Tribe: Trump Worse Than King Henry VIII, He’s Trying to Bypass Rule of Law

Harvard Law professor emeritus Laurence Tribe said Thursday on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” that President Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University make him worse than 16th-century English monarch King Henry VIII.

Tribe said, “This is an attack not just on Harvard, but as Kristi Noem, the Secretary of the Homeland Security Department, said, this is a warning shot to all universities in America. The warning shot is that this president thinks he has the power to change the curriculum, change the approach, change everything about the way education proceeds in this country. Harvard is the one he’s picking on now, and he’s throwing everything he can at Harvard, not just the sudden withdrawal of the right to enroll foreign students who make an enormous contribution to Harvard and to the world, but also trying to strip Harvard of its tax exemptions and tax benefits and cutting off all the grants.”

He added, “The point about that is he’s doing it to Harvard by name, and after Harvard, it’ll be somebody else by name. Not since King Henry VIII has government, either England or in the United States, asserted the power of a politician or a political branch to simply decide whom to punish. That’s called a bill of attainder. It went all the way back to Edward II, and not even King George III exercised this kind of power. He had to get parliament to go along. This guy thinks he is not just a king, but a king with powers beyond the imaginations of the modern kings of the last few centuries in England. The bill of attainder is just shorthand for the attempt by either Congress or the president, or both of them acting together to bypass due process, trial by jury, every process for deciding whether the institution or individual who is being singled out for punishment deserves it, has actually done anything wrong.”

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