Trump Doesn’t Want You to Know Where He Went to College
On This Day In 2019
The Wharton School is, in Trump’s words, “the hardest school to get into, the best school in the world” and “super genius stuff.” So, he proudly boasts about having attended that institution. It’s even in the third sentence of his official White House Bio: “Donald John Trump was born in Queens, New York, on June 14, 1946. His father, Fred Trump was a successful real estate developer. Trump was educated at the New York Military Academy and the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania.”
What Trump doesn’t want to tell you is that he wasn’t admitted to Wharton as a high-schooler. So he attended Fordham, in the Bronx. Despite omitting it from his bio.
But, he decided after two years to leave Fordham and to whitewash that portion of his life from his persona. So, as we learned OTDI 2019, this time he called in some favors.
James Nolan was an admissions officer at Wharton in 1966. One day he got a call from Donald’s older brother Fred, asking if he could help Donald get in to Wharton. In an exclusive Washington Post interview, Nolan said he must have given Trump “decent enough attributes to support his candidacy,” because they okayed Donald’s transfer application.
But, as Nolan noted, it was far easier to get accepted to Wharton in Trump’s long-ago era than it is today. Acceptance rates for transfer requests were above 50%. He also noted, famously, that perhaps Trump wasn’t so smart after all.
“It was not very difficult (to get in)… (and) I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius. Certainly not a super genius,” recalled Nolan. Ouch!
By the way, before leaving Fordham he had not left many “footprints,” according to the alumni association. And he had gotten in to Fordham after being rejected by the University of Southern California, where he wanted to study to be a movie producer.
Who cares? Well, let’s not forget this is the guy whose campaign strategy was to raise doubts that President Obama actually attended Ivy League institutions Columbia and Harvard Law School. It's yet another example of Trump’s “projecting” his own failures onto others. Trump couldn’t get into a top school? Well then let’s just proclaim Obama couldn’t either, facts be damned!
Please just remember this each time you hear Trump criticize anybody or anything.
How'd he do at Fordham? Or at Wharton? As we pointed out in an earlier OTDI, Trump threatens to sue anyone who releases his transcripts.
One final note. In 2017, the Fordham newspaper quoted a then-current student: “Kyoka Millard, ’19, would rather just forget that (Trump) went there. “I feel pretty terrible about it,” she said regarding the President’s connection to the college. “I’m really proud of the fact that Fordham has kind of disavowed him…”
Dive Deeper
Michael Kranish, in the WaPo's exclusive report, details how Trump got in to Wharton, and how he performed while there
Trump’s White House bio, which talks about his 2nd two years of college, but not the first two
Pic credit: I, Jonathan71