Keep the grades a secret
Leading up to the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump directed his personal attorney at the time to threaten legal action against the colleges and high school he attended if they publicly released his grades or standardized test scores, the attorney, Michael Cohen, told Congress on Wednesday.
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“When I say conman, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores,” he said.
Somehow I always kind of suspected the “brilliant” part was shaky.
In support of his testimony, Cohen provided a May 2015 letter he penned to the president of Fordham University, the New York school Trump attended for two years in the 1960s before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.
The letter warns that media outlets had requested Trump’s records but were denied by his legal team. Cohen reminded the school that Trump’s student records were protected by federal law, and he threatened to hold the school liable “to the fullest extent of the law” if the university released them.
Cohen emphasized that violating Trump’s confidentiality could result in “both criminal and civil liability and damages including, among other things, substantial fines, penalties and even the potential loss of government aid and other funding. This criminality will lead to jail time.”
The laws are real and Trump’s grades have never been released.
Now, this is Trump. If his grades were impressive, they’d be out there. What are we to conclude? That he’s every bit as thick as he appears to be, which is thick as two short planks.
Cohen said in his testimony that “the irony wasn’t lost on me” that Trump in 2011 criticized President Barack Obama for not releasing his records. He attached to his testimony an Associated Press story that quotes Trump as saying, “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”
Whatever the wizardry was, it didn’t get Trump into Columbia and Harvard.
Somehow I suspect Obama was not a bad student. Just Trump’s racist assumptions again.
One would think that ‘If I could do this badly in school and still work my way up to be president of the United States, think what you can achieve’ would reflect on him so much better than ‘don’t you fucking dare release my embarrasing grades or it’s lawsuits and prison for you’.
Only Trump and his massive ego could fuck up such a gilt-edged opportunity to sound like he genuinely achieved something against all the odds (well, some kids and all of his dumb-assed base would swallow it) because he cannot admit to ever being anything but the best at everything.
Even Dubya was clever enough to be openly self-effacing about his academic shortcomings because he knew it played well with like-minded schoolroom slackers. Trump isn’t even as smart as the (now second) dumbest man to attain the big chair.
Journalists have, as you might expect, contacted people from his classes who say he didn’t seem very bright and was always talking in class, but never saying anything relevant or substantial.
They (or the journalists) could be lying but that sounds exactly right to me.