On Hiding

There are four major reasons people hide things: Fear, Greed, Guilt, and Shame.

Donald John Trump has a lot of stuff hidden.

DJTrump thinks he's smart and says so frequently. "I'm, like, a really smart person." But factual accounts of his student days don't always square with his claim.

Needless to say, his butt never sat at a public school desk. Consider his education:

He attended, in order, the Kew-Forest School, which bills itself as "The oldest independent school in the borough of Queens;" the New York Military Academy, where he was sent in hopes of straightening out his incorrigible bad behavior; Fordham University, a Jesuit school in the Bronx, which his niece alleges he got into by paying someone else to take his SAT; and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with the default degree, a B.S. in Economics (he has occasionally boasted of having the prestigious Wharton MBA--not true).    

During the 2016 campaign, Trump ordered his minions to threaten all those schools but Kew-Forest with criminal charges if they made the Dunce-in-Chief's academic records public.

Why might the Litigant-in-Chief make such threats? Academic records are already protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA). Threatening a lawsuit would be overkill--the act of a person desperate to keep those records in deep darkness.

This kind of behavior never fails to make us Homo Saps curious. We're naturally nosy. Why hide records? What's the big deal? Come on, Donny, tell!

In my professional life as an educator I've noticed that most students react to grades in one of two ways: with joy and pride, or with disappointment and chagrin. Those who are proud of their grades as an accomplishment boast of them to anyone who will listen. The others go off and sulk.

Trump is a sulker. He has said he was first in his class (without designating a school), but those records that are public are clear: he never achieved honors and was never on a dean's list.

So here's my take on a non-mystery that's as plain as day: Donald John Trump was a terrible, uninterested, and unmotivated student. He spent his time in school playing and doing just enough to avoid flunking. He may have cheated on his SAT, and there is evidence that family connections got him into the Wharton School.

I doubt he cares overmuch about the grades themselves. He managed to get a degree so he could fit into a certain type of society. With the records sealed he could boast and lie about his academic prowess and never be challenged.

What exactly motivated him to bury his records? Unlikely as it sounds, I think it might have been shame, or the fear of being shamed. If the records were revealed somehow he would no doubt dismiss them as forgeries or an attempt to discredit him. But somewhere deep down, maybe the Liar-in-Chief knows that most Americans still have faith in the integrity of America's universities.

Just not in its chief executive.


---Diogenes, 8/4/2020