Opinion: What Trump’s secret school records tell us about 2016 and 2020
By Paul Waldman Paul Waldman Opinion writer covering politics Email Bio Follow Opinion writer March 6 at 12:20 PM The story of Donald Trump, Michael Cohen and the president’s desperate efforts to make sure the public never saw his school records may seem relatively unimportant, even if it reveals something about Trump’s insecurities.
In 2011, days after Donald Trump challenged President Barack Obama to “show his records” to prove that he hadn’t been a “terrible student,” the headmaster at New York Military Academy got an order from his boss: Find Trump’s academic records and help bury them. It’s more than just embarrassment. The answer lies in the narrative Trump was writing, not just about himself but about Obama and the entire American system.
What may be not quite as well remembered is that Trump also repeatedly demanded that Obama release his transcripts, and claimed over and over that Obama could not possibly have gotten into Columbia University and Harvard Law School on merit. “I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” Trump said. “I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can’t get into Harvard.
On a personal level, we know that Trump is desperately insecure about his intelligence. People who are actually smart don't go around telling you how smart they are, but Trump regularly feels it necessary to proclaim himself a genius; here's a representative stream-of-consciousness soliloquy from 2016, which actually began as a rumination on nuclear weapons:
By 2016, that was a message the conservative base was eager to hear. They’d spent the previous eight years being told by media figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck that Obama’s entire presidency was oriented around showering benefits on lazy, undeserving black people while whites were marginalized and discriminated against.
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