So a 1970s NYT obit writer does a soft profile on Fred Trump, for which it appears his sole sources were interviews with Fred and Donald Trump. They told him Donald graduated first in his class at Wharton. The result? He actually printed it.
Because Sally Vix seems to be fond of NYT, we can consider a New York Times article from 2015. At the time, Mr. Trump was not likely to be his party’s nominee, and hardly anyone would take him serious enough to bother trying to quash his chances. At this point, the fervor over fact-checking Mr. Trump’s lies had not yet really ramped up. This was just an early and fairly ordinary bit of fact-checking of a candidate’s statements.
The NYT article: **[over 30 years ago] Mr. Geist pointed out that “just about every profile ever written” about Mr. Trump — including stories in The New York Times in 1973 and 1976 — journalists say that he graduated first in his class at Wharton. “Although the school refused comment, the commencement program from 1968 does not list him as graduating with honors of any kind,” Mr. Geist wrote.
In August, The Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania newspaper, tried to get to the bottom of whether Mr. Trump did in fact graduate first in his class at Wharton. The paper cited a 1985 Trump biography, by Jerome Tuccille, that said Mr. Trump was not an honor student and “spent a lot of time on outside business activities.” Gwenda Blair, another Trump biographer, wrote that he was able to get into Wharton only because a “friendly” admissions officer knew his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., and did him a favor. A classmate of Mr. Trump’s, Steven Perelman, told the paper, “He was not in any kind of leadership. I certainly doubt he was the smartest guy in the class.” Unless Mr. Trump releases to the public his Wharton transcripts — which he has declined to do — we won’t know for sure, of course, whether he was an all-star at Wharton or not.**
So the school lists commencement honors, but the valedictorian would not be among those listed as graduating with honors? Yeah, ok. So a handful of credulous journalists used his version of events in puff pieces? The ostensible independent verification was from other journalists who had taken their info from Trump interviews?
And then remember everything you know about the guy and have seen nearly every day for the last decade. He will lie. He will especially lie to puff himself up. And if he actually has any facts that support his favorable statements about himself, he will make sure everyone knows about it. And he has repeatedly blocked access to his transcript, and has at least refused or neglected to offer hard evidence — which could totally prove exactly what he says about his stellar performance at Wharton. If you actually think he would withhold evidence that would prove things he loves to say about himself and things his opponents would hate to see proven, you are as gullible as it gets.