Will Trump Follow Nixon’s IRS Road to Ruin?

by James Bovard, May 8, 2025

On Friday morning, President Trump proclaimed on his Truth Social: “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” Trump is being hailed as a hero for demanding that the IRS bring Harvard University to its knees.

But Trump is following in the footsteps of President Richard Nixon, whose racketeering with the IRS helped pave the way to the collapse of his presidency. Trump is also forgetting the rallying cry of Republican opposition to the Obama regime. Political targeting of nonprofit entities is “the hallmark of authoritarian nations,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor declared in 2014.

Trump’s triumphal tax code decree was a follow-up to an April 15 message he posted on Truth Social: “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”

And who has unlimited prerogative to define the “PUBLIC INTEREST”? Donald Trump, of course!

Trump’s Treasury Department formally requested last month that the IRS revoke Harvard University’s tax exempt status. Trump ally Newt Gingrich predicts that the Trump administration is “going to go after a whole bunch” of universities’ tax-exempt status.

This is not the first time that Trump sought to financially torpedo American colleges he disapproved. In July 2020, Trump tweeted:

Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status… and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!

Trump’s approved education program doesn’t include standard rules on capitalization. Also, what in hell is an “Act Against Public Policy”?

To understand this controversy, it is important to distinguish between direct government aid and federal tax laws that enable deductions. If the Trump administration seeks to curtail federal funding of colleges across-the-board, that is not a violation of the rights of any specific college. As Connor O’Keeffe argued here on April 23, there are good reasons to end all federal subsidies to universities and colleges.

But permitting a president to seize veto power over the tax status of any individual or organization in the land is a recipe for tyranny. According to the New York Times, “Even an attempt at changing Harvard’s tax status would signify a drastic breach in the independence of the I.R.S. and its historical insulation from political pressure.” But the official storyline overlooks more than a half century of sporadic IRS vendettas against non-profits.

President John F. Kennedy used the IRS to attack the tax-exempt status of conservative organizations. The Ideological Organizations Audit Project targeted the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, and many other organizations. A 1976 Senate committee report noted, “By directing tax audits at individuals and groups solely because of their political beliefs, the Ideological Organizations Audit Project established a precedent for a far more elaborate program of targeting ‘dissidents.’”

Richard Nixon—who became president in 1969—never let perfidious precedents gather any dust. His administration speedily created a Special Services Staff to mastermind what a memo called “all IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical, and similar type organizations.” More than 10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism or slant between 1969 and 1973, including Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling (a left-wing critic of the Vietnam War) and the far-right John Birch Society. The IRS was also given Nixon’s enemies list to, as White House counsel John Dean said, “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The University of North Carolina non-profit tax status was one of the targets on the IRS list.

Congress responded to Nixon’s abuses by enacting legislation to severely restrict political contacts between the White House and the IRS. That legislation tacitly conceded that the 1952 legislation enacted to prevent the same problem had utterly failed. But the post-Watergate IRS reform did not impede President Bill Clinton. In 1995, the Clinton White House and the Democratic National Committee produced a 331-page report entitled “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce” that attacked conservative magazines, think tanks, and other entities and individuals who had criticized President Clinton. More than 20 conservative organizations—including the Heritage Foundation and the American Spectator magazine—and almost a dozen individual high-profile Clinton accusers, such as Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, were audited.

During the Obama years, IRS officials blocked almost 300 conservative organizations from getting tax-exempt status, targeting groups with names such as “Tea Party” and those that “advocated education about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” Conservative non-profits were also hit by far more audits. In 2016, a federal appeals court ruled the IRS had committed “unconstitutional acts against” right-wing nonprofits.

Trump’s command for the IRS to target Harvard violates a law prohibiting the IRS from targeting nonprofits “for regulatory scrutiny based on their ideological beliefs.” Many Americans understandably despise a pompous institution whose graduates and professors perennially pay far more homage to Leviathan than to the Constitution. As heroic whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg declared in 1970, the Pentagon Papers provided thousands of pages documenting “twenty years of crime under four presidents. And every one of those presidents had a Harvard professor at his side, telling him how to do it and how to get away with it.” Harvard has sent far more warmongers, torture-apologists, and authoritarian zealots to Washington since the end of the Vietnam War.

But the Trump administration’s demands to Harvard could set precedents for obliterating academic freedom far and wide. The Trump administration wants to ban Harvard from enrolling any foreign students who Trump appointees label “hostile to the American values.” If Biden was still in power and inflicted a twisted version of that standard on young Americans—anyone who had attended a (privately-funded) Mises Institute program or seminar—might be banned from colleges that received any federal funds or a tax exemption. The administration is also demanding that Harvard appoint a Trump-approved auditor to assess whether its programs and departments suffer from “ideological capture.” Trusting a Trump appointee to be a fair judge of Harvard’s ideology is like appointing Bill Clinton to be chaperone of a girls basketball team.

Perhaps Trump presumes he has nothing to fear thanks to a Supreme Court ruling last summer that expanded presidential immunity. But Trump and his lawyers would do well to study how waves of scandals destroyed President Nixon despite his far more triumphant re-election than Trump enjoyed. In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee articles of impeachment charged Nixon with endeavoring “to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.” Nixon’s IRS machinations—along with that Watergate scandal and a bevy of other crimes and outrages—helped sway many people to view him as a scoundrel. Nixon resigned rather than face a Senate trial which he was sure to lose.

“Harvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’… teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds,” Trump raged on Truth Social.

Contrary to Trump’s assumptions, “woke” is not such a grave and imminent peril as to nullify all limits on presidential power. Americans can enjoy scoffing at the Ivy League without cheering a politician seeking to financially raze any institution that fails to curtsy to him.