Donald J. Trump is dumber than Joe Bennett's dog, Blue…

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Press…

Blue understands just enough not to say

By JOE BENNETT | 4:00AM — Wednesday, 06 March2019


The presence of a possum was one of the possibilities when Joe Bennett's dog, Blue, went from
corpse to sentry in a split second.

NOW is a time of mysteries. Last week, God the sniper. This week, the conjoined dogs. Can anyone fathom these things? Answers on a postcard please (remember postcards?) to PO Box 666, The Endtimes.

I was watching Trump on television. I'm not sure why. Trump is like a public hanging: hideous but hard to look away from.

He was holding a press conference in front of 300 journalists, pretty well all of whom were his moral and intellectual superiors. Yet he was the king. As a species we get no better at power.

Trump would point at a journalist, the journalist would pose a question and Trump would fail to answer it.  His replies were emotive noise, bereft of thought and meaning, as significant as the snores and farts of my old dog. Blue, who lay stretched at my feet as if shot, knows nothing of Trump. It's a wise innocence.

Suddenly Blue woke. In an instant he went from corpse to sentry, his ears cocked, his body taut, the whole of him focused on something I could not detect. Then with a squeal of excitement he was up off the carpet, out through the dog door and away into the night.

There were several possible explanations, all of them emergencies: a possum on the roof, a dog on the deck or a hint of a suspicion of the presence of a cat within five miles. I stayed on the sofa. Trump was still burbling.

I don't think he thinks that anyone believes him. I think he speaks to reassure himself. He is so desperate for praise that he praises himself. He is so conscious of his failures that he projects them onto others. If Trump has an achievement it is that he has somehow rebuffed the world with brazen incoherence. But it can't last. Earlier that day his former legal thug had called him a conman and a cheat. And no-one was surprised.


US President Donald Trump has been called a conman and a cheat.

I could hear Blue whimpering with excitement. It had to be a visiting dog. We get a lot of them, dogs whose owners' idea of going for a walk is opening the back door. Some become regulars.

During the earthquakes I would leave car and garage open for Blue to take refuge. Often I'd find a black and white dog curled up in there with him, the pair of them trembling. And for a while a vast St Bernard used to lumber up and stick his head and mane through the dog door and survey the living room, unable to go further.

I got up to see what was happening and discovered not one dog but two — a sloppy-tongued mongrel and a whitish terrier. But, and here lies the mystery, the collar of one was yoked to the collar of the other by a leash a metre long. Why? What possible purpose could it serve? What was someone trying to achieve? I scratched my head then and I'm scratching it now, and still I come up with nothing.

When the mongrel saw me it tried to take off but the terrier tried to come towards me. The leash pulled them both up short. The dogs seemed puzzled but undistressed, like Siamese twins trying to get the hang of things. The mongrel was larger than the terrier and eventually prevailed. There was a brief confusion when they went either side of a lamp standard, then they headed back down the drive together into the warm night.

Trump was still burbling. “Blue,” I said to the dog, “the older I get, the less I understand.”

And Blue, who is a wise dog, said nothing.

__________________________________________________________________________

• Julian “Joe” Bennett is a writer, columnist and retired English school teacher living in Lyttelton, New Zealand. Born in England, Bennett emigrated to New Zealand when he was twenty-nine.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/111035429/blue-understands-just-enough-not-to-say

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Trump is like a public hanging: hideous but hard to look away from.

Now that is a classic and brilliantly-executed sneer. 

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Donald J. Trump is so DUMB that he got his “Mr Fixit” (who is now singing like a bird) to heavy Trump's old schools in order to hide their records showing what a dumbarse student Trump was…


from The Washington Post…

‘Grab that record’: How Trump's high school transcript was hidden

After Trump demanded that Obama release his academic records,
military academy officials say they were told to hand over Trump's.

By MARC FISHER | 4:27PM EST — Tuesday, March 05, 2019


A portrait of Donald J. Trump hangs on the wall at the New York Military Academy, in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. — Photograph: Mike Groll/Associated Press.

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 on 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.

“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.”

The former NYMA officials' recollections add new details to one of the allegations that Michael Cohen, the president's long-time personal lawyer and fixer, made before Congress last week. 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.”

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.

Trump spent five years at the military academy, starting in the fall of 1959, after his father — having concluded that his son, then in the seventh grade, needed a more discipline-focused setting — removed him from his Queens private school and sent him Upstate to NYMA.

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.”

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.”

He said his parents originally sent him there because “I was a wise guy, and they wanted to get me in line.”

Jones and Coverdale declined to disclose the contents of his transcript.

Those who were aware of the 2011 effort to conceal Trump's records said the request set off a frenzy at the military academy.

“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.”

The boarding school had no formal archive at the time. Jones said he combed through the basement of Scarborough Hall on the academy's sprawling campus, 60 miles north of New York City, and found the real estate mogul's transcript in file cabinets containing student records.

“I don't know if we should be doing this,” Jones recalled telling his boss. “He told me that several wealthy alumni, including a close friend of Mr. Trump, were putting a lot of pressure on the administration to put the record in their custody for safekeeping.”

Jones said he did not know whether the original request to remove Trump's records from the files came from Cohen.

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 multi-millionaires 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.”

The White House did not provide a response to The Washington Post's request for comment on Monday. Leaders of the academy's board from that time also did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did Cohen or the school's current superintendent, Jie Zhang.

The academy closed in 2015 after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but it quickly reopened after a non-profit entity led by a Chinese investor, Vincent Mo, bought it at a bankruptcy auction and said it would pay off the school's $16 million debt.


Michael Cohen, President Donald J. Trump's former lawyer, reacts after speaking with his lawyer Lanny Davis of Washington, as he testifies
before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, on Capitol Hill, on Wednesday, February 27, 2019, in Washington D.C.
 — Photograph: Alex Brandon/Associated Press.

Cohen said last week that he had sent threatening letters to Trump's schools, warning that “we will hold your institution liable” if any of his records were released. 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.

In 2011, when the military academy was asked to secure Trump's records, he had not entered politics formally. But he was considering challenging Obama in the 2012 election and had been making the rounds on TV, stepping up his criticism of the president, including insinuating that Obama was not qualified for admission to Columbia, where he finished his undergraduate degree, or Harvard, where he went to law school and graduated magna cum laude. During the 2012 campaign, Trump offered to donate $5 million to charity if Obama released his college transcripts.

At New York Military Academy, the decision to remove Trump's records from the files was unique, said Jones, a management consultant who served as headmaster from 2010 to 2011. “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.”

Coverdale, who was the school's superintendent from 2010 to 2013 and is now a public school administrator in Florida, said he does not know what happened to Trump's file after he left the academy in 2013.

The school's willingness to move the records stemmed from Trump's special status and the school's precarious position at the time, according to several academy graduates and former staff members.

The academy, founded in 1889, has had a mixed relationship with Trump through the years.

The school was in debt, and was openly discussing selling its 113-acre campus and shutting down, when a group of graduates and others trying to save the school visited Trump at his Manhattan office in 2010. The group was seeking a $7 million donation that they hoped to use to raise an additional $30 million from graduates and other sources.

The meeting did not go well.

First, Pezzullo, Trump's fellow graduate, spilled a glass of Diet Coke on Trump's cream-colored carpet, which caused Trump to blurt an expletive, according to two participants in the meeting.

Then, according to Pezzullo, when the school's graduates made their pitch, Trump responded by asking, “What do I get for my $7 million?”

The military academy was prepared to offer to name a summer program, a building or potentially even the school itself after Trump, according to academy officials.

But Trump said no investment in the school was worthwhile. “It's not a good business proposition,” he said, according to Pezzullo. “The school has had a good run.”

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.

__________________________________________________________________________

• Michael E. Miller and Karen Heller contributed to this report.

• Marc Fisher, a senior editor of The Washington Post, reports and writes on a wide range of topics. He has been the enterprise editor, local columnist and Berlin bureau chief, among other positions, over 30 years at the paper. Fisher wrote several Washington Post articles that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014. Fisher previously wrote The Post's local column and a blog, “Raw Fisher”. Earlier, he was the paper's special reports editor, wrote about politics and culture for the Style section, served as Central Europe bureau chief on The Washington Post's Foreign staff, and covered D.C. schools and D.C. politics for the Metro section, where he was also an assistant city editor. His history of radio since the advent of television, “Something in the Air: Radio, Rock and The Revolution That Shaped a Generation” (Random House, 2007), traces radio’s role in the nation’s popular culture from 1950 to the present, focusing on how old media adapt when new technologies burst onto the marketplace. While writing that book, he was a visiting scholar at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. He was also Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Fisher is the author of “After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History” (Simon and Schuster, 1995). The book is a reporter's view of Germany after reunification, focusing on the country's struggle with its history during a century of trauma and aggression. The book stemmed from Fisher's four years reporting in Germany, beginning with the dramatic events of autumn 1989.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • VIDEO: Cohen on Trump's SAT scores

 • Cohen says he ‘threatened’ schools over possible release of President Trump's SAT scores or grades

 • Michael Cohen's explosive opening statement about Trump, annotated

 • ‘Racist’, ‘con man’: Cohen assails Trump before Congress

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/grab-that-record-how-trumps-high-school-transcript-was-hidden/2019/03/05/8815b7b8-3c61-11e9-aaae-69364b2ed137_story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from The Washington Post…

The Fix: The extensive effort to bury Donald Trump's grades

Last week, Michael Cohen revealed that he threatened academic institutions not
to release Donald Trump's school records. Turns out, he might have undersold it.

By AARON BLAKE | 4:57PM EST — Tuesday, March 05, 2019


Michael Cohen, President Donald J. Trump's former personal attorney, testified on Wednesday, February 27, before the House
Oversight and Reform Committee. — Photograph: Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse.

LAST WEEK, Michael Cohen revealed that he threatened academic institutions not to release Donald Trump's school records. Turns out, he might have undersold the effort.

The Washington Post's Marc Fisher just broke the news that the New York Military Academy, which Trump attended as a boy, moved its Trump files to a more secure location amid pressure from moneyed Trump allies. The school didn't accede to these allies' requests that the documents be turned over. But citing financial ailments and worried about legal action, it did help ensure they'd never see the light of day.

The timing of this new revelation is the most notable. Cohen last week submitted a letter he wrote threatening Fordham University with legal action if Trump's records were released. That was in 2015, when Trump was about to run for president.



But this newest effort is actually from 2011, when Trump was considering challenging Barack Obama in his 2012 re-election race. That actually places it much closer to when Trump was routinely attacking Obama for not releasing his own academic records. (Trump all but abandoned the attack by 2015 and 2016 because of its declining utility against a lame-duck president.)

And according to Fisher, it came within days of when Trump called Obama a “terrible student” and suggested he shouldn't have been able to get into the schools he did.

“I heard he was a terrible student — terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” Trump told the Associated Press in late April 2011. “I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”



The day after the Associated Press story published, The Telegraph posted video of a Trump interview in which he said the same thing. While Trump first brought Obama's academic records up in the context of potential affirmative action, he would later suggest, also without evidence, that they might include something revelatory about Obama's birth place.

The hypocrisy is obviously thick here. But what's perhaps more notable is just how exhaustive the effort to bury Trump's academic records seems to have been. It's apparently something that spanned two different presidential campaign cycles and was undertaken almost immediately as Trump began talking about Obama's grades.

In his testimony, Cohen seemed to restrict the effort to bury Trump's grades to the 2016 campaign. He suggested his 2015 efforts were hypocritical in light of Trump's 2011 comments, but he didn't allude to any 2011 efforts.

“The irony wasn't lost on me at the time that Mr. Trump in 2011 had strongly criticized President Obama for not releasing his grades,” Cohen said. “As you can see in Exhibit 7, Mr. Trump declared, ‘Let him show his records’, after calling Obama a terrible student.”

It's not clear who exactly was involved in the efforts to lean on the New York Military Academy. The school's then-superintendent, Jeffrey Coverdale, declined to say who applied pressure. But the school's then-headmaster Evan Jones said the people were “prominent, wealthy alumni of the school who were Trump's friends.” And it's difficult to believe such a concerted effort would be undertaken by anyone without some nudging from Trump. This was clearly something he was interested in concealing, as Cohen's 2015 letter to Fordham indicates.

It's hardly the first example of Trump attacking others for things that could just as easily get turned around on him. But it does appear a particularly rich one. Trump could perhaps argue that he had no duty to release his grades in 2016 since Obama never did. But the fact that there was an effort to hide Trump's own grades even as he was attacking Obama on this topic suggests Trump never intended to abide by his own standard.

__________________________________________________________________________

• Aaron Blake is senior political reporter for The Fix at The Washington Post. A Minnesota native, he has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Hill newspaper.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/05/extensive-effort-bury-donald-trumps-grades