The ‘conservative’ Harvard? TOM LEONARD reveals why the youngsters (and money) of the brand new Trump elite are going to a college recognized for booze, not books

Jeff Bezos once offered to send Donald Trump to the moon in one of his space rockets – one-way – but the formerly-warring pair were all smiles when they dined at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach last Wednesday.

And if the conversation ever lagged about the president-elect’s intentions towards Silicon Valley and whether Amazon’s planned $1 million donation to the Trump inaugural fund would make any difference to those plans, at least their dining partner – Bezos fiancée, Lauren Sánchez – could bring the chat on to more amicable ground. 

She could talk to Trump about how they have a common connection – the University of Miami – where her son, Evan, and his granddaughter, Kai – are both expected to go. Once unflatteringly dubbed ‘Suntan U’ and famous only for its core curriculum of relentless partying, UM is nowadays shrugging off its hedonistic reputation for a new one as the favored school of the Trump elite.

Granted, Barron Trump eventually enrolled at New York University but that was reportedly heavily at the instigation of his Manhattan-loving mother, Melania, while UM had been one of the other widely-mooted contenders.

But having a different Trump and the soon-to-be stepson of one of the world’s richest men (assuming the wedding plans go ahead) coming instead is certainly a victory for a school that for decades was seen as something of a joke academically. And which in 1929 – just four years after it was founded – was in such dire straits that its students had to go door to door in the local neighborhood of Coral Gables collecting funds to keep it open.

How different now. ‘I am beyond excited to announce my verbal commitment to the University of Miami. I would like to thank my mom, Vanessa, and my dad, Don, for always supporting me through my journey,’ gushed 17-year-old Kai Trump in August as she announced she would be playing golf at the university and studying business, beginning in 2026.

Kai, the daughter of Donald Trump Jr and ex-wife Vanessa, also thanked ‘my Grandpa for giving me access to great [golf] courses and tremendous support’.

Lauren Sanchez sounded equally ecstatic in celebrating the news that her son Evan, 18, will also be going to UM’s business school, in his case next year. ‘My heart is bursting,’ she said on Instagram, sharing a photo of Whitesell, the son she shares with ex-husband Patrick Whitesell, as a baby, wearing a tiny blazer. ‘Beyond proud of you. Love you.’

In some ways, the arrival of the Trumpworld elite’s children at the University of Miami is simply a predictable consequence of the arrival of their parents in the Sunshine State as they flee Democrat enclaves like California, Illinois and New York to the low tax, light business regulation regime that Governor Ron DeSantis has built in Florida.

Bezos – whose net worth has been put at more than $238 billion and who has homes all over the world – has invested heavily in Florida and appears to be putting down roots there. Since last year, he has bought three homes – for a total of $234 million – on Miami’s ‘billionaire bunker’ island, Indian Creek.

Footballer Tom Brady and another key Trump camp couple, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, are among the neighbors of an uber-exclusive island that has its own 13-strong police force for just 30 homes.

For Bezos, it was a huge transition from his old and relatively low-key life in Seattle with ex-wife MacKenzie Scott whom he divorced in 2019 and started a romance with neighbor Lauren Sanchez. The latter, who dined at Mar-a-Lago last week wearing a tiny black dress seems tailor-made for glitzy Miami. (Bezos, who actually partly grew up in Miami, said he’d moved because ‘I want to be close to my parents, and Lauren and I love Miami’ but naturally didn’t mention anything so gauche as tax breaks).

He also said he wanted to be close to his space travel project, Blue Origin, which is also heavily based in the state. Bezos and Musk have pumped billions of dollars over the years into Florida’s space coast around NASA’s Cape Canaveral.

The Trumps have been a fixture in Florida since Donald Sr bought Mar-a-Lago for a knockdown price of $7 million, turning it into a private club and resort as well as what he called his ‘winter White House’. Never more than now as he prepares for a second presidential term, has the stately mansion deserved its reputation as the Court of Donald as supporters and aspiring beneficiaries descend on the club for the chance to kiss the Trump ring.

But south Florida and UM are by no means merely a bastion of Trump supporters. The Miami Hurricane, the student newspaper surveyed its young voters after his election victory last month and found some jubilant and others horrified.

However, it’s also undeniable that the University of Miami, and especially the business school, has far stronger links with Trumpworld than most colleges – links that appear to be strengthening as conservative entrepreneurs and businessmen relocate to southern Florida.

Steven Witkoff, chairman of the University of Miami Business School Real Estate Advisory Board, is a longtime friend of Trump and a generous GOP donor.

He’s a longtime friend of Trump who the president-elect has tapped to be his Middle East envoy. It was Witkoff, a regular Trump golf partner, who was playing with Trump on his course in West Palm Beach in September when he faced a second assassination attempt, which was foiled by his Secret Service guards.

Billionaire hedge fund manager and top Republican donor Ken Griffin, who voted for Trump this year and proclaimed that ‘America is open for business again’ when he won, donated $50 million to the University of Miami, it was revealed in March. The university’s Transformational Cancer Research Building is being renamed as the Kenneth C. Griffin Cancer Research Building.

Along with other conservatives, Griffin – who moved his firm, Citadel, from Chicago to Miami in 2022 – has been a cheerleader for Miami’s economic potential, calling it ‘Wall Street South’.

Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, provides another link with Suntan U, having studied law there.

And Trump himself may even feel a connection to UM, even though his alma mater was the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In 2010, he wrote to its then president, Donna Shalala, suggesting its football team, the Hurricanes, hire a particular coach from Texas to lead its football program. (Trump wrote his missive on a copy of the Palm Beach Post’s sports section, next to a story announcing the current coach had been fired).

History doesn’t record what Shalala thought of his bizarre suggestion but given she was one of Bill Clinton’s key allies and had previously served as his Health and Human Services Secretary, it may have gone straight in the bin.

Meanwhile, UM – now ranked 63rd out of 436 US universities – has come a long way from its louche old days, even if insiders say there’s still some way to go before it entirely shrugs off its reputation as a place for rich northern brats (particularly from New York and New Jersey) who would much rather lounge in the Florida sunshine with a tequila sunrise than slave away over Plato and Aristotle in an Ivy League library.

Earlier this year, the college was ranked as the ninth most ‘photogenic’ campus in the country by Immerse Education, an academic tutoring company, based on the number of Instagram and TikTok posts associated with each school. It praised UM’s ‘palm tree-lined walkways and a serene central lake’.

To date, its most famous alumni – Dwayne Johnson, Sylvester Stallone, Ray Liotta and Enrique Iglesias – don’t exactly scream Nobel Prize winner. In fact, when Johnson – aka the Rock – recently sent UM students free samples of his skincare line, he added a little piece of advice that spoke volumes about its reputation: work hard, have fun but don’t get drunk on Thursday nights because there’s class on Friday.

A decade ago, the student newspaper republished a telling – and hilarious – article about UM from 1949. The piece, published in the Saturday Evening Post magazine, was headlined ‘Suntan U reputation casts long shadow’. It was illustrated with a picture of a student wearing only swimming trunks sprawled reading in the sun. ‘Scholar in the sun. Miami’s climate and extracurricular diversions make it hard to knuckle down and get good grades,’ said the caption.

By the 1960s, the university was trying to clamp down on the rowdier elements. When the Post returned to UM in 1961, it could report that ‘skylarkers don’t get away with what they used to. Last semester three fraternities were put on probation, a house mother was fired, and two fraternity officers were suspended – all for simply ‘having a few drinks’ (the brothers’ version) at weekend parties.’

But a decade later, when the Florida drinking age was still 18, the student campus bar – the Rathskeller, or Rat – would reportedly get through up to 60 kegs of beer in just two hours. That’s a lot of drinking.

In the meantime it seems UM has some way to go before Trumpworld money and offspring turns it into a conservative Harvard. Last semester, Alyse Lancaster, vice dean for academic affairs at UM’s School of Communication, started teaching a course called ‘Strategically Communicating through Music: The Mastermind of the Taylor Swift Brand.’

Swift’s most important ‘strategic communication’ of late was to vote Democrat.