As if you thought Trump might have been a scholar

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.

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 Trump’s records to them, but Coverdale said he refused.

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“I moved them elsewhere on campus where they could not be released.

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“It was the only time in my education career that I ever heard of someone’s record being removed,” he said. “But people were fearful as a result of whatever call was made from Mr. Trump’s friends. I was told we’re getting a lot of heat about this.”

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Coverdale declined to say where he hid Trump’s records or to identify the people who ordered him to pull them out of the school’s files. “I don’t want to get into anything with these guys,” he said. “You have to understand, these were millionaires and multimillionaires on the board, and the school was going through some troubles. But to hear, ‘You will deliver them to us?’ That doesn’t happen. This was highly unusual.”

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[Long time Trump lawyer and fixer Michael] Cohen, who told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that part of his job was to attack Trump’s critics and defend his reputation, said that Trump ordered him “to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.”

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In his letter to the president of Fordham University, where Trump spent his first two years of college, studying business administration, Cohen demanded that the records be “permanently sealed” and said any release was “criminality,” which “will lead to jail time.”

A Fordham spokesman last week confirmed that the school received Cohen’s letter, as well as a call from the Trump campaign, and responded that the university was bound by federal law not to reveal any student records without Trump’s permission. A spokesman for the University of Pennsylvania declined to comment.

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Trump has frequently boasted that he was a stellar student, but he declined throughout the 2016 campaign to release any of his academic records, telling The Washington Post then, “I’m not letting you look at anything.”

Last year, he said he “heard I was first in my class” at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business program, where he finished his undergraduate degree, but Trump’s name does not appear on the school’s dean’s list or on the list of students who received academic honors in his class of 1968.

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Trump has said that his military academy background provided “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”

Trump told The Post during the 2016 campaign that he “did very well under the military system. I became one of the top guys at the whole school.”

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“I know for a fact that in 2011, the decision was made by the superintendent to remove those records and secure them so no one on the staff could get to them,” said Richard Pezzullo, a graduate who worked closely with school officials in a drive to save the school, which was then in financial distress. “People had been making inquiries, and there was a paramount interest in securing those records.”

  WaPo

According to the article, at one point in 2010, the school being in financial straits, some alumni went to Trump seeking a $7 million donation, which he refused.

A decade before that meeting, Trump offered to build a facility on campus in honor of his coach and mentor, Theodore Dobias, according to two former school officials. But the school’s board turned down the offer, preferring a cash donation. Trump, who had “just wanted to build something for this man he loved,” gave nothing, Pezzullo said.

The Trump Tower meeting in 2010 ended with Trump’s “firm ‘No,’ very polite, but firm,” Pezzullo said.

After the meeting with Trump, the group from the academy met with Cohen, who delivered the same message but in a less gracious manner.

“Cohen told us he would love to have enough money to buy the school so he could bulldoze it,” Pezzullo said.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.