One Democratic senator, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, implied that the president may be freezing funds to Harvard because of a personal quest for revenge, writing
on X and
Threads above an
Esquire story about Harvard's feud with Trump: "Can't help but wonder how many Trumps got rejected by Harvard."
However, there is no evidence that these universities rejected Barron Trump, a
New York University student.
As first
reported by USAToday, the first lady's office categorically denied that Barron Trump even applied to Harvard.
"Barron did not apply to Harvard, and any assertion that he, or that anyone on his behalf, applied is completely false," said Nick Clemens, spokesperson for the Office of the First Lady, in an email to Snopes. (USAToday reported receiving the same statement.)
Clemens did not respond to repeated inquiries as to whether the first lady's son was rejected from Columbia or Stanford. Nor did those universities immediately return requests to confirm or debunk that they rejected admission to the 19-year-old; this story will be updated if they respond.
Google searches for "
Barron Trump Harvard rejection," "
Barron Trump Stanford rejection" and "
Barron Trump Columbia rejection" returned no results showing evidence that these universities rejected him as of this writing. Similarly, Google searches for "
Barron Trump applied to Harvard," "
Barron Trump applied to Columbia" and "
Barron Trump applied to Stanford" returned no relevant results as of this writing.
A
search of the president's Truth Social posts also found no mention of "Barron" in conjunction with
any university; searches for "
Harvard," "
Columbia" and "
Stanford" also found no posts which mentioned Barron Trump or any of the Trump children as of this writing.
Barron Trump broke from his family's tradition when he decided to attend NYU; in the past, the president's children have gone to either the
University of
Pennsylvania or
Georgetown University, or
both.
www.snopes.com
