Trump Starts Talking About ‘Harlem’ When Stephen A. Smith Asks About ‘Harvard’: ‘I Got a Very High Black Vote’

President Donald Trump offered a puzzling response to a question about his attempt to bring Harvard University to heel on Wednesday night.

Trump has targeted several universities by alleging that the schools have allowed anti-Semitism to run rampant on campus. In one particularly embarrassing episode, lawyers for the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard demanding that the university accede to several demands. Lawyers for the school responded in a public letter, prompting outcry from a White House official, who said the administration’s letter was sent erroneously.

“It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” said May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist. “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”

Trump phoned into a NewsNation town hall hosted by Chris Cuomo, Bill O’Reilly, and Stephen A. Smith. At one point, Smith asked the president about Harvard.

“It’s interesting that you brought up Harvard because when people think about Harvard, where they’re basically talking about is that they’re asking what you say to those who view your actions as an attack on academic freedom rather than a defense of fairness,” Smith said. “What do you say to that?”

Here is the president’s response:

Well, I say this. We had riots in Harlem, in Harlem, and frankly, if you look at what’s gone on, and people from Harlem went up and they protested, Stephen. And they protested very strongly against Harvard. They happened to be on my side.

You know, I got a very high Black vote. You know that. Very, very high Black vote. It was a very great compliment. I did criminal justice reform. I did opportunity zones for one of the greatest economic deals ever for the Black and Hispanic community. I got tremendous– they agree with what I’m doing with respect to Harvard. Harvard gets four, five billion dollars a year from the United States government in the form of grants. And they have $53 billion, yet they do not treat the people right. They take the foreign students. Nobody knows where they come from, and they viciously hate our country.

And I’m saying, if we’re gonna give grant money, we want people in that school that love our country, not people that are gonna hate our country. They run a bad operation up there, and we have to get to the bottom of it.

On top of that, they said they want to teach their students remedial mathematics. That’s basic math. Two and two is four. And you say, “Well Harvard’s supposed to be so great. Why do people have to have remedial, that’s basic, very simple mathematics?”

So, we’re looking into Harvard. But we give them billions of dollars a year, and that may very well stop. And that’s up to the president. It’s up to our government. We don’t have to grant their money. We can grant that money to people that really need it and frankly, people you’d rather have me give the money to, Stephen.

Smith responded by pivoting to a question about federal funding of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Watch above via NewsNation.