children.”

Bob Jones University touted itself as the “world’s most unusual university” and prided itself on breaking the norms of mainstream higher education. While other conservative Christian colleges pursued accreditation, Bob Jones refused. The issue almost shut the school down in the 1950s, with administrators leading a failed revolt against the institution’s stubborn — and enrollment-killing — unwillingness to join the world of modern higher education.

The most trenchant issue was race. In a radio address in 1960, Jones infamously asked, “Is Segregation Scriptural?” His answer was a fervent yes. For decades, Bob Jones University clung to its harsh racial segregation, even as other conservative colleges abandoned it. Eventually, the hard line the Bob Jones campus drew had other conservative evangelicals calling the situation “Bob Jones versus everybody.” (Bob Jones Sr. was followed as president of the institution by his son, Bob Jones Jr., and then his grandson, Bob Jones III.)

As in all things, Bob Jones University clung to its policies even when they threatened to destroy the university itself. By the 1970s, other universities had abandoned racial segregation, pushed in part by the need to maintain their accreditation. At Bob Jones, a ferocious anti-accreditation policy allowed the university to hold out.

Finally, the Carter administration moved more aggressively. Under Jerome Kurtz, a former commissioner of the IRS, the administration threatened to remove the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other racially segregated schools. Among conservatives at the time, the response was explosive. In 1980, the Republican Party platform promised to “halt the unconstitutional regulatory vendetta launched by Mr. Carter’s IRS Commissioner against independent schools.” As a candidate, Ronald Reagan’s campaign pamphlets promised that he “opposes the IRS’s attempt to remove the tax-exempt status of private schools by administrative fiat.”

Reagan did not defend racial segregation itself. Rather, he framed the issue as one of religious freedom. In one nationally syndicated radio address, Reagan blasted the aggression of Commissioner Kurtz, warning that Kurtz wanted “the destruction of religious freedom.” The issue could not possibly be racial segregation, Reagan insisted, because schools such as Bob Jones “are presently desegregated.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie, but it was far from the truth. In 1971, Bob Jones University had encouraged a Black employee to register for a class, though the man soon dropped it. In 1975, the school allowed a handful Black men to enroll, stipulating that they must be married to avoid any chance of interracial dating.

It was, at best, an intentionally deceptive fig leaf. Yet among white conservative Christians, it was enough. Instead of an embarrassing holdout of segregation, the Bob Jones case became a rallying cry for religious freedom. The university represented, in the eyes of conservatives, a stalwart Christian institution standing up for its beliefs in spite of heavy-handed government oppression. As the conservative activist Paul Weyrich later claimed, the issues of religious freedom and tax exemption mobilized more Christians than either abortion or school prayer. As another conservative put it, “Jerome Kurtz has done more to bring Christians together than any man since the Apostle Paul.”

In spite of such broad conservative support, the case did not end well for Bob Jones University. As president, Reagan failed to fulfill his promise to stop the IRS, and the case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled 8-1 against the college in 1983.

The president at the time, Bob Jones III, refused to acknowledge his loss. Instead of accepting the need to integrate, Jones lashed out at Reagan, calling him a “traitor to God’s people.” The university gave up its tax-exempt status, subjecting itself to overwhelming financial losses, rather than submit to federal power.

Those who are shocked and surprised by today’s attacks on Harvard’s tax-exempt status may have forgotten the episode, but conservative Christians and intellectuals never did. They have been driven for decades by the idea that conservative religious universities are under attack — specifically, under an unfair, unreasonable attack on their tax-exempt status by the IRS, an attack that used fake claims of racial discrimination to punish Christian enemies of the liberal regime.

The lingering bitterness looms large across conservative platforms. Project 2025, for instance, warns of the overweening power of the “accreditation cartel.” Too often, according to Project 2025, accreditors have forced religious colleges to enforce “standards and criteria” that undermine their religious freedom. Accreditors, according to Project 2025, have insisted on inclusive policies, even when those policies go against “the institutional mission and culture of the schools.” Moreover, the federal government has threatened the “religious exemptions” of conservative colleges, forcing them to accept civil-rights norms.

Nor have conservative preachers forgotten. Trump recently met with some, including Robert Jeffress, a Dallas megachurch pastor, in the Oval Office, where the conversation reportedly detailed years of IRS harassment. Hearing that the IRS had put churches “through Hell for years” was likely all Trump needed to weaponize the IRS for himself. It is more than a stretch to compare Bob Jones University’s stark and explicit segregationism to alleged “civil-rights violations” at Harvard. But it fits perfectly with the norms of this administration, which has been driven by the politics of resentment and retribution. To Trump, law and civil norm have always taken a backseat to the politics of payback.

In this case, the incomprehensible attacks on Harvard become comprehensible when seen for what they are: a ham-handed effort to exact long-delayed vengeance for the perceived slights and injuries of the Bob Jones case.