President Trump’s general distaste for the nation’s “elites,” a broad moniker that comfortably includes the professoriate, was more narrowly focused Thursday on a single piece of academic research that the president finds politically inconvenient. In two early morning tweets, Trump blasted the merits of a study from George Washington University that placed the death toll from Hurricane Maria near 3,000 — far more than the 64 deaths that the Puerto Rican government had originally acknowledged.