Donald Trump never made Wharton’s Dean’s List. He never graduated with honors. The 1968 commencement program from the University of Pennsylvania lists every cum laude, magna cum laude and summa cum laude student in his class, and his name isn’t on it. Decades of Trump insisting he finished first in his class turned out to be a goddamn lie nobody bothered to check until reporters finally pulled the actual paperwork.
Jared Kushner got into Harvard the same way. His father Charles Kushner pledged $2.5 million to the school in 1998, paid out in yearly installments of $250k, and Jared was accepted the following year. Administrators at his high school told journalist Daniel Golden his grades and test scores didn’t come close to warranting it. Kushner Companies calls the connection false. The check cleared anyway.
Jim Jordan earned a law degree from Capital University in 2001. He never took the bar exam. He’s spent years running the House Judiciary Committee, lecturing witnesses and prosecutors about the law, and he’s not a licensed attorney in any state. Nobody stopped him. Nobody in his own party seems to give a damn.
Rand Paul let his real ophthalmology certification from the American Board of Ophthalmology lapse in 2005. So he founded his own certifying board, named himself president, put his wife and father in law in charge, and called himself board certified for over a decade. The board he invented wasn’t recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties, the American Medical Association or the state of Kentucky.
Mike Johnson took a job in 2010 as founding dean of a law school in Shreveport, Louisiana. He gave a speech about how it couldn’t fail. It never enrolled a single student. It never opened its doors. It collapsed after the accreditation fell through, and Johnson doesn’t bring it up these days.
Sources: Daily Pennsylvanian, ProPublica, Punchbowl News, Snopes, Associated Press
