US President Donald Trump has threatened to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status and said the university should apologise, a day after it rejected what it called unlawful demands to overhaul academic programmes or lose federal grants, Reuters reports.

Trump said in a social media post on Tuesday he was mulling whether to seek to end Harvard’s tax-exempt status if it continued pushing what he called “political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”

He did not say how he would do this. Under the US tax code, most universities are exempt from federal income tax because they are deemed to be “operated exclusively” for public educational purposes.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Trump wanted to see Harvard apologise for what she called “anti-Semitism that took place on their college campus against Jewish American students”.

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