To Help Get Him Into Wharton, Trump Allegedly Paid Someone To Take The SAT

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Donald Trump

When Donald Trump was a high school student in Queens, he paid someone to take the SAT on his behalf, according to the president’s niece in a forthcoming tell-all memoir.

The new disclosure is made by Mary L. Trump in “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” an already best-selling book that will be published next week. Mary Trump, the daughter of Donald’s late brother, is the first to break ranks with the family and spill its secrets into the public domain.

According to Ms. Trump, who claims that her uncle practiced “cheating as a way of life,” the high score the proxy earned on the SAT helped the young Trump to later gain admittance to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business when he transferred there as an undergraduate from Fordham University.

‘WILL YOU INTERVIEW MY BROTHER?’

After graduating from military school and living at home with his parents and commuting to Fordham, Trump wanted to apply to Wharton but worried that his grades alone wouldn’t allow for his admission, according to the book.

Mary Trump writes that Donald’s sister, Maryanne, “had been doing his homework for him,” but that she couldn’t take standardized tests in his place. “Donald worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of the class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted. To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.”

A White House spokesperson says the allegation is “false” and “absurd.” In earlier profiles of Trump, Shapiro has been quoted and identified as a “college friend.” Originally, he was thought to be a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and received his law degree from Harvard with honors. Later in life, Shapiro served as an Executive Vice President of Walt Disney Company and a lecturer at California State University in Los Angeles. Married to tennis champion Pam Shriver, he passed away from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1999. Mary Trump, however, has since said it was a different Joe Shapiro who allegedly took the test on Trump’s behalf.

Still, it apparently took even a bit more than a high score to get him into Wharton. Trump also got an important assist from a close friend of his family, according to a former University of Pennsylvania admissions official. In an interview with The Washington Post, James Nolan acknowledged that in 1966 he had a phone call from Fred Trump Jr., Mary Trump’s father, asking him to help his younger brother Donald gain admission to Wharton.

“He called me and said, ‘You remember my brother Donald?’ Which I didn’t,” Nolan told the Post.“He said: ‘He’s at Fordham and he would like to transfer to Wharton. Will you interview him?’ I was happy to do that.”

Not long after the phone call, according to the Post, Donald Trump arrived at Penn for the interview, accompanied by his father, Fred Trump Sr., who attempted to “ingratiate” himself, Nolan said.

In her new book, Mary Trump, a trained clinical psychologist, alleges that when her father died in 1981 at the age of 42 from an alcohol-induced heart attack, the Trump family sent him to the hospital alone on the night of his death. No one went with him, according to the book, including his brother Donald, who alleges Mary, went to see a movie instead.

BACK THEN, WHARTON ACCEPTED MORE THAN HALF ITS APPLICANTS

Nolan, who told the newspaper that he was the only admissions official to talk to Donald Trump, was required to give Trump a rating, and he recalled, “It must have been decent enough to support his candidacy.”

Nolan, now 81 years old, and Fred Trump Jr. had been best friends. They went to high school together and spent many hours in the Trump family home in Queens. Nolan told the Post he was sure the family hoped he could help get Trump into Wharton. The final decision rested with Nolan’s boss, who approved the application and is no longer living, according to Nolan, who would later become director of undergraduate admissions at Penn.

Yet, at the time, Wharton’s acceptance rates were nothing like the 6.49% admit rate today. In the mid-1960s, when Trump got into Wharton, the school accepted more than half of its applicants, Nolan told the Post, and transfer students had an even higher acceptance rate. “It was not very difficult,” Nolan said of the time Trump applied in 1966.“I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius. Certainly not a super genius.” A Penn official said the acceptance rate for 1966 was not available but noted that the school says on its website that the 1980 rate was “slightly greater than 40%.”

In any case, Trump transferred from Fordham to Wharton as a junior and graduated from Wharton in 1968. Ever since Trump has claimed that his graduation from Wharton is evidence of his intellect. Trump asserted that he went to “the hardest school to get into, the best school in the world,” calling it “super genius stuff.” Only last month, President Trump pointed to his studies there as he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to conservative economist Arthur Laffer. At that time, Trump claimed that he had studied the Laffer curve for many years in the “Wharton School of Finance,” even though it was not created until 1974, six years after his graduation from Wharton.

‘FIRST IN HIS CLASS’

It was a 1973 article in the New York Times that said Trump graduated “first in his class” at Wharton. However, it would later become clear that Trump’s name was not among top honorees at his commencement. Nor was he on the dean’s list his senior year, meaning he was not among the top 56 students in his graduating class of 366.

Many of Trump’s peers in the Wharton Class of 1968 agree that he did not stand out academically, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper at Penn (see Trump Failed To Excel At Wharton). The newspaper quoted 1968 Wharton graduate Louis Calomaris who recalled that “Don … was loath to really study much.”

Calomaris said Trump would come to study groups unprepared and did not “seem to care about being prepared.” He added that Trump’s academic passivity likely stemmed from his passion for engaging directly in the real estate business.

‘THE DUMBEST GODDAMN STUDENT I EVER HAD’

“He spent all his weekends in New York because residential real estate is a weekend business,” Calomaris told the Pennsylvanian which noted that five of Trump’s other classmates confirmed the alum’s claims. “He was not an intellectual man, but that wasn’t what his goal was,” Calomaris added. “He’s not an intellectual now, [and] that’s pretty obvious … [w]hat I saw early on was an unbounded ambition that did come to fruition, because it matched his firm’s needs, and that’s how these things work.”

One of Trump’s marketing professors at Wharton, the late William Kelley, apparently thought little of his student. A close friend of the professor, Frank DiPrima, said that Kelley told him 100 times over three decades that “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had.” “I remember his emphasis and inflection — it went like this — ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had,’” DiPrima wrote. “Dr. Kelley told me this after Trump had become a celebrity but long before he was considered a political figure. Dr. Kelley often referred to Trump’s arrogance when he told of this — that Trump came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything.”

Trump has consistently declined to release his college transcripts, and during his 2016 presidential campaign his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, threatened colleges with lawsuits if his academic records were released. Yet, Trump had no hesitation in falsely claiming that Obama was “a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”

He then challenged Obama to release his college transcripts, arguing that those records were important in determining whether a person was qualified to be president of the U.S.

DON’T MISS: TRUMP FAILED TO EXCEL AT WHARTON

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