PEERING DOWN FROM EMPYREAN HEIGHTS AT THE WORM NAMED DONALD J. TRUMP

Those of you have watched a number of Donald Trump's free form rants, as I have, will know that a good deal of his time at the podium is devoted to bragging.  There are three brags that crop up again and again as he wanders across the political landscape, like Pierre at the Battle of Borodino.  Trump tells us proudly that he is very rich, that he is very smart, and -- apparently as evidence of his smarts -- that he went to THE WHARTON SCHOOL OF BUSINESS.  [I put those last words in caps because that is how Trump pronounces them.]

When I first heard Trump trumpet his credentials as a graduate of the Wharton School, I winced in sympathetic embarrassment.  There is nothing more pathetic than someone reaching for the scraps and shards of educational respectability.  It puts one in mind of the character in Kim [is my memory accurate here?] who lists himself as "B. A. Oxon. failed."

Now the simple fact is that Trump began his undergraduate career at Fordham, a perfectly respectable institution ranked sixty-eighth in the latest list of American universities.  He transferred to Wharton after two years and earned a B. A.  -- not, be it noted, an MBA -- at that institution, which is actually ranked third in business schools behind Stanford and Harvard.

I am waiting for a debate moderator to ask Trump"  "If you are so smart, why did you go to the business school ranked third, rather than to the one ranked first or second?"  That is the sort of thing that ought to make no difference at all save to a blowhard braggart like Trump.