Donald Trump often brags the smartest, it turns out normal
Donald Trump, the 45th US President, has long been known as a narcissist and megalomaniac. He often brags about his achievements, including his academic grades at school.
Trump is a high school alumnus of the New York Military Academy, then continued his studies at Fordham University before finally moving to major in business at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The Wharton campus has spawned many moncer businessmen, such as Warren Buffett, Walter Annenberg, Aditya Mittal, and Elon Musk. In 2017, Forbes ranked Wharton's Masters of Business Administration program as the best business school in the United States.
That is what seems to make Trump puffed up and has the courage to talk about his academic achievements.
Since before becoming President, until now, Trump has often prided himself on being a smart and accomplished student. From April 2011 to January 2018, ABC News recorded six times Trump declared himself a smart person.
And in typical Trump fashion, he shows off while trying to demean others. In April 2011, Trump said that Barack Obama was a bad student despite being accepted into two Ivy League campuses. Trump then asked Obama to show a transcript of his college academic grades.
"I heard he was a student whose academic grades were bad, terrible," Trump told the Associated Press (AP). "Now, I'm trying to find out how a bad student like that got into Columbia and Harvard."
This excess self-confidence makes it seem like Trump is denying the role of others in the government. In the Morning Joe program that aired on NBC in March 2016, Trump was asked about whom he would consult on foreign issues when he became president. Trump lightly replied that he was relying on himself.
"I will talk to myself, because I have a very good brain." Although he also mentioned that he would talk to many other people, he still joked that "my main consultant is myself, and I know I have a good instinct for this."
In December 2016, after Trump was declared victorious in the US presidential election beating Hillary Clinton, he called himself smart because he didn't need a daily director for the elected president. "I'm smart. I don't have to be told the same thing or the same words every day."
And self-legitimation for that self-intelligence is also used by Trump to attack his political opponents. The most recent is when Trump defended himself from the book Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018) which was considered cornering him. The book casts doubt on Trump's ability to become President, and says even presidential advisers have questioned his ability as president.
Trump is furious and describes the book as fiction and the author as a con artist. In January 2018, Trump tweeted, "In my entire life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and intelligence."
During the press conference session, journalists asked about the meaning of the tweet. Instead of explaining, Trump is again showing off his academic acumen and achievements.
"I went to the best campus, I was a very good student, graduated and made billions of dollars, became one of the top businessmen, had a career in the television industry."
Never Proven
Trump may keep bragging about calling himself smart and smart, but the truth is: it's far from being a fire.
Marc Fisher, a senior journalist for The Washington Post in the lengthy report "'Grab that Record': How Trump's High School Transcript was Hidden" published on Tuesday 5 March 2019, describes how Trump and the people behind him tried to hide the school's academic transcripts middle to college the President.
Ironically, this has been done since Trump ran as a presidential candidate in the 2011 US presidential election and when he ridiculed Obama's academic achievements and challenged him to show academic worth.
According to one school superintendent, Jeffrey Coverdale, the pressure came from a group of wealthy Trump friends. They asked the school to hide Trump's academic transcripts. The order was then passed on to the then head of the New York Military Academy school, Evan Jones.
This oddity began to catch on in January 2016 when Trump rejected The Washington Post's request to review his academic records at the New York Military Academy. "I won't let you see the transcript," Trump said. "You're going to make up a bad story."
Although Jones and Coverdale admitted to being pressured to hide their academic transcripts in 2011, both of them still refuse to open them to the media until now. Until the day before The Washington Post's report was released, the White House did not budge when asked for a response to the findings of the incident.
The admission of the former New York Military Academy officials seemed to complement the confession of Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal lawyer. In late February, Cohen testified before the US Congressional Oversight and Reform Committee that he was instructed by Trump to write to the New York Military Academy, Fordham University campus and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
The letter contained threats that the two higher education institutions would not release Trump's academic transcripts to anyone. The threat of criminal penalties, fines and termination of government assistance is ready to await if the two campuses violate them. Cohen adopted the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act which prohibited the release of educational records to third parties.
"I am talking about a man who claims to be brilliant but directs me to threaten his middle school, college and College Board to never release his (Trump) academic grades," Cohen said while testifying on the Committee, as reported by The New York Times.
And attacks on Trump's "academic intelligence" have also come from colleagues at his alma mater. In 2017, The Daily Pennsylvania looked at student data from Wharton Pennsylvania campus graduates through their newspaper archive which once contained a list of the top 56 graduates. However, Donald Trump's name was not listed there.
"I recognize nearly every name on the list," Stephen Foxman, a 1968 Wharton graduate, told The Daily Pennsylvania, "and Trump is not one of them."
Another archive that lists the names of outstanding 1968 students in many categories also does not reveal the name Donald Trump. None.
"If he does well, his name will come up," said Foxman.
In other words, Trump is just a student with mediocre academic performance. And now, the President must start to stop claiming his academic achievements.
