Thursday, March 20, 2025
Donald Trump at Wharton: Fact Checking the President’s Time at Penn
Fact-Checking All of the Mysteries Surrounding Donald Trump and Penn
"Why is everything about Trump’s time at Wharton shrouded in secrecy? We set out to uncover the truth.
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What do we really know about Donald Trump at Wharton? We examined the facts. Locust Walk photo courtesy University of Pennsylvania; Trump photo by Tasos Katopodis/Stringer/Getty Images
It was, it can be said without fear of exaggeration, a day that will live in infamy. When President Donald Trump emerged from his mysterious one-on-one summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July of 2018, the respective visages and body language of the two world leaders could not have been further apart. The Russian president looked smug and sated, like a vampire with a bellyful of peasant blood; Trump looked like a man who’d just received a painful enema. Or, as grizzled, now-banished White House aide-de-camp Steve Bannon describes it in Siege, Michael Wolff’s decadent and depraved follow-up to 2018’s Trumpworld tell-all Fire And Fury, “like a beaten dog.”
Speculation within Trump’s inner circle was that Putin must have something on Trump. The pee tape? Evidence that Don Jr. tried to buy Hillary’s emails? His tax returns? Nah. As Bannon told Wolff, “nobody gives a fuck” about that stuff. But, he wondered, “What if they have his college transcript?”
Ahh, the college transcript. Trump famously graduated from Penn’s Wharton School in 1968 — a fact he reminds audiences of over and over again. (Per Penn’s student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, he publicly name-dropped Wharton 52 times between June 2015 and January 2018.) But despite all his humblebragging about that Wharton degree, Trump has never allowed his academic performance there to be made public.
“This was a major, major thing with Trump — that people might think he’s stupid,” Michael Wolff told me around the time of Siege’s publication earlier this summer. “The focus of that for Trump is the college transcripts, which are apparently terrible. I’ve spoken to friends of Trump from that time, and this was a guy that was obviously not interested in school and possibly never read a book in his life. For everyone that had known him then and years afterward, the assumption was that he had terrible grades, he was a lackluster student at best.”
In truth, Trump’s Wharton GPA is just one of many mysteries surrounding the 45th president’s relationship with Penn, Philadelphia’s most powerful private institution, which, unwittingly or not, helped unleash Trump on the world. Over the years, there have been rumors about how Trump might have gotten into Penn in the first place, and how much — or how little — he’s donated to the school as an alum. There are tales about Trump’s social life as a Penn undergrad — did he, in fact, have a fling with Candice Bergen? And there are stories — including one particularly juicy one — about the Penn careers of Trump kids Don Jr., Ivanka and Tiffany, all of whom followed in their old man’s red-and-blue footsteps.
Trump’s Wharton GPA is just one of many mysteries surrounding the 45th president’s relationship with Penn. Perhaps the biggest reason for this shroud of mystery is Penn itself; the school’s sphinx-like reticence about its most famous alumnus plays at times like a silent scream.
Perhaps the biggest reason for this shroud of mystery is Penn itself; the school’s sphinx-like reticence about its most famous alumnus plays at times like a silent scream. For instance, Penn has never had Trump deliver a commencement speech or conferred an honorary degree on him. In the wake of his election, Penn tour guides were discouraged from bringing up the T-word and issued simple instructions for handling questions about Trump’s tenure at Penn: Keep it short and sweet — “Yes, he graduated from Wharton in 1968” — and leave it at that. Tell Penn you’re writing an article about Donald Trump’s time there, and you’ll get the academic version of name, rank and serial number: “Donald J. Trump earned a B.S. in real estate, which was awarded on May 20, 1968,” says Ron Ozio, Penn’s director of media relations, declining my request for an interview. Which is peculiar, given that most universities make a lot of marketing hay out of an alumnus in the White House — and Trump is Penn’s first.
So what is the truth about Trump and Penn? What’s the reality behind all those rumors? Because Philadelphians deserve answers, and because I’ve made a career out of lost causes and thankless jobs, I went on a hunt for the facts.
Mystery #1: After two years at Fordham University, did Trump need special treatment to gain admission to Wharton?
The answer begins with James A. Nolan, the Penn admissions officer who interviewed Trump and ushered his application through the vetting process, which he says he did at the behest of Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr. Nolan grew up in Queens and had been friends with Fred since high school in the mid-1950s. During an interview at his apartment on Washington Square, Nolan told me he spent a lot of time in those days at the Trump McMansion in Jamaica Estates, which he described as “very big, with lots of bedrooms” and blackface lawn jockeys lining the approach. Both friends planned to enroll at Penn, but only Nolan got accepted. Ten years later, Nolan was working in Penn’s admissions department — he would later become director of undergraduate admissions — when Fred called in a favor.
This was first revealed in Gwenda Blair’s book The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire (Simon & Schuster, 2000). “Whether that was 100 percent why he got in, I don’t know, but clearly it was helpful,” Blair told me. Blair says that at Nolan’s request she kept his identity a secret until earlier this summer, when Nolan granted interviews to the Washington Post and this magazine.
Nolan is adamant: Trump wasn’t accepted to Wharton solely on his say-so. Both the head of transfer student admissions and the vice dean reviewed Trump’s application and Nolan’s interview notes before giving final approval.
Now 80, Nolan says he found “no evidence” of Trump’s alleged “super genius” at the time. Furthermore, he says, Wharton wasn’t nearly as difficult to get into in the mid-’60s as it is today. Back then, according to Nolan, Penn was accepting 40 percent of all applicants, as opposed to its current cutthroat acceptance rate of seven percent. Not surprisingly, Trump remembers it differently. “I got in quickly and easily,” he told the Boston Globe in 2015. “And it’s one of the hardest schools to get into in the country — always has been.”
Nolan says helping Trump is a big regret. “I wish I hadn’t interviewed him,” he says, breaking into the deep belly laugh of a man who knows that at his age, nothing he says can possibly hurt him. “In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t done that.”
Mystery #2: Did one of his Wharton professors repeatedly tell friends and associates that Donald Trump “was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had”?
It’s rare for a professor to disparage the intelligence of a student, but according to attorney Frank DiPrima, who was close friends with professor William T. Kelley for 47 years, the prof made an exception for Donald Trump, at least in private. “He must have told me that 100 times over the course of 30 years,” says DiPrima, who has been practicing law since 1963 and has served as in-house counsel for entities including the Federal Trade Commission and Playboy Enterprises. “I remember the inflection of his voice when he said it: ‘Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamnstudent I ever had!’” He would say that [Trump] came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything, that he was arrogant and he wasn’t there to learn.” Kelley, who passed away in 2011 at age 94, taught marketing at Wharton for 31 years, retiring in 1982.
As Trump admitted in The Art of the Deal, all he got out of Wharton was bragging rights: “In my opinion, that degree doesn’t prove very much, but a lot of people I do business with take it very seriously, and it’s considered very prestigious. So all things considered, I’m glad I went to Wharton.”
Mystery #3: Was Donald Trump the proverbial Big Man on Campus at Penn?
Despite his braggadocio, Trump appears to have left no substantive mark in the collective memory of his graduating class. Efforts by media outlets — including the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Daily Pennsylvanian and this magazine — to locate Penn classmates with vivid memories of Trump’s tenure proved largely fruitless. He was involved in no known extracurriculars, rarely socialized on campus, and didn’t even submit a yearbook photo. One classmate, Louis Calomaris, told the Boston Globe that he remembered Trump standing up in class and declaring, “I’m going to be the king of New York real estate.” prompting eye-rolls from his classmates. “Sit down, you [expletive],” Calomaris remembered thinking.
For an article titled “Many of Trump’s Wharton Classmates Don’t Remember Him,” the DP contacted 269 of his fellow matriculates. Seventy-four responded; 68 said they had “never encountered Trump at Penn.” “Wharton was a pretty small community back then … you knew everyone. Well, except him,” 1968 Wharton graduate Kenneth Kadish told the DP. “It wasn’t that [Trump] was just not prominent, it was like he was nonexistent.” Nolan, the admissions officer, recalls: “I never saw him with another student. Always by himself. Kind of a sad sack.”
I was able to locate one classmate with something nice to say about Trump. “I knew him and I liked him, and most of the people I went to school with didn’t know him and don’t like him,” says Ted Sachs, who sat next to the future president in corporate finance and went on to a prosperous career in the financial sector. After class they would go out for fried oyster sandwiches, a Trump favorite. Not surprisingly, Trump did most of the talking. “He talked about himself mostly,” says Sachs, who voted for Trump in 2016 and plans to do so again in 2020. “He was very focused on himself, like he is today. But in a nice way.”
Mystery #4: Did Trump attempt to “date” Penn student Candice Bergen and get shot down?
Prior to flunking out in 1965, Ms. Bergen was the It Girl at Penn, elected both Homecoming Queen and Miss University. Her proto-screen-siren star power was apparently visible in the night sky from as far away as New York, because one evening, the phone in her dorm rang, and on the other end was one Donald Trump, pre-Wharton. “I was 18,” Bergen told Harry Connick Jr. back in 2017. “He was a nice-looking guy, I mean, he was. And I was in college, and it’s where he was going to be going to college. … It was like a blind date. He called me in the dorm. And I was bored. So he picked me up. He was wearing a burgundy three-piece suit with burgundy patent leather boots, and he was in a burgundy limousine, so it was very color- coordinated.” It was a short date: “I was home by nine.” She expanded on her account a few days later on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen: “He was a good-looking guy. And a douche. I was home very early. … ” She stressed that there was no kiss, “no physical contact whatsoever.” Within a year, Ms. Bergen, who politely declined to participate in this article, was a movie star on track for a storied career and never looked back.
Mystery #5: Did Donald Trump finish first in his class at Wharton, as he bragged to multiple journalists over the years?
This assertion appeared in a fawning New York Times profile of the Trump Organization published in 1973, the same year the Department of Justice sued Donald and his father Fred for housing discrimination for refusing to rent to people of color. Sample paragraph:
Donald, who was graduated first in his class from the Wharton School of Finance of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, joined his father about five years ago. He has what his father calls “drive.” … “Donald is the smartest person I know,” he remarked admiringly.
The claim was repeated in another doting profile of Trump in the New York Times in 1976. Noting that practically every article ever written about Trump in the wake of the Times profiles parroted the “first in his class” claim, the Times finally corrected the record in yet another eye-roll-inducing profile published in 1984 (“Spending a day with Donald Trump is like driving a Ferrari without the windshield. It’s exhilarating; he gets a few bugs in his teeth”), declaring that the notion that Trump finished first in his class at Wharton was contradicted by the university’s commencement program.
The program for the commencement ceremony lists the names of students who graduated from Wharton with honors — cum laude, magna cum laude, summa cum laude — and Donald Trump isn’t among them. Nor is his name included on the Dean’s List published in 1968 by the Daily Pennsylvanian. Given that colleges and universities are prohibited by law from releasing transcripts to anyone other than the student in question, and that Trump has purportedly forbidden the school to do so, we’ll have to rely on proof by omission that Trump didn’t graduate with any academic distinction whatsoever.
Trump himself finally copped to this in a 1988 New York magazine story written by Julie Baumgold. “Okay, maybe not ‘first,’ as myth has it,” Baumgold wrote, “but he had ‘the highest grades possible.’”
Mystery #6: Did Trump donate $1.4 million to Penn over the years or merely pledge to do so? Did his pledges coincide with the enrollment applications of his children? Why doesn’t his name appear prominently anywhere on Penn’s campus?
Penn pleads the Fifth. “Thank you for your inquiry,” says John H. Zeller, vice president for development and alumni relations. “We have a policy to not disclose or comment on any donors’ history or support.”
However, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, the Daily Pennsylvanian’s Luis Ferré-Sadurní did a deep dive into all extant publicly available donor reports between 1968 and 2007 — there were presumably 39 annual-giving reports issued between those years, but he was only able to locate 32 of them. Also unavailable were annual reports from 2008 to 2016. Ferré-Sadurní determined that Trump had pledged at least $1,480,500 between 1968 and 2007. However, the reports only list money pledged, not how much, if any, Trump actually forked over. That information remains a closely guarded secret. Zeller told the DP that Penn “has an exceptionally high rate of fulfillment” for pledged gifts but declined to confirm or deny that Trump followed through on his pledged donations.
“We don’t know, and we may never know,” says Ferré-Sadurní, who now covers the housing beat for the New York Times. “But a lot of the pledged donations seem to be made right around the time each of his kids was going to Penn or trying to get in.”
The only physical evidence on campus of Trump donating anything to Penn is a plaque on the wall of the Class of 1968 Seminar Room — an aggressively unremarkable meeting room with a conference table, whiteboards, and an overhead projector — tucked into the bowels of Van Pelt library. Trump’s name is nearly lost in the crowd of 27 Class of ’68 donors who chipped in back in 2003. Pretty small beer for a billionaire twice over. Allegedly.
Mystery #7: Did Trump strike Don Jr. across the face in his freshman dorm room for attempting to wear a Yankees jersey to a baseball game with him?
That’s the story recounted in a November 3rd, 2016, Facebook post by Don Jr.’s former classmate Scott Melker:
I was hanging out in a freshman dorm with some friends, next door to Donald Jr.’s room. I walked out of the room to find Donald Trump at his son’s door, there to pick him up for a baseball game. There were quite a few students standing around watching, trying to catch a glimpse of the famed real estate magnate. Don Jr. opened the door, wearing a Yankee jersey. Without saying a word, his father slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor in front of all of his classmates. He simply said, “Put on a suit and meet me outside,” and closed the door.
Melker’s post describes Donald Jr. as “a drunk in college,” a young man who “despised his father, and hated the attention that his last name afforded him.” It claims Don Jr.’s nickname was “Diaper Don” because he tended to “fall asleep drunk in other people’s beds and urinate.” (Melker’s account was denied by the Trumps.)
Melker, who resides in Miami Beach, where he’s a DJ/cryptocurrency trader, declined to comment for this story but acknowledges writing the post, which remains on his Facebook. “I was approached by Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher etc. around election time [and I declined],” he told me via Twitter message. “My personal FB post went viral when a Gawker writer screenshot it as news. I have nothing to add to it, and never intended for it to happen.” A request to connect me with others who were there that day was denied: “Been down that road before. Nobody is going to talk unfortunately.”
Mystery #8: What is known about Ivanka’s Penn stint beyond the fact that after two years at Georgetown, she transferred to Wharton, where, unlike her father, she graduated cum laude, in 2004?
Like her dad, Ivanka has been the subject of a DP story wherein nobody from her graduating class seems to have gotten to know her. Back in April of 2017, the DP reached out to 600 graduates from the class of 2004 and came up with … not that much. Most described her as “polished, hardworking and nice.” Roland Oliver told the DP: “She came to the school, and did her part, and left.”
What else? She lived in the Left Bank apartments, near 32nd and Walnut streets. Another 2004 Wharton graduate, Roman Galas, told the DP that he “saw her at Smokes’ once, sitting across from me at the bar, sipping her drink peacefully and gracefully.” She was occasionally spotted at White Dog Cafe and La Terrasse as well as in Rittenhouse Square.
A rumor made the rounds on campus that a breakup drove her from Georgetown to Penn midstream, but she denied it in a 2004 Philadelphia profile in which she described her life at Penn as “hermetic” and was characterized as more likely to binge-watch Law & Order than to trip the light fandango on the beer-sticky dance floors of the frat-party circuit. That job would be left to her half-sister, Tiffany.
Mystery #9: What do we know about Tiffany’s Penn years?
In 2012, Tiffany arrived at Penn on the heels of a brief but doomed bid at autotuned pop stardom (google “Tiffany Trump” and “Like A Bird” if you’re feeling sinister), as her father was waging his notoriously racist birther fake-news campaign. She double-majored in sociology and urban studies. According to unnamed sources interviewed by Vanity Fair, she was rebuffed in efforts to join Tabard, “a secret society that offers its members an exclusive social network,” out of fear that a scion of the toxic Trump family tree might drive away the swells.
But Kappa Alpha Theta was apparently happy to have her. Her alleged billionaire father reportedly kept her on a short leash, doling out a miserly $500-a-month allowance. Still, she managed to make the rounds of the elite-rich-kid party scene at Penn. One party boy who insisted on anonymity summed up the scene to me thusly: “You’re looking at Tiff Trump passing a joint to me, and I’m passing it to a kid who grabs it while wearing a $38,000 rose gold Patek Philippe watch and then, you know, accidentally drops the joint into his cheap red cup filled with Grey Goose. And that was a normal Tuesday night for them.”
Said party boy also noted that Joe Biden’s granddaughter Naomi, who attended Penn concurrently, was a scene fixture as well. “Tiff was even nicer than Naomi, which is kind of ironic given the parents,” he says. “Naomi thought she was hot shit. Tiff was really, really sweet. You never would’ve guessed from where she came.”
Mystery #10: Did Michael Cohen threaten to sue Penn back to the Stone Age if it released Trump’s grades?
Almost absolutely. In his televised testimony before the House Oversight & Reform Committee in February, Michael Cohen, who served as Trump’s personal attorney and fixer from 2006 to 2018, said the following about his former boss:
When I say con man, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores. As I mentioned, I’m giving the Committee today copies of a letter I sent at Mr. Trump’s direction threatening these schools with civil and criminal actions if Mr. Trump’s grades or SAT scores were ever disclosed without his permission. These are Exhibit 6. 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. As you can see in Exhibit 7, Mr. Trump declared “Let him show his records” after calling President Obama “a terrible student.”
For reasons that are unclear, the House Oversight Committee only made public the letter sent to the president of Fordham University. But given that Cohen referred in his testimony to “a letter” — singular, not plural — that he says he sent to all the schools Trump attended, along with the College Board, which administers the SAT, and the fact that in the third paragraph of the letter sent to Fordham, Cohen refers to “all of the College Board employees” (presumably having neglected to customize the missive before sending), we can safely assume that all of Trump’s academic institutions received the same letter. Amusingly, Cohen’s letter concludes four paragraphs of dire threats, including liability “to the fullest extent of the law including damages and criminality” for anyone who dares to reveal Trump’s grades, with the following:
P.S. Mr. Trump truly enjoyed his two years at Fordham and has great respect for the University.
•
There is another day that will live in infamy: On the morning of May 20th, 1968, a then-22-year-old Donald Trump — robed, slender, handsome, with a slicked-back coif of thick golden-brown locks — queued up with his classmates at the Civic Center for the University of Pennsylvania’s 212th Commencement for the Conferring of Degrees.
“The weather was beautiful, my parents were there, and it was a nice day,” Trump told the Boston Globe in 2015. “You graduate from a great school. I did well. That was the beginning, right? The real beginning was that day. … You know, I wasn’t Trump then, you understand? I was Trump but I wasn’t Trump.”
And so began his toxic glide path to the White House. First, he’d take Manhattan — armed with his Wharton degree, bottomless chutzpah, and his father’s deep pockets — and then, in due time, the world.
Published as “Trump University” in the September 2019 issue of Philadelphia magazine."
Revealed: Trump education cuts mean years of work – and millions of dollars – go to waste | Trump administration | The Guardian
Revealed: Trump education cuts mean years of work – and millions of dollars – go to waste
"Staffers at US Department of Education say severe cuts in the name of efficiency are having the opposite effect: ‘You can’t even quantify the loss’
The education secretary, Linda McMahon, presented sweeping reductions at the US Department of Education as an efficiency drive, hailing firings and funding cuts as a “significant step toward restoring the greatness” of the country’s schools system.
Staff inside the department disagree.
The Trump administration has axed many research programs which have yet to be completed, according to workers, putting years of work – on which the federal government spent tens of millions of dollars – to waste.
Nearly 50% of staff at the US Department of Education was fired last week, with more than 1,300 employees given termination notices and nearly 600 workers taking voluntary resignation offers. Offices covering research, data and statistics were decimated.
A Department of Education employee who survived the cuts likened the experience to a funeral. “People were crying, breaking down at the human toll,” they told the Guardian. “These people are not bureaucratic bloat: they’re vital to helping improve educational outcomes for our nation’s children, and to ensuring states comply with the law. It’s death by a thousand cuts.”
Staff were particularly concerned about the decision to halt research projects, years after they started, that were nearly complete.
Nearly all employees at the department’s Institute of Educational Sciences (IES) were fired, and more than 160 education research funding contracts and grants worth $900m were cancelled.
Many of the research projects were commissioned to take place over five years. “We were in year four, which means there was a lot of research that was almost done, but is now never going to see the light of day,” one fired IES employee said.
They cited one study into the early impact of a literacy program in Michigan. The outcome of the research will now not see the light of day.
Most of the money spent on such research will now “yield nothing for the taxpayers, nothing for schools, nothing for students,” the employee said. “You can’t even quantify the loss.”
They questioned McMahon’s claim that the sweeping cuts would restore the “greatness” of the US education system. “I don’t understand how you can do that when you cut an office where our only job was to figure out what’s working in classrooms, what’s not working, who’s it working for, and who’s it not working for?
“We have this roadmap for schools, we have all this information, and now we’re just taking it away and saying, figure it out.”
“These cancellations are going to have stopped research that was well on its way to helping us better understand how to improve outcomes for kids,” said Rachel Dinkes, president and CEO of Knowledge Alliance, a non-profit whose members are educational organizations. “It’s just been halted, stopped, and it doesn’t look like there’s any indication that it will get restarted.”
She cited proven success stories that relied on the kind of research being cancelled, including vast improvements in literacy in Mississippi.
“When states use evidence-based practices, student achievements improve,” Dinkes added. “I think we’re unwinding, hampering and putting speed bumps into achieving those goals.”
Joshua Stewart, an education researcher for a federal contractor since 2012, was working on research for the education department’s regional educational laboratories. Last week, he said they had to inform school districts and teachers they were working with that – midway through their work – it had been abruptly halted.
“We had to send them a series of notes saying we’ve been thankful to be your partners on these projects that are intended to improve outcomes for students and teachers, but we have to stop right away. We can’t even leave you with anything, we just have to stop,” Stewart said. “I have a hard time believing that it’s going to have any positive impact on students, teachers and families.”
A federal judge in Maryland has since ordered a temporary halt to the reduction in force firings at the Department of Education and other agencies. The Trump administration has appealed.
Attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia also filed a lawsuit last week over the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the agency.
Contacted for comment, a spokesperson for the Department of Education referred the Guardian to the press release on the cuts, which claimed that it would continue to deliver “on all statutory programs” under the agency’s purview.
Education outcomes in reading and math in the US had been gradually increasing since the education department’s creation in 1979, up until Covid-19 shutdowns caused significant disruption. Trump has made clear he wants to close the department."
Opinion | Tom Friedman: Trump Is a ‘Small Man in a Big Time’ - The New York Times
Tom Friedman: Trump Is a ‘Small Man in a Big Time’
"Nearly 60 days in, the president is failing to engage in long-term thinking.
President Trump has been operating with complete impunity and disregard for American institutions. In this episode of “The Opinions,” the Times Opinion deputy editor Patrick Healy and the columnist Thomas L. Freidman discuss the repercussions of such behavior on America’s national and international policy.
Tom Friedman: Trump Is a ‘Small Man in a Big Time’
Nearly 60 days in, the president is failing to engage in long-term thinking.Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion, and this is The First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.
This week, I wanted to talk to my colleague, Tom Friedman, about how the world we knew is being unraveled by its most powerful player, America. The American president is slapping tariffs on our friends, giving license to Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu to act with impunity and thumbing his nose at America’s judges and courts.
Tom has been the foreign affairs columnist at The Times for decades, and he has his finger on the big problems facing our country and the world. So I wanted to get Tom’s insights on how Trump is trying to reshape reality through sheer force of will.
Tom, thanks for joining me.
Thomas Friedman: Always a pleasure, Pat.
Healy: Let’s start with the economy. Trump is asking Americans to go along with higher groceries and cost of living — temporarily, he says — in exchange for a future where America will be in a stronger economic position.
We just had the Treasury secretary call this stock market decline “healthy” and say it’s better to have a market correction now rather than a crash later. And, you know, we’re both hearing the recession talk, too. But voters in November, they wanted a president who would stabilize the economy and make life more affordable.
I still think that’s what Trump will be judged on in the end. But, do you think it matters to Trump what voters want?
Friedman: Well, Pat, if you don’t build your economic plan on hard truths and solid foundations, you’re going to get a recession just for recession’s sake, and you’re not going to get a recession that clears the way for a new future.
Let’s remember what Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s White House spokesman, said the other day: that tariffs are a tax cut. Now, tariffs are many things. They can be paid by the exporter, the importer, the merchant in this country, or passed on to consumers. But there’s one thing tariffs aren’t, and that’s a tax cut. And that’s just calling black, white. Now that scares the heck out of me. Either you believe that, in which case that’s shocking, or you were told to say that, which is even more shocking. But what is for sure is that it is not true; that’s a lie. If you build your economics on a lie, it’s going to end badly.
Just as Trump said President Zelensky of Ukraine is a dictator — you can like Zelensky, you cannot like Zelensky. But if you call him a dictator, you’re building your policy on Ukraine on a lie. And that’s what worries me about these people.
Healy: That’s how they use language, Tom, right? What do you think Jerome Powell was thinking in his head when he hears that they’re calling tariffs tax cuts, or even the Treasury secretary? These people are supposed to be credible people.
Friedman: Let’s start with Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary. He was a hedge fund manager. I have zero doubt, Pat, that if he were still running his hedge fund, he would be shorting the market right now. I mean, there’s no way he would be doing this.
And Bessent to me is Exhibit A of the fundamental truth — and we’ve talked about this before — of the Trump 2 administration. Trump 1 was surrounded by buffers, and Trump 2 is surrounded by amplifiers. There is simply no buffer anymore between what Trump hears at the Mar-a-Lago bar and what becomes Treasury policy days later, or foreign policy days later.
Now, as for Jerome Powell, I can’t say for sure, but judging from everything he’s said and believed over the years, he knows how you cut the government budget, how you reduce spending, and it’s not by gutting the crown jewels of the American government, which are our institutions.
Healy: And Tom, China is watching all of this, and Trump pretends at least to say that he cares a great deal about competition with China, America’s position against China. But I find myself wondering — and you watch China closely, you visit there, you talk to officials there — how do they see this kind of long-term trajectory of what America is trying to do with tariffs, with trade, with its own economic house, trying to get it in order? And what does that look like for the future?
Friedman: Well, I’d say a couple things about China and Russia here, where they’re aligned.
Number one is these two countries spend a huge amount of money on disinformation and trying to soil the American brand around the world. They don’t have to spend a dime anymore, Pat. All they have to do is quote Donald Trump. When Donald Trump says Zelensky is a dictator, well, what does Putin have to say? He just has to quote him.
Number two, China and Putin have the exact same agenda, which is to shrink American power, keep it bottled up in North America, get the Americans out of Europe and get the Americans out of the Pacific Asian theater. Anything that does that is just perfect for them. That is their alliance; it’s to shrink American influence in the world.
Now, I happen to think that’s crazy from a Chinese point of view. What I’ve said to the Chinese is, you keep saying you’re tired of America setting the rules of the global order. Hey, tell me something: How did you do in this world ordered by America? You did pretty well, I’d say. What are the alternative set of rules on trade and commerce and intellectual property that you want to impose that you think you’re going to do better in?
China could not have done better in any world other than the world that America created after World War II. So I think they’re on a very wrong track there.
Healy: What’s fascinating, Tom, about the world that we’ve had for the last 80 years is that the country that, frankly, benefited the most from that 80-year world order, that lifted a lot of boats, was America.
You’ve written about how more people, more countries, got slices of the pie over the last 80 years, but America was the one that was always getting the biggest slice. And it seems as if Trump looks at the world and he doesn’t believe in the notion of a rising tide lifting all boats. It’s rather a “survival of the fittest,” and America wants the whole pie, not just a big slice.
Friedman: Exactly. At least half of it.
I was speaking to a friend of mine from the previous administration the other day and we were very hard on ourselves. I think my generation — I was born in 1953, so my mom was in the Navy in World War II — and I grew up covering Jim Baker, George H.W. Bush. Those are men who fought in the military. And I covered the reunification of Germany, so I was very aware of that world.
I think one of the great failures of my generation, both journalists and political figures, is that we actually didn’t teach the next generation about that world. They take the world as it is right now for granted, and they just don’t appreciate the role America played in forging this new world and the sacrifices that people made. I think it’s been a real failure of education, Democrats and Republicans, to bring along generations X, Y and Z to appreciate what is being lost right now.
Healy: I want to bring up a parallel between what the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is doing and Trump. Netanyahu has sought to fire the head of his domestic intelligence agency saying he’s lost trust in him.
When it comes to political power, I want to ask you, Tom, what happens to a country when its leaders don’t explain their actions or govern based on sound reasoning, but instead they make loyalty the most important trait?
Friedman: I’ve always said, to me, Trump and Netanyahu are brothers from different mothers, and there’s only one good thing about both of them, and that’s God only made one of each.
The real parallel with Netanyahu though, is today, this moment, is with Putin, because I think Putin and Netanyahu both understand that forever war is their friend. It’s Putin’s friend because he uses it to completely strangle any political opposition in Russia. He absolutely reinforces his iron grip on power.
The same thing with Netanyahu. Netanyahu knows that as long as the Gaza war continues, there is not going to be a commission of inquiry into his responsibility for Israel suffering the worst death of Jews since the Holocaust in a surprise attack. So Netanyahu wants the war to go on. It’s what keeps his cabinet together. Putin wants the war to go on. It’s what reinforces his grip on power.
Healy: What you’re describing could also be seen as them just saying: This is opportunity, people, with Donald Trump in power in the White House, I can act with impunity because I don’t have America or a strong world order constraining me anymore. I’m not afraid of consequences.
It gets back to the word of the week, Tom, which feels like it’s impunity — what Trump is doing on the foreign policy stage, with judges and courts in America. You have watched so many presidents act, try to act, boldly. They get constrained, they get pushed back on. Where does impunity lead, Tom? When you look at the world stage, what concerns you the most? What is actually the most dangerous dynamic for America right now?
Friedman: You know, Pat, listening to you, I’m thinking of this story, probably apocryphal — no one knows for sure — where Muhammad Ali was flying on an airplane. He was about to take off and he didn’t have his seatbelt on and the stewardess came by and said, “You have to put your seatbelt on.” And he said, “Superman don’t need no seatbelt.” And the stewardess said, “Well, Superman don’t need no airplane.”
These guys think they’re Superman, but we all need seatbelts in the end because you can’t fly. The laws of gravity will eventually prevail.
It’s not just impunity, Pat. What’s going on in Washington today is a combination I’ve never seen: A president acting with impunity, backed by a party that controls the House, the Senate and effectively the Supreme Court which are absolutely terrified of challenging Trump on any issue. Backed by the world’s richest man who can fund a primary against any of these people and who can really intimidate them with social media and launch a Twitter mob against them.
So it’s this combination of impunity and utter fear of getting in the way of it, that I have never seen before.
To me, the core failure of the Trump administration, Pat, is it’s all first-order thinking. First-order thinking says: I’m going to end the war in Ukraine and for that we have to be more pro-Putin and less pro-Ukrainian. That’s first-order thinking.
What’s second-order thinking? Second-order thinking says: If we abandon our traditional European allies of 80 years and do something we’ve never done before, sell out a country that is looking to defend and promote its liberty to a country that is promoting autocracy, if we do that, oh my God, what will other American allies do? I’ll tell you what other American allies will do: They are called Japan, Korea, Poland, Saudi Arabia. They will say that America’s guarantee to us is worthless and therefore we better get a nuclear weapon.
Then we go to third-order thinking. Well, what happens if the whole nuclear nonproliferation regime — one of the great achievements of the post-Cold War world, to limit the spread of nuclear weapons — what if that breaks down and suddenly all these countries go out and get nuclear weapons? Then what are we going to need?
We’re going to need a greater antimissile shield. And what will that cost us? A trillion dollars. So if you just stop at the first-order thinking, it may feel good for a day, but when you look at the second- and third-order effects of these things, it could be devastating.
Healy: You do wonder, Tom, whether Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, have any kind of understanding or really feel any kind of responsibility about strengthening society in the end.
Trump thinks that what he’s doing with the economy on tariffs is going to lead to a stronger domestic economic position for the United States. But I’m just not sure they see those second- or third-order effects. They’re just so narrowly focused on what they see as their own ends. So let me take the other side of this. What’s the best way to counter Trump on all these moves? What’s the counter message here?
Friedman: Well, what would a Democratic foreign policy sound like? Here’s, to me, what it would sound like: First of all, what world are we living in? Everything today that is complex is made in an ecosystem, whether it’s an iPhone, an electric car or an mRNA vaccine. That’s the world we’re living in.
Well, if we’re living in an ecosystem world, what do we, America, want? We want to be in touch with more ecosystems, and we want to make sure that the end products of those ecosystems are designed in America.
Now, let’s connect that then with hard-core foreign policy. What, then, should be American foreign policy? Let’s go back to what was going on in the world on Oct. 6, 2023, the day before Hamas launched its attack on Israel. On that day, Ukraine was trying to join the Western ecosystem, the European Union, and Israel was actually trying to join the Eastern ecosystem with Saudi Arabia, which would then anchor a kind of Middle Eastern-European Union.
Russia stopped the first, and Iran and Hamas stopped the second. Therefore, what should our foreign policy be? It should be to say to Netanyahu: You are not acting in our interest because our interest is a Saudi-Israel entente and that requires an Israeli-Palestinian entente. You are not acting in our interest.
And it’s to say to Putin: If you want this war to end, then why don’t you stop it? Because you started it. And in order to drive that point through your [expletive] head, we are going to triple down on our aid to Ukraine and make sure they have all the cards.
That, to me, is where Democrats should be. You can’t just say we’re for this and we’re for that. You’ve got to persuade voters that you have a take on the world. This is how America fits in, and this is how they fit in, and this is how it benefits all of us.
Healy: Tom, I’m thinking about something you wrote in a recent column. You quoted that famous line from President Kennedy’s 1961 speech, “Ask not what your country can do fo you, ask what you can do for your country.” And you put a twist on it, saying that under Trump’s leadership it’s, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for President Trump.”
That is the story that he is telling, the story that he is conveying. We’re heading into this future that’s based on no blueprint from the past, and it’s one that seems deeply self-centered.
Friedman: If you were to ask me, Pat, what’s the biggest thing that surprised you about what Trump has done? It’s the complete absence of any desire to pull the country together. And the complete desire to drive a completely partisan agenda.
I’ll give you a simple example. It’s the board of the Kennedy Center, this wonderful center for performing arts in Washington, D.C., that was always bipartisan, always had Democrats and Republicans. He came in and fired all the Democrats on the board and put his own people there.
It’s that “going to that next stage of where we’ve never gone before,” of “complete rule or die” politics: “When I’m in power, we get everything.” “It’s our time to eat and you get nothing.”
I think one of the many things Trump doesn’t understand, and what Democrats should be playing to, is that the most underappreciated political attitude in America today is actually the quest for unity. People want leaders who will pull us together, not pull us apart. I know division plays in 30 percent here and 30 percent there, but that’s not where the country is. And that’s why he is going to fail. Because we have big things to do, and big, hard things can only be done together.
As my friend Leon Wieseltier said about Benjamin Netanyahu, and it’s true of Trump as well: He’s a small man in a big time. Everything else is just commentary.
Healy: Tom, thanks so much for joining me.
Friedman: Really a pleasure, Pat.
Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Aman Sahota, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman •Facebook"