Filed under: News, President Obama, Race and Civil Rights
In potential GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's (pictured) latest brain fart, Trump says he doesn't believe that President Barack Obama was qualified to go to Ivy League institutions Harvard and Columbia."I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Trump said in an interview with the Associated Press. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records."
In a dialogue better suited as part of an SNL skit rather than a presidential election, Trump is now attempting to tie his illegitimate Birther Movement claims (despite a live birth certificate that proves he was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961) to President Obama's stellar education, adding:
"I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can't get in to Harvard," Trump said. "We don't know a thing about this guy. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president."
What he really means to say is that he had great boards but still couldn't get in to Harvard.
Trump attended Fordham University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania but perhaps when he applied to both Columbia and Harvard, he didn't get in. I hate to pull the race card here, but is he a little saucy that a black man got in to an institution he couldn't get in to?
I mean, President Obama graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Jealous much?
Former GOP presidential candidate John McCain even publicly dismissed Trump's ambitions for president as a publicity stunt on NBC's "Meet the Press" this past Sunday, saying:
"I think that Mr. Trump is having the time of his life. I congratulate him for getting the attention that he's getting."
I disagree with McCain on that one, though. I think Trump is dead serious about running, but because he doesn't have the political (or thinks he doesn't have the real educational) chops, all he can think to do is seize the most irrelevant topics to discuss and harp on them over and over again.
In other words, he's pulling a Sarah Palin or should I say, a George Dubya Bush? Remember when Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was turned from a war hero into a flip-flopper back in 1994? Now President Obama is going from a top-educated president, to what, an educational charlatan -- the GOP has been pulling these shenanigans for years.
Here are some questions I have:
Has Trump provided even one solution to the high rate of foreclosures in this country? Has he provided a strategy to facilitate the millions of Americans who are out of work? Is he interested in coming up with ways to improve our public school system so that more children in this country can get an education that will make them competitive with the world?
You already know the answer to all of these questions: No.
Instead, Trump wants to make his entire "campaign" about low blows and faux scandals. He should keep it up. After all, Palin was wildly popular at one point, but now, she's no longer taken seriously by anyone in politics, irrespective of what side of the aisle they sit on.
But really, someone needs to tell the big Donald, "You're fired!"