Saturday, October 31, 2015

Donald Trump's Prep School Educational Background and Vietnam War Draft Avoidance Revisited

Unlike most voters in the United States, ultra-rich celebrity deal-maker and 2016 Republican party presidential candidate Donald Trump didn't graduate from a high school in a U.S. public school system; and unlike many elderly right-wing Republican party voters, Trump apparently was able to avoid being drafted into the U.S. military during the Vietnam War era of the 1960's. As the 1992 book by former Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Deals and The Downfall, recalled:

"...Donald [Trump]...went to Kew Forest, a small private Queens institution...located just a few miles from the Trump home...He was...pulled out by Fred [Trump II] at the end of seventh grade and sent to...New York Military Academy...

"He went to college at Fordham...in his red Auburn-Healey 3000...After his sophomore year, he suddenly transferred to Wharton [Business School of University of Pennsylvania]...Everyone was surprised that he had been admitted since he was hardly a star student at Fordham and Wharton was a highly selective school. There he...stayed far away from the anti-war tumult that hit Penn's campus in the late sixties. He graduated in 1968...

"Somehow, with 5 years of military training and a string of cadet honors at New York Military Academy [NYMA], the baseball-tennis-squash star qualified for a medical deferment, classified 1Y after a physical exam at the Armed Forces Center in New York on September 17, 1968...In 1969, the same year Richard Nixon became President, Donald [Trump] registered as a Republican...."

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