Friday Trump Blogging

Mid-morning update: I'm not the only one who's having fun with Donald Trump. The new issue of The New Yorker has him belly-flopping topless into a pool, possibly flattening Jeb, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie:

Issue dated July 27, 2015


Original Post:
I promise this blog isn't going to be "all Trump, all the time," but right now he and his campaign for president just keep presenting me with fun things to blog about. (Blog readers know that in the past I've made the same promise about Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin.) What caught my eye this morning is the home page of politico.com, which currently has five stories about The Donald:

The mystery of the Trump coalition
Insiders: Ted Cruz hurt most by Trump candidacy
Trump: My supporters aren't "crazies"
Trump seizes on Chattanooga shooting
Trump feuds with Perry, calls him dumb

Separately, will college degrees become an issue in this campaign? Do politicians with an Ivy League degree make the best presidents? Consider: Every president since Ronald Reagan has had one or more degrees from an Ivy League school:

George H.W. Bush -- Yale
Bill Clinton -- Yale Law School
George W. Bush -- Yale (undergraduate) and Harvard (MBA)
Barack Obama -- Columbia (undergraduate) and Harvard Law School

Regarding the two most recent unsuccessful presidential candidates, Mitt Romney has a law degree and an MBA from Harvard, and John McCain graduated from the Naval Academy.

So far in this campaign I've seen some reporting about the college-level achievements of two candidates, Scott Walker, who attended college but didn't graduate, and, no surprise, Donald J. Trump. Currently the Washington Post has an article titled, "Yes, Donald Trump really went to an Ivy League school." Although semantic nit-pickers will point out that "went to" is not the same as "has a degree from," according to the article Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1968, which included classes at the Wharton School of Economics. (Read the article here.)

Among the 17,000 other individuals currently running for president, Hillary, like her husband, has a law degree from Yale; Jeb, unlike his father and older brother, skipped the Ivy League and obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin. It would take some serious googling to come up with the colleges that the rest of the candidates attended and the degrees they did or did not obtain. If I have some time this week-end I may dive into that, or not. Stay tuned.