Front-runner TRUTHINESS #3

     HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
     In school, Hillary is a motivated, hard-working, and all-round good student.  She participates in several sports, like swimming and baseball.  She's involved in Brownies and Girl Scouts winning different awards.  At her high school, she is active in the student council, student newspaper, and is selected for the National Honor Society.  After changing schools in her senior year due to redistricting, she becomes a National Merit Finalist and graduates in the top five percent of her 1965 graduating class.
     Hillary's family background is politically conservative (although her father is an "outspoken" Republican, her mother is quiet and leans toward Democratic views).  At age 13, Hillary helps canvass Chicago's south side "following very close 1960 Presidential election, where she finds evidence of electoral fraud against Republican candidate Richard Nixon".  While a junior in high school, she campaigns for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater.  Her greatest political influences during this time come from her high school history teacher (who like her father is strongly anticommunist and who encourages her to read Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative) and her Methodist Youth minister (who like her mother is very concerned with social justice).  It is due to this minister that Hillary, as a sophomore, first sees and meets Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Chicago's Orchestra Hall.

     DONALD JOHN TRUMP
     Donald begins his education at Kew-Forest School where his father, Fred, sits on the Board of Trustees.  At age 13, because of behavioral problems, Donald is removed from Kew-Forest and enrolled in the New York Military Academy.  It seems, as his father states in 1983, Donald "was a pretty rough fellow when he was small".  His parents hope "the discipline of the school [NYMA] would channel his energy in a positive manner".  He finishes eighth grade and high school at the New York Military Academy.  Donald participates in marching drills, wears a uniform and attains rank of captain in his senior year.
     He attends Fordham University, a Jesuit school in the Bronx, for two years then attends University of Pennsylvania for two years.  He studies economics and graduates from University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor's degree in 1968.  While there, Donald takes undergraduate courses at Penn's famed Wharton School of Business.  He is NOT, however, enrolled in Wharton's prestigious MBA program.
     How is Donald able to get into the University of Pennsylvania?  His grades from Fordham "had been respectable".  He is also interviewed for acceptance into Penn by "a 'friendly' Wharton admissions officer who was an old classmate of Trump's older brother".
     Donald would have us believe that he graduated from Wharton "first in his class".  However, "careful examination of the commencement program from 1968 'does not list him as graduating with honors of any kind' even though 'just about every profile ever written about Mr. Trump states that he graduated first in his class at Wharton in 1968'...In 1988, New York magazine reported that the idea that Trump had graduated first in his class was a 'myth'."

Comments:

• Note the difference between Hillary and Donald during the period they were each 13 years of age.
• "Trumped-up" seems to be an accurate description of Donald's educational achievements

Sources:  Wikipedia; 2011 Salon magazine; Valerie Strauss, July 17, 2015; New York Times magazine, William Geist, 1984