{"id":21595,"date":"2025-05-08T15:12:05","date_gmt":"2025-05-08T19:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=21595"},"modified":"2025-05-08T15:28:47","modified_gmt":"2025-05-08T19:28:47","slug":"will-trump-follow-nixons-irs-road-to-ruin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/08\/will-trump-follow-nixons-irs-road-to-ruin\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Trump Follow Nixon\u2019s IRS Road to Ruin?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

Will Trump Follow Nixon\u2019s IRS Road to Ruin?<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard, May 8, 2025\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On Friday morning, President Trump proclaimed<\/a> on his Truth Social: \u201cWe are going to be taking away Harvard\u2019s Tax Exempt Status. It\u2019s what they deserve!\u201d Trump is being hailed as a hero for demanding that the IRS bring Harvard University to its knees.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201cthe hallmark of authoritarian nations,\u201d House Majority Leader Eric Cantor declared<\/a> in 2014.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s triumphal tax code decree was a follow-up to an April 15 message he posted on Truth Social: \u201cPerhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired\/supporting \u2018Sickness?\u2019 Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!\u201d<\/p>\n

And who has unlimited prerogative to define the \u201cPUBLIC INTEREST\u201d? Donald Trump, of course!<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Treasury Department formally requested last month that the IRS revoke Harvard University\u2019s tax exempt status. Trump ally Newt Gingrich predicts<\/a> that the Trump administration is \u201cgoing to go after a whole bunch\u201d of universities\u2019 tax-exempt status.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time that Trump sought to financially torpedo American colleges he disapproved. In July 2020, Trump tweeted<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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\u2026 and\/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Trump\u2019s approved education program doesn\u2019t include standard rules on capitalization. Also, what in hell is an \u201cAct Against Public Policy\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019Keeffe argued here on April 23, there are good reasons<\/a> to end all federal subsidies to universities and colleges.<\/p>\n

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.<\/strong> According to the New York Times<\/em>, \u201cEven an attempt at changing Harvard\u2019s tax status would signify a drastic breach in the independence of the I.R.S. and its historical insulation from political pressure.\u201d\u00a0But the official storyline overlooks more than a half century of sporadic IRS vendettas against non-profits.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cBy 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 \u2018dissidents.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Richard Nixon\u2014who became president in 1969\u2014never let perfidious precedents gather any dust. His administration speedily created a Special Services Staff to mastermind what a memo called \u201call IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical, and similar type organizations.\u201d 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\u2019s enemies list to, as White House counsel John Dean said, \u201cuse the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.\u201d The University of North Carolina non-profit tax status was one of the targets on the IRS list.<\/p>\n

Congress responded to Nixon\u2019s 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 \u201cCommunication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce\u201d that attacked conservative magazines, think tanks, and other entities and individuals who had criticized President Clinton. More than 20 conservative organizations\u2014including the Heritage Foundation and the American Spectator<\/em> magazine\u2014and almost a dozen individual high-profile Clinton accusers, such as Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, were audited.<\/p>\n

During the Obama years, IRS officials blocked almost 300 conservative organizations from getting tax-exempt status, targeting groups with names such as \u201cTea Party\u201d and those that \u201cadvocated education about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.\u201d Conservative non-profits were also hit by far more audits.\u00a0In 2016, a federal appeals court ruled the IRS had committed \u201cunconstitutional acts against\u201d right-wing nonprofits.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s command for the IRS to target Harvard violates a law<\/a> prohibiting the IRS from targeting nonprofits \u201cfor regulatory scrutiny based on their ideological beliefs.\u201d 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<\/a> declared in 1970, the Pentagon Papers provided thousands of pages documenting \u201ctwenty 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.\u201d Harvard has sent far more warmongers, torture-apologists, and authoritarian zealots to Washington since the end of the Vietnam War.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But the Trump administration\u2019s demands to Harvard could set precedents for obliterating academic freedom far and wide<\/strong>. The Trump administration wants to ban Harvard from enrolling any foreign students who Trump appointees label \u201chostile to the American values<\/a>.\u201d If Biden was still in power and inflicted a twisted version of that standard on young Americans\u2014anyone who had attended a (privately-funded) Mises Institute program or seminar\u2014might 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 \u201cideological capture.\u201d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps Trump presumes he has nothing to fear thanks to a Supreme Court ruling last summer that expanded presidential immuni<\/strong>ty. 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.\u00a0In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee articles of impeachment charged Nixon with endeavoring \u201cto 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.\u201d Nixon\u2019s IRS machinations\u2014along with that Watergate scandal and a bevy of other crimes and outrages\u2014helped sway many people to view him as a scoundrel. Nixon resigned rather than face a Senate trial which he was sure to lose.<\/p>\n

\u201cHarvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and \u2018birdbrains\u2019\u2026 teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds,\u201d Trump raged<\/a> on Truth Social.<\/p>\n

Contrary to Trump\u2019s assumptions, \u201cwoke\u201d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will Trump Follow Nixon\u2019s IRS Road to Ruin? by James Bovard, May 8, 2025 On Friday morning, President Trump proclaimed on his Truth Social: \u201cWe are going to be taking away Harvard\u2019s Tax Exempt Status. It\u2019s what they deserve!\u201d Trump is being hailed as a hero for demanding that the IRS bring Harvard University to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4561,4562,51,367,1157,4239,1492,49,4560,488,245,38,2900,4559,24,4557,4558,708,288,4343],"class_list":["post-21595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academic-freedom","tag-birdbrains","tag-clinton","tag-daniel-ellsberg","tag-foundation-for-economic-education","tag-harvard","tag-immunity","tag-irs","tag-john-birch-society","tag-john-f-kennedy","tag-nixon","tag-obama","tag-paula-jones","tag-spelling","tag-supreme-court","tag-tax-exempt","tag-tax-exemption","tag-trump","tag-vietnam-war","tag-woke"],"yoast_head":"\nWill Trump Follow Nixon\u2019s IRS Road to Ruin? - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Trump announced he will cancel Harvard's tax exemption. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21597,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21595\/revisions\/21597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}