It started with an enigmatic text.

You wrote that you couldn’t figure why Trump’s crusade against the Ivy League is starting to look so slapdash. If you really want to know, meet me tonight at the Watergate parking garage, fifth floor, southwest stairwell. 11:00 sharp.

How could I resist? I arrived at 10:55. A few minutes later, a short figure in a trench coat slid around the corner. “Rick?” he asked.

“Yep, it’s me,” I said. “But who are you?”

“Call me Deep Ivy,” he said after a pause and a long pull from his Marlboro. “I read where you were wondering why the administration’s higher ed push looks to be jumping the rails.”

“I can’t figure it out,” I said. “They were racking up wins. And now all these missteps. It looks like universities might even be gaining public support. Trump must be furious.”

“That’s where you’ve got it all wrong. The president’s delighted. He’s throwing this one on purpose.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked.

“The president craves attention. He covets praise. I mean, have you seen his cabinet meetings? He needs flattery. And Ivy League professors write the history books. The president knows his legacy is in their hands. Look, it’s all here.” He tossed me a manila folder, crammed with documents, labeled “The Crimson Dossier.”

“Hold up,” I said. “If Trump is in cahoots with the Ivy League, why’d he go after them?”

“Ah, that’s the brilliance of it,” he murmured, looking up and down the stairwell. “Last June, the Ivy League presidents gathered in Davos to assess the carnage of 2023-24. They’d seen fellow presidents resign, they’d been humiliated and ignored by pro-Hamas punks, and they realized that their humanities and social science departments really had been overrun by wild-eyed ideologues.”

“Okay,” I said.

“They saw a solution. It was straight out of pro wrestling. They’d convince Trump to play the scary, orange Big Bad. They wanted him to denounce colleges on Truth Social as dens of Marxists and the incubators of anti-American iniquity.”

“But how would that help colleges?”

“Two ways,” he said. “It drew attention away from more damning criticisms of bloat, scholarly lassitude, and low expectations. And it gave them an excuse to pursue overdue course-corrections they’d been wanting to make.”

“But the problems have been there for years,” I said. “What makes you think they really wanted reform?”

“College presidents approach reform the way you or I approach losing thirty pounds. They want to, but only so much. It’s hard. They lack willpower. Trump would be their Ozempic.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“It worked like a charm. The president’s threats gave Ivy leadership cover to rein in the nuts, discipline the cosplay terrorists, and sound statesmanlike. You might’ve noticed that the White House wasn’t so over-the-top at first. It hit Columbia with a pretty reasonable list of demands. It made a sensible if controversial move to reduce NIH overhead rates. The Department of Education launched a bunch of richly deserved Title VI investigations. This meant the Ivy presidents could call the cops, confront antisemitism, and talk about intellectual heterodoxy without worrying about being deposed by the campus left.”

“Seems like a win-win,” I said. “So why didn’t Trump’s team pocket the wins and build from there? Seems like they could’ve run the Biden-Obama playbook: use those concessions and the investigations to issue guidance that would’ve driven system-wide change. They had colleges on the run. None of them were willing to stand up for one another.”

“Indeed,” he said.

“Then nothing makes sense,” I sputtered. My head was spinning. “Why would the administration drop that late-night list of astonishing if amorphous demands on Harvard? Why’d they issue that wild and semi-incoherent McMahon letter? Why’d they have Trump personally threaten Harvard’s tax-exempt status on Truth Social? It seems they’re turning a winning hand into a losing one. They’re now on shaky legal footing and risk making the colleges look like the good guys.”

“Ask yourself, ‘Who benefits?’” he said, furtively peering around. “The Ivies’ collusion with the president worked too well. Their institutions’ conduct had been so indefensible and campus culture was so off the rails that they realized they’d unleashed Frankenstein’s monster. They hadn’t anticipated how bad it would be. They found themselves hemorrhaging donors and public support.”

“So, what happened?” I asked

“Check the dossier,” he said. “You’ll notice the Harvard letter that blew things up was dated April 11. The Ivy presidents just happened to gather for a hush-hush conclave on April 9 at, yep, Mar-a-Lago. But they used assumed names, and since nobody knows what these guys look like, the meeting flew under the radar.”

“Wow!” I said.

“They needed the president to go full King Kong,” he continued, “and for the administration to step on every rake in sight. That would allow the Ivies to pivot and play what the WWE would call the ‘babyfaces’—the good guys.”

“But how’d they get Trump to go along?” I asked. “You mentioned the pull of history. I could see that being enough for phase one, but not really for phase two.”

“Follow the money,” he said. “What have colleges quietly been hoovering up over the past decade? Foreign money. They’ve gotten very adept at working off the grid with sovereign wealth funds and hostile actors. And have you noted any odd-looking foreign payoffs to the president in recent weeks?”

“So many!” I replied. “The crypto cash. And the $400 million Qatari plane! Are you telling me the ‘flying palace’ jumbo jet, with its nine bathrooms and five galleys and art-deco interiors, is a backdoor payoff from the colleges for playing ball?!”

“Judge for yourself,” he said. “But a half-billion-dollar plane is small beans when you’re sitting on a $50 billion endowment.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “I can’t believe those Ivy Leaguers could be that nefarious.”

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” he said. And in a puff of cigarette smoke, Deep Ivy was gone.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”