Lifestyle

Is Donald Trump less educated than Barack Obama?

Trump has a four-year degree from the University of Pennsylvania. His grades and transcripts are secret.

Barack Obama has a four-year degree from Columbia University, where he maintained a 3.7 GPA. He also earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude (which at Harvard, corresponds to a GPA of 3.8 to 3.9). Obama was also named an editor of the Harvard Law Review after his first year, and the president of it after his second.

Without making any assumptions about their relative intelligence, or whether or not they both actually earned their degrees, Obama is more educated, hands down.


I went to college with Donald Trump, although I never met him. The undergraduate Wharton Business School program that Trump took was the laughingstock of the University. It was a series of easy courses for the young sons of multi-millionaires to learn how to read accounting statements and freight schedules. No challenges worthy of an Ivy League University. They were mocked as “Whartonies”, but they got a Penn diploma!

Trump’s niece has told us that he paid a guy to take his college board exams for him. We also know that he has threatened the University with lawsuits if they release his grades. One Wharton professor is on record saying that “Donald Trump was the dumbest student I’ve ever had.” We have also the statements of Trump himself, like bleaching away Covid, George Washington capturing all the airports during our revolution, and hundreds of others.

Obama was a Harvard Law graduate who taught Constitutional Law. In contrast, Trump couldn’t teach anyone anything, except perhaps to avoid Trump. Just read “Art of the Deal”; although he had a ghostwriter write it for him, the chaotic shallowness of Trump is on every page.


The historical record shows that Barack Obama went to Punahou School, then got a scholarship to Occidental College, then transferred to Columbia where he majored in political science and English literature. He later enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black editor of Harvard Law Review and graduated with a J.D. magna cum laude.

Donald Trump attended the New York Military Academy, then spent two years at Fordham University before transferring to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a B.S. in economics.

On the face of it, Obama, having undertaken postgraduate study and achieved a postgraduate degree, is certainly more educated than Trump.

The real mystery is that, even though Trump attended a fairly prestigious military school (other alumni include Francis Coppola, Stephen Sondheim and Johnny Mandel) and two respectable universities, from none of them does he seem to have received anything resembling an education.

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