Person Who Took Trump’s SATs Uncovered: Hello Joe Shapiro

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It isn’t as if anyone needed an explosive revelation from the new tell-all book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, written by Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump, to convince the world that the president is not the “stable genius” he claims to be. Many people have been left wondering, however, who the man was who took Trump’s SATs for him to get into the University of Pennsylvania, Joe Shapiro, as alleged by Mary in her book.

As it turns out, the president who claimed that windmills cause cancer and that ingesting or injecting oneself with disinfectants would kill a virus isn’t exactly smart enough to get into his college of choice. Mary Trump details his efforts to be accepted into UPenn, and specifically their Wharton School of Business, in her new book.

According to The Guardian, Trump’s niece writes that:

‘Donald worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of the class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted. To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerised records.’

Shapiro graduated from Harvard Law in 1977, went to work for a prestigious law firm, and later  worked on the legal team for Disney until 1994, when he retired due to illness. In other words, Shapiro has the educational background Donald Trump wishes he had. Shapiro died in 1999 after a long bout with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 52.

According to an article from Variety at the time of Shapiro’s death, Disney CEO Michael Eisner said:

‘Joe rebuilt our entire legal department … He had a brilliant mind both for the law and for business, and he has been much missed throughout Disney.’

Trump has never challenged reports that he graduated “top of his class” from Wharton Business School and has proclaimed himself “like really, really smart” and “a stable genius” during his presidency. However, documents and statements from Trump’s classmates tell a different story than the one Trump tells. During the campaigns, a story regarding Trump’s grades at Wharton hit the news cycle.

The Daily Pennsylvanian reported at the time that:

‘1968 Wharton graduate Jon Hillsberg added that there was no indication on the 1968 Commencement Program that Trump graduated with any honors. A copy of the program acquired from the Penn Archives lists 20 Wharton award and prize recipients, 15 cum laude recipients, four magna cum laude recipients and two summa cum laude recipients for the Class of 1968. Trump’s name appears nowhere on those lists.’

Featured image screenshot via YouTube