On the heels of his IQ test challenge to his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, one of Trump’s former professor’s words from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Finance has come back to haunt him.
The late Professor William T. Kelley, who taught marketing at Wharton for 31 years and had Trump in his classroom, said, “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had,” in a conversation with his close friend Frank DiPrima.
Kelley made the comment while Trump was already a public figure, but had not yet ventured into politics.
The professor “often referred to Trump’s arrogance when he told of this—that Trump came to Wharton thinking he already knew everything.” The parallels between this student and the 71-year-old man currently sitting in the Oval Office, who only this week challenged his own Secretary of State to an IQ test, are striking.
Tillerson, for his part, had reportedly called Trump a “moron.”
Unlike the current President, Professor Kelley was no moron. Per Mr. DiPrima, “Bill Kelley was one smart cookie. His text book cited above [Marketing Intelligence — The Management of Marketing Information (originally published by P. Staples, London, 1968)] — published in the late 1960s — was standard in his time in the then-new field of ‘marketing intelligence’ and the necessity of using computers and data bases to manage it.”
It seems that our know-it-all President hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years. Neither, though, has the late Professor Kelley’s assessment of him.
