President Trump had someone else take the SAT for him when he was in high school, his niece, Mary Trump, wrote in her forthcoming book.
As the book would tell it, Trump, who grew up in New York City, paid someone to take the standardized test for him and got a score that helped him gain admittance to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate.
The claim is from Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, which is due to be released next week. A copy of the book was obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Trump “worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted” at the University of Pennsylvania, where he had “set his sights.” So Trump approached a friend for help.
“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,” Mary Trump writes. “Donald, who had never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.”
The White House described the book as riddled with lies.
“It’s ridiculous, absurd allegations that have absolutely no bearing in truth. Have yet to see the book, but it is a book of falsehoods,” said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
In addition, Mary Trump, a licensed clinical psychologist, wrote that the president displays all nine clinical signs for being a narcissist.
“The fact is,” she writes, “Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neurophysical tests that he’ll never sit for.”
The book, published by Simon & Schuster, is set to go on sale Tuesday, but a legal fight is being waged by the president’s brother, Robert Trump, who argues that the book violates a confidentiality agreement that Mary Trump signed nearly 20 years ago. A temporary restraining order against Simon & Schuster has been lifted, but one remains in place on Mary Trump, barring her from commenting publicly on the matter ahead of a July 10 hearing.
The book also reveals that Mary Trump was the source of confidential documents disclosed in a New York Times investigation into the family’s “legally dubious” tax schemes in the 1990s.
Last week, the publisher announced that it had already printed 75,000 copies of the book and shipped thousands of them.
