Philadelphia, PA—
After several years of opaqueness, the Wharton School of the University of Philadelphia has finally released President Donald Trump’s academic records.
Mr. Trump graduated from the university’s business school, and has long boasted of his grades in campaign events and casual conversations. However, the publishing of his transcript reveals he was last in class in virtually every course he took, except, surprisingly, one poetry class.
“Donald Trump was a real dumbf***,” explained one of Trump’s Business professors, Dr. Walt Winters, 91. “I remember him vividly all these years later. His written essays about economics always clearly exhibited his not knowing anything. A real dunce. The chapter in the book about tariffs and trade wars he obviously didn’t understand. When I assigned the class a paper on what business they dreamed of starting, he wrote about how he’d start a beauty pageant to sneak in on the changing rooms. He actually wrote that in his paper. But I guess, to his credit, he did make that dream come true. But his test scores were always single digits. He could not seem to retain any facts. One time I remember very clearly he turned in an exam with a bunch of different doodles of breasts in the margins, and half the answers empty. But other times he’d turn in failing exams with strangely articulate poems on the back of pages that just made no sense juxtaposed with his otherwise clear lack of intellectual curiosity about anything covered in class.”
Trump’s poetry professor, Stephen Jacobs, 94, remembers Trump being surprisingly philosophical in his poetic submissions to Wharton’s annual english department poetry contest.
“I actually kept one of his poems all these years,” Jacobs said. “And boy does it sound weird today knowing how Donald Trump ran for president pandering to Christians. But prepare yourself, because I think it reveals facets of Donald Trump you would not expect. It’s got all kinds of nuances and subtleties, nothing like how he communicates today. It’s like he’s some kind of idiot savant when it comes to poetic journaling. He should have stuck with literature instead of business. And certainly not gone into politics, for America’s sake. Here, I’ll show you. I swear to God this is Donald Trump’s poem.”
Donald Trump wrote this when he was 21-years-old:
The Thing About Jesus
by Donald J. Trump, 1968
The thing about Jesus
is that he’s billed as the savior of all mankind
because he died on a cross as if it were some ultimate death
in sacrifice for our sins
but let’s be honest—
being crucified
as far as punishments go
isn’t really that bad—
like for sure it sucks
but
there are much worse ways to die than being nailed to a cross.
like prometheus of another mythology
who is chained to a mountain and every single day an eagle comes
and tears out his organs with its beak
and it has been happening for thousands of years
and it happened today and yesterday
and all throughout the 50s
and is going to happen tomorrow
and the day after
and so on forever.
In fact
to hype up Jesus’s torture and then stick with a measly cross
is merely unimaginative
and his suffering lasted several hours
though as far as historical crucifixions go
that’s nothing
for plenty of condemned Roman victims.
Beyond wood beams humans have invented worse
like cooking each other in bronze bulls
where the metal burns you
and adds insult to injury
while the sound of your screams makes music from a horn
so your death is entertaining for your torturers
as they sip their digestifs in the banquet room.
Being strangled is another crazy way to go out
maybe it’s shorter
but talk about an aggressive way for Jesus to die
rolling on the ground being strangled by Judas for sixteen minutes
until he passes out and then maybe gets his face and skull
stomped on for several minutes like the mob does.
Being drawn and quartered maybe sounds worse
torn to pieces for offense against the crown,
it wasn’t a very Jesusy kind of thing for medieval Christians to do.
Or wasting away through months of Nazi Auschwitz medical torture
and losing your mind waiting to die on wooden planks
with a bit of water and black bread until you waste away.
Or growing weak from cancer denied a health insurance claim
for your chemo dying for being poor
or drafting into a pointless and unwinnable war
in a country whose independence your occupation efforts are betraying
or getting captured and beheaded on live television
for committing crimes of journalism
or being chased through swampy woods for a week
somewhere deep in Louisiana
and beat and lynched for talking to a white woman.
What if Jesus had died of starvation slowly on the cold street
in a town whose charitable impulses
were banned with civic laws criminalizing feeding the homeless?
I guess I don’t know what I’m trying to get at
but perhaps we fetishize the suffering of our prophets
to ignore the suffering of the living.
* * *
“Aren’t you surprised?” asked Jacobs. “It truly blew my mind. I showed it to Trump’s business professors when he turned it in, and it floored them, too.”
Jacobs showed the poem to Professor Winters, who kept a copy as well.
“I wouldn’t have believed it, except I could see it was in Donald Trump’s distinctive handwriting,” Winters said. “Even back then he wrote everything with a sharpie, and, instead of taking notes during lectures, he would practice signing his signatures, which really distracted the class because he’d scribble it over and over quick and loudly, and every time he finished a notebook page full of signatures he’d tear it out, hold it up, and then circle his favorite ones. I was always having to tell him to pay attention, but he’d whine in front of the whole class that I was treating him unfairly by not giving him A’s, and that the school’s faculty was rigged against him. Like I said earlier, a total dumbf*** beyond his inexplicable poetic musings.”
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