What did Donald Trump do today?

He took $175 million in research funds from a university for nonexistent violations of a policy he just made up.

In the 2021-2022 college swimming season, Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, joined the University of Pennsylvania team. A strong but not dominant swimmer by women's college standards, Thomas  had medically transitioned via hormone therapy when she joined the women's team, a process which caused her to lose muscle mass and added fifteen seconds to her 500m freestyle time. Her participation followed NCAA rules in place at the time.

Today, in 2025, Trump froze $175 million in federal research funds to Penn, most of which would likely have gone to medical research in the university's hospital system. A spokesperson confirmed that the abrupt cuts were due to Penn having "infamously permitted a male [sic] to compete on its women’s swimming team.”

There are currently no transgender athletes at Penn, and virtually none nationwide. Trump has issued an executive order attempting to force universities to adopt policies that would bar those ten or so athletes. That order is currently being challenged in court.

In other words, Trump—who shows little discomfort with gender fluidity in his personal life, but who has adopted transphobia as a culture war issue—is punishing Penn's hospital system because in 2022 its athletic department followed a different policy than the one he wants them to now.

Trump is a graduate of Penn's Wharton School, although he doesn't mention it as much as he used to. Trump has zealously policed the privacy of his student record from Penn—the last of several schools his family influence got him into—most likely because it would show up his claims to have graduated at the top of his Wharton class. In reality, he appears nowhere on any of the published honors lists from the years he attended.

In other sports news, Trump had a web pages celebrating baseball legend and WWII veteran Jackie Robinson taken off of the Department of Defense site, apparently because acknowledging that the man who broke the segregation barrier for major league baseball had also served honorably in the military was "DEI."

Why does this matter?

• It was not illegal to do things in 2022 that Donald Trump would decide in 2025 you shouldn't have.

• Punishing unrelated medical researchers for a sports issue is stupid and cruel.

• Governing erratically and punitively so that people are frightened into compliance is what dictators do.