In the wake of President Donald Trump’s action against Columbia, Harvard, which reflects his general antipathy towards the Ivy League colleges despite having studied in one of them, Trump’s former aide has revealed how the president was snubbed by the elite club when he needed them.
Alan Marcus, a business and political consultant who oversaw Trump’s public relations between 1994 and 2000, said he reached out to some of the board members of the Ivy League institutes to get Trump deliver a college commencement address or receive an honorary degree — at the time when Trump’s companies went through multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s.
“But I got essentially laughed at,” Marcus told the New York Times in an interview. “They don’t return the love to him,” he said.
Donald Trump studied at the University of Pennsylvania, but he never delivered a commencement address there. Former president Joe Biden has, and even Hillary Clinton has, but not Trump. Penn never conferred on Trump even an honorary degree.
In 1966, Trump was admitted to Penn as a transfer student from Fordham University in the Bronx. NYT interviewed James T Nolan, who interviewed a young Trump for college admission. 86-year-old Nolan said Trump was not particularly outgoing, he answered all his questions. He had a high B average from Fordham, Nolan said adding that at that time it was not very difficult to get through an Ivy League school.
Nolan said Trump was a loner on campus, and he went home to New York every weekend to do some work with his father. Ever since Trump graduated from Penn, he cited his Wharton business degree as evidence of his high intelligence, but Penn never embraced him.
Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and Yale University are the eight members of the Ivy League. Though Trump now hates them and calls them citadels of antisemitism, his cabinet has many Ivy League graduates, including JD Vance and Pete Hegseth.
