President Donald Trump has been going around the White House making off-color remarks about Asians on college campuses, author Michael Wolff said during an appearance on The Daily Beast podcast.
The State Department announced last week the U.S. would begin to “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students who either had ties to the Communist Party or were studying in “critical fields,” though it didn’t say what those fields were.
U.S. embassies and consulates have also been ordered to stop scheduling student visa appointments “until further guidance is issued” on social media screening for applicants.
“Since he issued this announcement trying to ban Chinese students from American universities, he’s gone around saying, ‘I remember a time, don’t you remember a time when you can go to an American college and not see any Asians?’” Wolff told host Joanna Coles during Wednesday’s episode of The Daily Beast Podcast. “‘When I went to Wharton, there were no Asians. Where do they all come from?’”
He said it wasn’t clear if the comment was intended or interpreted as a joke.
The president attended Fordham University for two years before transferring to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and graduating in 1968 with a Bachelor’s degree in economics.
Trump’s statement is about more than simple racism, though, Wolff added. It’s harking back to a time before the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which is how Trump wants the world to look again.
“A lot of Americans live in that world,” said Wolff, who most recently penned All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America about the 2024 election. “I think it strikes him as a very profound point. ‘Hey, what happened? Something happened here. What is all this change about? Asians, where did they come from?’”
In a statement to the Daily Beast, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung responded to Wolff’s claim by calling the author a “lying sack of s--t” who “has been proven to be a fraud.”
“He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain,” Cheung added.
Trump himself has previously blasted Wolff’s statements as the work of a “Third Rate Reporter, who is laughed at even by the scoundrels of the Fake News.”
During Wednesday’s podcast episode, Coles said it was noteworthy the way Trump says, “‘Something happened. What happened?’ i.e. America somehow got screwed in this process.”
Wolff said pundits have interpreted the move to keep Chinese students out of American universities as a geopolitical strategy, when in fact it wasn’t really about preventing them from accessing American intellectual goods.
“It’s just about the look. You know, Trump, it’s all in the look,” he said.
“He wants American campuses to look like they did in Love Story, where people carried books in a leather strap and everybody looked like Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal,” Coles said, referencing the classic 1970 film in which O’Neal’s old-money character falls in love with the working-class MacGraw.
“Yeah, he wants them to look like he looks. What was the world like when he went to Wharton,” Wolff said.
