At the academy, which modeled its strict code of conduct after the nearby U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Trump loved competing to win contests for cleanest room or best-made bed. Although not known as an academic standout, he was a prominent baseball player and was well known on campus for bringing women there and showing them around. Despite getting a series of Vietnam War medical deferments for bone spurs in his feet, Trump has said that his military academy background provided “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”<doc-sep>Photo : Tasos Katopodis ( Getty Images ) In 2011, when Donald J. Trump was just a really obnoxious civilian Twitter troll, he wasn’t just pushing for then-President Barack Obama to prove that he wasn’t a Kenyan operative, he also wanted proof that the best president to ever grace the White House wasn’t a terrible student. Advertisement Also in 2011, Donnie boy was pushing to get his own grades hidden because he didn’t want anyone to know that he was in remedial reading. Evan Jones, headmaster of the New York Military Academy when Trump attended, claims the superintendent of the elite 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,” according to The Washington Post. “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 to the Post that he was asked by the school’s board of trustees to hand over Trump’s grades, but he initially refused. “I was given directives, part of which I could follow but part of which I could not, and that was handing them over to the trustees,” he said. “I moved them elsewhere on campus where they could not be released. It’s the only time I ever moved an alumnus’s records.” Why wouldn’t Trump want his grades public? He’s boasted that he was top of his class during his days at NYMA. Is it because the president is full of shit and thus doesn’t want his grades to definitively prove that he was a dumbass? The president’s former fixer and right hand man for a decade, Michael Cohen, testified before Congress that part of his job was to prevent the Dotard’s grades from ever seeing the light of day. Cohen claimed that Trump ordered him “to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores,” The Post reported. Advertisement Trump declined The Post’s request in 2016 to see his academic records, telling them, “I’m not letting you look at anything.” Trump has also boasted of being top of his class while attending the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business program, except his name isn’t on the dean’s list or any list really. Advertisement But, let’s get back to this strong-arming of his military academy grades. Trump told The Post during the 2016 campaign that he was sent to the school because he was a dumbass. Fine, he actually claimed he was a “wise guy” and they wanted to get him in line. He also claimed that he “did very well under the military system. I became one of the top guys at the whole school.” Advertisement Jones and Coverdale refused to tell The Post what was on Trump’s transcript. “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.” Advertisement In the end, the military academy did Trump’s bidding. His transcript has been sealed and the contents safe from public view, but that didn’t stop Twitter from having a field day with the hashtag SummaCumLiar. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement and my favorite:<doc-sep>Naming a school after yourself won’t make you an academic. Photo: Thos Robinson/Getty Images Among the many revelations about Trump’s behavior that emerged in Michael Cohen’s House testimony last week was this juicy tidbit: Trump allegedly asked his fixer to seal or otherwise bury his high school and college transcripts. “I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores,” Cohen said to the House Oversight Committee. A new Washington Post report lays out how Trump managed to conceal his academic record eight years ago, just when he was beginning to blur the lines between entertainment and politics. In April 2011, in the midst of his birtherism rants, Trump questioned Barack Obama’s academic record, wondering “how a bad student [could] go to Columbia and then to Harvard.” Days later, according to the Post, the headmaster at New York Military Academy received an order from the school’s superintendent to find Trump’s school records and hide them from any inquiring journalists or opposition research teams. Evan Jones, who, in 2011, was headmaster at the academy where trouble-child Donald was sent at 13 years old, recalled that the school’s superintendent “came to me in a panic because he had been accosted by prominent, wealthy alumni of the school who were Mr. Trump’s friends.” The superintendent, Jeffrey Coverdale, also confirmed the account, saying that the board of trustees initially wanted him to hand over Trump’s documents; Coverdale refused, and moved them “elsewhere on campus where they could not be released.” As is normal with requests from Trump, the billionaire reportedly went above-and-beyond routine expectations of alumni behavior. “I don’t know if we should be doing this,” headmaster Jones said to superintendent Coverdale. But Jones went along with the request, searching through filing cabinets in a basement until he found Trump’s records, which he then hid somewhere else. Coverdale did not offer where the records were placed, nor did he identify the alumni who requested he bury the files. “I don’t want to get into anything with these guys,” he told the Post. 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.” Last week, Fordham confirmed that someone from the Trump team had called the university in the run-up to the campaign, and reiterated the threat of legal action that Cohen mentioned in his testimony. “We told the caller that Fordham is bound by federal law, and that we could not/would not reveal/share any records with anyone except Mr. Trump himself, or any recipient he designated, in writing,” a university spokesman said in an email to the Post, referring to a privacy law that restricts schools from releasing grades or test scores without permission. Trump has bragged about his performance in school, claiming he was “first in my class” in his business program at the University of Pennsylvania, although the Daily Pennsylvanian reports that his name did not appear on the dean’s list, or on any academic honors lists from his graduating class in 1968. Any realistic fan, or critic, of the president’s speeches knows that his talents lie not in reading, but in improvisation, as shown by his recent, marathon speech at CPAC, considered one of his more unhinged — or brilliant, depending on interpretation — performances at the mic. But many who have worked with Trump in recent years also contest the president’s boasts of intelligence: He was reportedly called an “idiot” by Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, Sam Nunberg, Steve Mnuchin, and Reince Priebus, and, notoriously, a “fucking moron” by former secretary of State Rex Tillerson.<doc-sep>
President Donald Trump appears to have gone the extra mile to ensure that his academic records are buried from public view through alleged threats and his former attorney and "personal fixer" Michael Cohen. Last week, Cohen told a House Committee that Trump directed him "to threaten his high school, his colleges and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores" during the 2016 presidential campaign. In a letter Cohen sent to school administrators in 2015, shown to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, he vowed to hold them liable to "the fullest extent of the law" if they did not comply. Evan Jones, the former headmaster at New York Military Academy, a boarding school that the president attended from age 13 until he started at Fordham University, remembers receiving a similar order in 2011, days after Trump called on then-President Barack Obama to "show his records" to demonstrate he wasn't a "terrible student." "[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," Jones told the Washington Post. "He said, 'You need to go grab that record and deliver it to me because I need to deliver it to them.'" Jeffrey Coverdale, the superintendent, told the Post he was instructed to hand over Trump's records to members of the school's board, but he declined. "I was given directives, part of which I could follow but part of which I could not, and that was handing them over to the trustees," he said. "I moved them elsewhere on campus where they could not be released. It's the only time I ever moved an alumnus's records." New York Military Academy graduate Richard Pezzullo, who worked with school officials, recalls that the request sparked hysteria within the institution. "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," he told the Post. "People had been making inquiries, and there was a paramount interest in securing those records." Both Coverdale and Jones refused to declined to disclose information contained in the transcripts, according to the Post. It is also unclear whether the intitial request to hide the transcripts came from Cohen. The White House did not immediately respond to Newsweek's request for comment.