Trump Extremely Doesn't Want Anyone to See His High School Grades
Last week, when Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen testified before Congress, he aired a good deal of his former boss's dirty laundry, from Trump's involvement in paying off Stormy Daniels to his utter lack of faith in his oldest son's intelligence. But one of the pettier details that came out was Cohen's work making sure that Trump's school grades never saw the light of day.
During the hearing, Cohen presented a letter he wrote in May 2015 to Fordham University, where Trump went to school before transferring to University of Pennsylvania's Wharton, threatening legal action if Trump's grades ever became public. This was shortly before Trump declared his candidacy and several years after Trump demanded to see then-president Barack Obama's high school transcript to prove he hadn't been a "terrible student."
But apparently Cohen's writing Fordham wasn't the first time that Trump pressured one of his alma maters to make sure that his academic records were kept under wraps. A new story from the Washington Post reports that in 2011, his old high school, the New York Military Academy, the then-headmaster was pushed to make sure that no one would be able to access Trump's records from his time as a student. From the Post:
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 President 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.”
It turns out that this was when Trump was still planning a 2012 run for the presidency and came just days after he started making noise about Obama not being a good enough student to get into Ivy League schools. Unlike with Fordham though, here Trump used rich, well-connected friends to make sure his ass was covered.
The thing is, it's hard to imagine that anyone would have changed their vote for or against Trump based on whatever his Fordham GPA was: His appeal or lack thereof isn't more or less intense if he had a 4.0 or a solid C minus. But Trump is, if nothing else, a preening narcissist, and as a result he often picks seemingly irrelevant and obviously false hills to die on: he's lied about historic his Electoral College win was, lied about his net worth to improve his Forbes ranking, and claimed that the Republican tax cuts he signed into law are the biggest in history, a lie that, to date, is still up on the White House's official website. He never works harder than he does when trying to fluff up some arbitrary, superficial measure of success.
