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Go Home The Donald's Bizarre Obsession with College Admissions

JONATHAN CHAIT APRIL 28, 2011

The Donald's Bizarre Obsession with College Admissions

BY JAMES DOWNIE

[Guest post by James Downie]

Clearly in need of a new way to make headlines and send his TV ratings further into the tank, Donald Trump has now shifted his aim to Obama's college credentials:

Real estate mogul Donald Trump suggested in an interview Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended. Trump, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president's birth certificate.

"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."

Gawker has already gleefully pointed out that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner had no business getting into Harvard, but surely the weirdness of this claim hits Trump closer to home than in-laws. His oldest son, Donald, Jr., went to Penn's Wharton school, the Donald's alma mater, and his oldest daughter, Ivanka, transferred to Wharton after attending Georgetown for two years. Would anybody believe for a moment that their applications didn't benefit from having a father who was not only famous and fabulously wealthy (at least, according to himself), but also an alum?

One could object that Trump's children aren't running for president, though, so consider the case of The Trumpster himself. From his 1997 book The Art of the Deal:

After I graduated from the New York Military Academy in 1964 I flirted briefly with the idea of attending film school at the University of Southern California...But in the end I decided real estate was a better business.

I began by attending Fordham University in the Bronx, mostly because I wanted to be close to home...but after two years, I decided that as long as I had to be in college, I might as well test myself against the best. I applied to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania and I got in. At the time, if you were going to make a career in business, Wharton was the place to go.

When young Donald was applying to Wharton, his father was just a few years removed from building a "3,800-apartment Trump Village in Coney Island." (The penchant for self-memorializing, it seems, was also genetic.) Again, it's hard to believe that didn't help Trump in his applications, and given his pre-college interests, it seems unlikely he had a strong business school application. Whether any journalists will bring this up the next time he spouts off, though, remains to be seen.

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20 comments

Enough with The Fish Face already. We're trying to hold down lunch peacefully and this doesn't help.

- tmmats

April 28, 2011 at 2:25pm

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That dog won't hunt. Bush-II shouldn't have gotten into Yale, OR graduated from it, but managed both. Obama has been a PROFESSOR for heaven's sake, what was that supposed to be, "affirmative action" to a guy who didn't deserve it? I don't think so.

- AllanL5

April 28, 2011 at 2:31pm

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Unless that's the new dog-whistle. Sure, "Obama was a poor student", so it was ONLY Affirmative Action that enabled everything he's done. Down with Affirmative Action! I still think that dog won't hunt. Even as a dog-whistle, it can't be effective, except to show continued stubborness and idiocy on the part of Trump.

- AllanL5

April 28, 2011 at 2:33pm

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Oh, but legacy enrollments are just fine; they are the entitlements of the progeny relatives of the very-well off.

- liberalref

April 28, 2011 at 2:41pm

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Perhaps the MSM start paying attention to dog whistles that carry such an overtly racialist tinge, no?

- wildboy

April 28, 2011 at 2:43pm

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My comment should read "the progeny and other relatives of the very well-off."

- liberalref

April 28, 2011 at 2:44pm

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This may be the reason why Obama unveiled his birth certificate. It wasn't as much a broadside against the birthers, as I believe it was a call to action for the media to start growing up. One hopes they hear the message and treat Trump with the skepticism he deserves vs. just reporting everything he says.

- NR409654

April 28, 2011 at 3:26pm

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As a fellow Columbia alum (just a few years ahead of Obama), I must insist that the real question is this: what on earth possessed Obama to attend a second-rate institution like Harvard?

- timteeter

April 28, 2011 at 3:39pm

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I don't want Trump anywhere near the Whitehouse. If Bush could wage War against a country in the middle east based on numskull premises, Trump will lead us in an attack on Mars.

- Nusholtz

April 28, 2011 at 3:40pm

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I don't know much about what his grades were when Obama transferred to Columbia but I will say that there is not much chance that he would have been accepted into HLS without an impressive resume and zero chance that he would gain entry into the Harvard Law Review without fully earning it. To sum up, Trump is just a mouth breathing buffoon. Why do we have to even acknowledge people like that?

- aylwards

April 28, 2011 at 3:51pm

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Something ironic: wingers worship Ayn Rand and her works because of the emphasis she places on reason and on the rational. Unless you're completely blinded by ideology, it's hard to miss the fact that Barack Obama is probably the most rational and reasonable politician this country has seen in a very long time, not to mention, one of an intellectual caliber that leaves most other comers in the dust.

- NR409654

April 28, 2011 at 4:07pm

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I also recall reading (perhaps in an early TNR profile of Obama?) that none other than Professor Lawrence Tribe had viewed Obama as one of the brightest students he'd ever had, which is saying quite a lot. (I'm an alum, so I'm biased but there's no question that the people at the top of the class at Harvard Law are super smart, even if not every student is something special.) And as far as I know (but I admit I may not remember correctly), there's no affirmative action involved in making it onto the Law Review. You get on either by having stellar grades or by doing well in a crazy competition that involves writing a sample "comment" and doing sample editing. I'm also fairly sure that the Law Review editors all elect their president and don't think they'd pick someone second rate as an affirmative action move.

- shellski

April 28, 2011 at 4:16pm

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NR409654: I agree with you (and I imagine several other posters do as well), but it is nonetheless true that for many people, Obama momentarily mixing the number of primaries with the number of states while speaking to the press after maintaining a grueling campaign pace for months on end with very little sleep means that his holding degrees from Columbia and Harvard are meaningless. Plus, you know, he's black, so referring to him as "Odumbo" is perfectly reasonable.

- janus

April 28, 2011 at 4:17pm

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According to Wikipedia, "At the end of his first year he was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review based on his grades and a writing competition.", at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_career_of_Barack_Obama#cite_note-Harvard_Law_2007-44 Plus, even with affirmative action, you have to have had very good undergrad grades to get into Harvard Law School in the late 80s.

- RHSerlin

April 28, 2011 at 5:35pm

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I think this issue falls into the "why should anyone care?" department. The relevant issues are: is this person smart? Capable? Competent? If so (or even if not), why the hell should anyone care where this person went to school? The same should go for the "birther" issue, except that place of birth evidently has some legal implications.

- dsimon

April 28, 2011 at 5:48pm

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I am with the other posters who are convinced that this is pretty clearly an attempt at a racial smear.

- miceelf

April 28, 2011 at 7:01pm

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RHSerlin writes: "At the end of his first year he was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review based on his grades and a writing competition." Note that 76% of Harvard Law Grads graduated "with honors" (magna cum laude) under the old system, which was re-vamped in 1999 according to the LATimes. If they in fact graded on a curve, then it means C+ students were graduating with honors. If not, then it means that grades were inflated for all (still a problem in Ivy League schools) Also, note that starting in 1981, the Law Review awarded 4 of the 5 slots to teh top students in each first year section that were elected based on grades and writing. But a 5th slot was reserved for a top-scoring minority student in the top 25. This is according to the Harvard Crimson. Shortly after this, that policy was scrapped and it was simplified to just allowing editors to consider race in selecting their new members. Summary: Obama was probably a C+/B- student just like Gore, Bush and Kerry. And it was possible to have those grades and still win these lofty labels. Think about it: If he had wonderful grades, they'd have been released pronto. No question he's a smart guy. Like a lot of folks, he probably had other things going on at the time and studies weren't his #1 priority. I've been there myself. PS. Let's not forget how much ink the various papers, including USAToday, WashPost and Boston Globe, spilled in making sure everyone knew Bush's grades and various test scores. What is curious here is how the media has suddenly lost interest in presidential record gathering. It's odd that this task has fallen on Trump, with the media thoroughly puzzled as to why he is doing their job. Google Bush Grades and you get 11.4M hits Google Obama Grades and you get 10.8M hits. The masses appear equally curious. http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jun/10/news/mn-46135 http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/6/5/law-review-debates-affirmative-action-policy/

- seattleeng

April 29, 2011 at 3:57am

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Incidentally, it's started. It appears Trump lied about how he managed to avoid serving in Vietnam (see Political Wire link on right side of page).

- ironyroad

April 29, 2011 at 11:50am

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Summary for Seattleeng: you don't believe Obama earned high grades and so you make extraordinary assumptive leaps to torture out your conclusion that he, just like you, did not work hard to earn sterling grades while pursuing his undergraduate and law degrees. Maybe Obama does not want to release his grades because his record of graduating from Columbia, HLS and being president of HLR testifies fully to his impressive educational achievements. My assumption is as easily justified as yours is based on the available facts.

- aylwards

April 29, 2011 at 12:56pm

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Seattle: I must say that given how much better the GOP tends to strum the MSM, it is almost jarring to read about how unfair it is being from time to time. It's also very jarring to read complaints about what the media did over 10 years ago that actually helped your preferred candidate. I'm still waiting for the MSM to splash the same amount of ink about the contradictions and flat out falsehoods of the Bush campaign as they did about how Gore was a sanctimonious liar (and over incredibly minor and irrelevant points). As opposed to say, maybe Bush is a bit dumb, but an OK guy. Newflash - the media (largely) respond to the current controversy, whether it be legitimate or faux. I'm assuming you are also bemoaning the lack of scrutiny of McCain's eligibility to be president (not even born in the US!) or Romney's (similar difficulties with birth certificates due to similar state laws) elsewhere. Now the interest in Bush's intelligence or lack thereof may also have stemmed from the observation that it wasn't exactly a state secret that GW wasn't viewed in the same light as his brothers and didn't have the most, stellar record prior to his father purchasing a baseball team for him. Yet he curiously got into Yale, and his brother's didn't, and there was an oddly co-incidental change in a policy that benefitted the progeny of former allumni there before Jeb "decided" to study closer to home. Innuendo is such a powerful argument; see - anyone can do it! I am also still trying to work out the point you are trying to make with some of your assertions above. You freely admit that 1 of the 5 spots for the Law Review was reserved for the top minority student; the implication being that that must be how Obama was admitted to the Review (no evidence is presented for this of course). So we still have him as being a top student, from a group that inarguable was still pretty disadvantaged at that point in time. And it's not like Obama was the adopted black child of a otherwise picket fence middle-to-upper class family who just happened to benefit from being black. And finally, I can imagine why he hasn't released his grades 1. They're completely irrelevant, but if they were released, I'm sure the MSM would spill some ink on the topic. I don't know about how you hire new grads, but grades are not high on my list of questions. 2. You don't seem to recognise the contradiction in saying "..if he had wonderful grades, they'd have been released pronto." shortly after saying "If they in fact graded on a curve, then it means C+ students were graduating with honors." and your later comments about the reserved minority position. You've just frankly admitted that you would rationalize any released grade as being curved or due to affirmative action. Doesn't seem to be a lot of point for the President to kick up another pointless sideshow by releasing his grades does there?

- Nari224

April 30, 2011 at 8:31am

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