He was a brat and he went to form for one year and then he got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take his take the exams.
No way.
And he had somebody take his entrance exam SATs or whatever.
Yeah.
Oh Jesus.
I even remember the name.
I did his homework for him.
Said I’m highly educated.
I went to the Wharton School of Finance.
I went to the Wharton School of Finance.
I went to the Wharton School of Finance.
I went to the Wharton School of Finance.
I was a very fine student.
I’ve also heard I was first in my class at the Wharton School of Finance.
And I used to say, “Excuse me, I went to the Wharton School of Finance.
” I said, “Excuse me.
Uh, does that mean we’re not going to make things anymore?” We all remember how Citizen Trump perpetuated the birther lie about President Obama.
He also questioned President Obama’s intelligence, telling the Associate Press that he heard that Obama was a terrible student and he should show his school records.
A few days later, the headmaster at Mr.
Trump’s own high school got an order from his boss to find Trump’s school records and help bury them.
I am providing the committee today with several documents, copies of letters I wrote at Mr.
Trump’s direction that threatened his high school, colleges, and the college board not to release his grades or SAT scores.
Donald Trump has said for decades that he was top of his class at Wharton, one of the best students the school ever had, that professors recognized his brilliance immediately.
And then there was William T.
Kelly, who was Trump’s marketing professor at Wharton, who taught there for 31 years from 1951 to 1982, who had thousands of students passed through his classroom, bragging in no shortage of degree about how smart he is and also his educational bonafide.
They spoke to an admissions officer who was there at the time named James Nolan.
He says the acceptance rate in 1966 was at 50% and it was even higher for transfers like Donald Trump, who went to Forom first.
Nolan also told the Post he was not impressed with Trump’s intellect.
I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius.
Certainly not a super genius.
It was not very difficult to get into Wharton.
And who told his friend Frank Deprima for three decades from the 1970s until Kelly died in 2011.
The same thing every time Trump’s name came up.
Kelly would say Donald Trump was the dumbest godamn student I ever had.
Not one of the worst, the dumbest.
And Kelly did not say it once in a moment of frustration.
He said it for 30 years.
Which means it was not anger.
It was an assessment from a man who taught marketing and business strategy to thousands of students and remembered one specifically because the gap between that student’s confidence and that student’s comprehension was so extreme it became the story Kelly told when someone asked him about the worst student he ever taught.
By Trump saying it was the hardest school to get into.
I wanted to see if that was true.
It is not the hardest school to get into.
This was the undergraduate school of finance at the University of Pennsylvania.
At the time Trump went to University of Pennsylvania.
The acceptance rate was more than 50%.
Steven Colbear found the testimony.
It comes from Frank Deprima, who was Kelly’s friend for decades and who repeated publicly what Kelly told him privately over and over.
And Depria’s account has been reported by multiple outlets because the quote is specific.
The timeline is clear and Kelly said it long before Trump entered politics, which means it was not partisan.
It was a professor’s professional opinion about a student who sat in his classroom in the late 1960s.
What’s different here is that Trump has said he’s done so great.
Hardest school to get into.
Super genius stuff.
Said he’d heard he was first in his class.
None of that was correct.
In fact, the dean’s list of 56 top students does not include Trump’s name.
And here is what makes Kelly’s assessment impossible to dismiss.
Kelly did not just call Trump dumb.
He explained why.
He told Prima that Trump would walk into class acting like he already knew everything.
That Trump had no interest in learning concepts that contradicted what he already believed.
That Trump could memorize enough to pass exams but could not apply theory to real scenarios.
and that when Kelly would challenge Trump’s reasoning in class, Trump would deflect or bluster instead of engaging with the actual question.
Kelly described a student whose arrogance prevented him from learning.
And 31 years of teaching gave Kelly enough perspective to know that this was not normal student struggle.
This was a specific kind of incapacity that comes from believing you are smarter than the material before you understand the material.
The article also points out that Trump was not one of the top honores at graduation and he wasn’t even on the deans list.
Now, a year earlier, Trump, he had this to say about Obama.
He was a terrible student.
terrible.
He went to accidental.
I heard he was a terrible student.
Not like, okay, I heard he was a bad student.
If you grew up in an era when a professor’s 30-year consistency on a single assessment meant something, when a teacher who saw thousands of students and remembered one as the worst was delivering a professional judgment, not a personal grudge, then you already understood what Kelly understood, which is that some students fail because they do not try.
And some students fail because they cannot accept that they do not already know.
And Trump was the second kind.
When Philly Mag investigated Trump’s academic record at Wharton, they found that Trump’s name does not appear on the deans list for 1968, which means he was not among the top academic performers that year.
And Trump’s name does not appear in the honors section of the 1968 commencement program, which means he did not graduate cumlaude, Magna Cumla, or Sumaum Laad, which means he did not finish in the top tier academically.
So when Trump says top of his class and the dean’s list says he was not on it and his professor of 31 years says he was the dumbest student in three decades of teaching, one of those sources is lying and the other two are documented.
Well, Donald Trump has said for years that uh he is the top student at Wharton.
Whenever people has questioned his intellect he’s referred to getting a degree, said it was the hardest school to get into.
So essentially I wanted to see if that was true and find out what exactly happened in getting into Wharton.
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You are the reason this exists.
And here is the detail that makes this entire story impossible for Trump to escape.
Kelly did not wait until Trump became famous to form this opinion.
Kelly was saying it in the 1970s when Trump was a local real estate developer.
Nobody outside New York had heard of.
He was saying it in the 1980s and 1990s when Trump was a celebrity but not a political figure.
And he was still saying it in the 2000s before Trump had any presidential ambitions.
And a professor who teaches for 31 years and remembers one student as the dumbest after seeing thousands means the student was not just below average.
That student was memorably, distinctively bottom of the scale and capable in a way that stuck with the professor for the rest of his life.
Kelly told Prima that Trump’s problem was not intelligence in the IQ sense.
It was that Trump had such inflated confidence in his own understanding that he could not absorb correction, could not process feedback, could not sit with the discomfort of not knowing something.
And in a business school where the entire point is to learn frameworks and apply them to unfamiliar problems, a student who refuses to accept that he does not already know the answer cannot succeed at a high level matter how much he memorizes.
The dean’s list is not a matter of opinion.
It is a published record and Trump is not on it.
The honor section of a commencement program is not subjective.
It lists the students who met the GPA threshold and Trump is not listed.
Trump can call himself a genius at every rally.
He cannot make the deans list add his name retroactively.
cannot make the honors program include him decades later and cannot make a dead professor’s three decade consistency vanish because it is inconvenient.
Subscribe to the narrative brief.
We find the professor who kept saying it for 30 years.
The patterns repeat.
We slow them down.
