In 2011, Donald Trump was getting invited on the cable news circuit to bash President Barack Obama with a stream of ridiculous accusations, many of which were downright racist at their core. There was, of course, the claim Trump endlessly promoted that Barack Obama wasn’t even a U.S. citizen. But he also relentlessly suggested that Obama, the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, was a terrible student who needed “help” getting into college, which is another favorite racist trope. From those 2011 glory days:
"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Mr 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."
Turns out, Donald Trump was the one who likely needed help getting into schools. Thanks to the congressional testimony of his former attorney, Michael Cohen, we now know Donald Trump instructed him to threaten Fordham University with legal action if his academic records ever leaked. Now the Washington Post is reporting that wealthy alumni from the New York Military Academy, where Trump spent his high school years, demanded Trump’s records be retrieved and hidden—and they were.
The superintendent of the private school “came to me in a panic because he had been accosted by prominent, wealthy alumni of the school who were Mr. Trump’s friends” and who wanted to keep his records secret, recalled Evan Jones, the headmaster at the time. “He said, ‘You need to go grab that record and deliver it to me because I need to deliver it to them.’ ”
The superintendent, Jeffrey Coverdale, confirmed Monday that members of the school’s board of trustees initially wanted him to hand over Trump’s records to them, but Coverdale said he refused.
“I was given directives, part of which I could follow but part of which I could not, and that was handing them over to the trustees,” he said. “I moved them elsewhere on campus where they could not be released. It’s the only time I ever moved an alumnus’s records.”
Former headmaster Evan Jones said he felt it wrong at the time to dig through the old records, but the school was in dire financial straits and they felt they could not anger wealthy alumni.
“I don’t know if we should be doing this,” Jones recalled telling his boss. “He told me that several wealthy alumni, including a close friend of Mr. Trump, were putting a lot of pressure on the administration to put the record in their custody for safekeeping.”
Now why would someone who has bragged over and over again about his genius want to go to such great lengths to hide his own academic record? And at the very same time he was garnering a tremendous amount of free media to spread lies about President Barack Obama?
The key is projection. Everything he says is amplification of his own weaknesses and failings, and this is yet another example. The school should release his records. I’m sure we all could use the laugh.