1.
I began the second year of following the adventures of Donald in the Fun House known as the Oval Office still puzzling over this mental fitness thing, a subject being raised frequently by biased head-scratching pundits trying to make him look like a certified idiot or moron. Is it just another hoax, perpetrated by the witch-hunting fake news establishment that is out to get our commander in chief, the best one we have? Does the president have all his marbles? Is he totally insane, whatever?
Trump for the defense:
Throughout my life my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being like really smart. . . . Not only smart but VERY smart, a genius . . . and a very stable genius at that.
And not only that, he continued on the Pravda of the Trump presidency (Twitter), he went to “a good college.” Not Brooklyn College or Queens College or even CCNY, the Harvard of his New York metropolitan area, and my alma mater! “I went to an Ivy League school,” Trump told a crowd in St. Augustine, Fla. “I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words,” he said at a rally, according to Politico magazine (November 6, 2016).
2.
During the campaign debates I had heard the soon-to-be-elected president certify how smart he was by bragging endlessly about his education at the University of Pennsylvania, an overrated, overpriced, overfunded school, like most of the Ivies.
“Wharton,” he proudly explained on Meet the Press about the part of Penn he attended, “is probably the hardest there is to get into.” Nailing it, he added, “Some of the greatest business minds in the financial world have gone to Wharton.” His, he was not ashamed to imply, was one of them.
There are those who say Wharton is a sort of a trade school branch of Penn, dealing with commercial real estate, a field closer to high-stakes gambling than high-class education. It may have been at Wharton that the junior transfer student from Fordham learned his art of the deal, an M.O. which involved getting contractors to do expensive jobs, refusing to pay them, and loosing on them a pack of shady but crafty lawyers when they threaten to sue. Ironically, the motto of the University of Pennsylvania, I’m told by a reliably informed source, is Leges sine Moribus vanae, or “Laws without morals are useless.” “It’s not ‘Lawyers without morals are shameless,’” explained my source, a Columbia grad and not a big Penn fan, “but it’s close.”
Having gone to Wharton is an achievement he waves around like the Shroud of Turin. Not only is the president proud of having studied at Wharton (Class of 1968), but he told the New York Times repeatedly he graduated “first in his class.”
This First In His Class doesn’t appear to have accumulated any of the usual honors, such as the Dean’s List, according to an investigation by the student newspaper Daily Pennsylvanian, or any of the Latin laurels associated with top-of-the-class rankings (magna this, magna cum laude that and any other magnas signifying academic greatness).
The president is also guilty of misleading the public about his studies at Wharton, his enemies say. Apparently, there are two Whartons, and two Wharton degrees. The undergraduate Wharton awards a BS in Business Administration or Economics. The graduate school awards the famous MBA/Masters of Business Administration. An undergraduate degree is not the same thing as an MBA.
“If he so claims, or even implies that he has a Wharton MBA,” a Wharton MBA-holder told the Daily Pennsylvanian, “he’s so obviously lying his pants are not just on fire, they’re a blazing inferno. Nobody in Wall Street or in finance/bulge bracket investment banks would be fooled in the slightest.”
It’s widely believed on campus that young Trump earned the lesser undergraduate degree (BS). “Any implication that he has an MBA is completely untrue,” a real Wharton graduate MBA explained, “and CANNOT be an innocent mistake (especially if it’s by him).”
To all of which, members of the base say, “So what?”
3.
Much is made of young Trump leaving the Groves of Academe in Philadelphia with a glistening new BS in Economics, further enhanced by a graduation gift from his father, Fred C. Trump, the slumlord and rental apartment titan, of $10 million (other estimates reportedly range from $1 to $25 million, whatever the number it was more than my father gave me, graduating from CCNY). “See what you can do with it, son,” were the only instructions the graduate reportedly got from Daddy Fred C.
Some say he promptly lost all of it, not a feather in Wharton’s curriculum cap. I don’t believe it. He may have managed to lose a lot of it in his deals, but not all of it. A blind, mentally ill person could make money with $10 or whatever million in New York real estate.
In his studies at Wharton he must have learned how to build Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which he claimed cost $1.2 billion, and was “the eighth wonder of the world.” An even greater wonder is how he managed to not pay the carpenters, electricians, plumbers, window installers, and other contractors, the workers who put in the guard rails, doors, stalls, and paper dispensers in the almost 300 public bathrooms, and the 253 contractors who in turn hired the thousands who did the work of sculpting the 70 onion domes and minarets that towered over the boardwalk. It was an honor to be stiffed by the self-anointed “King of Debt,” not shared by some waiting since 1990 to be paid.
In his postgraduate years, he developed a brilliant financial strategy that he also may have learned at Wharton: whenever you’ve totally fucked things up to the point where you owe everybody money and the banks won’t lend you any more, declare bankruptcy and start over. He did that at least six times at last count. Is this a great country, or what? Talk about your Horatio Alger stories.
Of course, a few crybabies borrowed money to learn how to get rich at Trump University, with a course of study that turned out to be a few CDs promoting Trump U., and they wanted their tuition back. Get smart; that was the valuable lesson to be learned at Trump’s school of hard knocks.
And then there were the folks who made down payments on some gorgeous projected houses overlooking the ocean off the Mexican coast. The 250 condo buyers at the coming-soon Trump Ocean Resort at Baja, Mexico, south of Tijuana, put over $32.5 million down, according to James D. Zirin’s Plaintiff in Chief. The 525-unit development deal promised infinity-edged swimming pools, tennis courts, and views of the Pacific money couldn’t buy. “The most spectacular place in all of Mexico,” proclaimed the sales literature featuring a portrait of the smiling future president, sitting in a gold leaf chair.
The houses had not technically been built yet, and never were, technically, expected to get built. The home “owners” were trying to get their money back for a few decades with remarkably little success.
But this is what capitalism is all about: lying, cheating, stiffing workers, and generally screwing everybody if you can get away with it. That’s what made our country great, and what is making it great again with the first Wharton graduate in the Oval Office.
4.
When the Wharton graduate proudly claimed the honorific “King of Debt,” he actually sold himself short. As it became known later in his administration, he actually was the Aga Khan of Debt.
Through business practices he may have learned at Wharton, according to the New York Times (May 8, 2019), the potentate of debt from 1985 to 1994 managed “to lose more money than nearly any other individual taxpayer in the nation.” His core businesses—casinos, hotels, and retail spaces in apartment buildings—in 1990 and 1991 alone lost more than $250 million each year, and those losses were more than double those of any other taxpayers, according to IRS information.
“There’s something not right when every single one of your projects doesn’t work out right,” analyst Marvin Roffman said of Trump’s casino business going six times to the Camden, New Jersey, bankruptcy court. By 2004, all of Trump’s fantabulous Atlantic City casinos, including his cathedral of glitz, Trump Taj Mahal, had filed for bankruptcy. Also underwater, according to Zirin’s Plaintiff in Chief, were the stiffed contractors and workers who had built the Taj.
He does not seem to have had a talent for business, does he?
What was especially impressive about his achievements as the business tycoon who almost single-handedly took Atlantic City down, though, is the message it gave to fans of the self-made billionaire (if you ignore the $400 million or so Daddy Megabucks Fred pumped into the sinking Trump family ship): Debt is good! You, too, can have six bankruptcies and grow up to be president.
5.
The way the University of Pennsylvania is treating its most famous graduate on the planet is reprehensible. Unlike Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League schools that had their share of presidents, William Henry Harrison had been the only other president Penn can claim.26
You would think the brainiacs running the show at Penn would have given their contribution to American democracy at least an honorary degree, an LL.D (Doctor of Laws), which is what presidents usually get, even if not known for scholarship. Doctor Trump would have mentioned it from time to time. Nada. Zip. Borscht. Shameful. So sad.
As for the president being very smart, I would like to see his Wharton report card before I start boasting about his intellectual achievements. Along with SAT scores, and his more current tax filings, his scholastic records at Wharton (and Fordham, too) are buried in the Trump schoolhouse vaults forever or until the end of time, whichever lasts longer, so help the Trump lawyers’ case banning their release.