Donald Trump: Barack Obama wasn't qualified for Ivy League - Telegraph

Quote:

Mr Trump, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president's birth certificate. "I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?" Mr Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records." Mr Obama graduated from Columbia University in New York in 1983 with a degree in political science after transferring from Occidental College in California. He went on to Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude 1991 and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Mr Obama's 2008 campaign did not release his college transcripts, and in his bestselling memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Mr Obama indicated he hadn't always been an academic star. Mr Trump told the AP that Mr Obama's refusal to release his college grades were part of a pattern of concealing information about himself. "I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can't get into Harvard," Mr Trump said. "We don't know a thing about this guy. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president." Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Mr Obama's re-election campaign, declined to comment. Mr Trump has shaped himself as an ultraconservative candidate, reversing some positions he once held. He now would make abortion illegal, opposes gay marriage and gun control. He advocates repeal of Mr Obama's health care overhaul that became law last year. He wants to cut foreign aid, is highly critical of China's trade and monetary policies and wants to end the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he has got the most political traction by latching onto the "birther" movement: those who believe claims initiated by the far-right that Mr Obama was born outside the United States – despite the release of official birth records in Hawaii and other evidence. The U.S. Constitution requires that presidential candidates be "natural-born" U.S. citizens. Of late, Mr Trump has appeared in interviews on all the major American cable television networks, pushing relentlessly his message that Mr Obama needs to prove he was born in the United States. He points to his rising poll numbers as proof that Americans like what he is saying on that deeply divisive issue. "I have more people that are excited about the fact that I reinvigorated this whole issue," Mr Trump said, adding "the last guy (Obama) wants to run against is Donald Trump." Mr Trump is scheduled to travel to the early primary states of New Hampshire and Nevada this week and said he will make a final decision about a presidential bid by June.

Want to know why even people in third-world dictatorships gawp at the US political process with incredulity and a kind of can't-tear-your-eyes-away revulsion?

^^^ That.

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Meh, nobody here takes Trump seriously.

PRINCETON, NJ -- More than 6 in 10 registered voters nationwide say they would definitely not vote for Donald Trump or Sarah Palin for president in 2012, significantly more than say the same about possible Republican candidates Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, or about President Barack Obama.

--snip--

While 52% of Republicans would consider voting for Trump, 46% already say they would definitely not vote for him, worse than their attitudes toward Huckabee, Romney, and Palin. This measure of the projected voting patterns of Republicans thus does not look encouraging for Trump.

In U.S., More Than 6 in 10 Would Not Vote for Trump, Palin

And this is with most people not even paying much/any attention to 2012 yet. Which as someone claimed is why Trump COULD win, lol... American politics.

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Righteousness will always be the trap at the gates of hell

Jon Stuart had a couple of excellent cameos on Trump...

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Trump?s Diggers Should Look for Real Ideas: Margaret Carlson - Bloomberg

Trump’s Diggers Should Look for Real Ideas: Margaret Carlson
By Margaret Carlson - Apr 27, 2011

If anyone can grow up to be president, does that mean anyone who runs should be covered as if he could be president, even when he couldn’t possibly be?

I’m speaking of Donald Trump. The press is caught in a spiral, covering his possible candidacy and rise in the polls, which necessitate covering him even more.

Trump enjoys the eternal appeal of the barker at the circus, the motivational speaker, the in-your-face huckster. Not for him the buttoned-down demeanor of a CEO with a board of stuffed shirts. The huckster never has to prove he’s really successful -- Trump could be in kneecap-breaking hock, for all we know -- so long as he lives as if he is.

What’s made this brush with candidacy different than his previous ones is that he’s riding the discredited birther movement for all its worth.

Big-name Republicans, not wanting to lose the roughly 45 percent of their voters who still don’t believe Barack Obama is a natural-born citizen, talk about the issue in careful code: “I take the president at his word” (House Speaker John Boehner) or “It’s distracting” (Sarah Palin).

Not so the real-estate developer with an ego as tall as a skyscraper. Every time the supposed facts his crack team of investigators discovers in Hawaii are exposed as hokum, he doubles down.

Obama’s grandmother never said she was present at his birth in Kenya; a translator did, and it was immediately corrected. Obama’s certificate of live birth is genuine. His birth notice in Honolulu newspapers wasn’t part of a grand conspiracy to clear the way for him to be president someday.

Unappealing Roster
That Trump has ridden such an ugly horse this far is a stain on some Republicans that exposes how unappealing the roster of presidential aspirants is. One of the best potential candidates, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, said Monday he won’t run. That could mean his close friend, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, gets in. Or it could mean that Trump and other out-of-the-mainstream candidates, such as Representative Michele Bachmann, continue to drown out more-plausible, less carnival- ready alternatives. Heard much from Tim Pawlenty lately?

Trump’s ascension shows our politics are now so roiled that any outsider is appealing. When I spent time with him, in 1999, he was a harmless gadfly, pre-“Apprentice,” frustrated that he didn’t get more attention for himself and his books. He built his presidential exploratory committee on spec, as if it were a gaudy new building he would flip at any moment.

‘Loves Me’
He had his constituency -- “The guy who picks up the bus at the Port Authority, gets $50 in chips and a ticket for the all-you-can-eat buffet and takes the missus to the Trump Taj Mahal, he loves me,” Trump told me then -- and his mansions (his murals rivaled the Sistine Chapel; Mar-a-Lago was superior to the White House), and his name plastered everywhere. It just wasn’t enough.

Even after an ugly divorce from Ivana and a tabloid-hot romance with Marla “Best Sex I Ever Had” Maples, he could quickly correct for running low on family values. “I could be married in 24 hours,” he said, shining the lamp in the back of his limousine on his then-companion, now-wife, model Melania Knauss. “Is this the next first lady of the United States, or what?”

His marital status isn’t all that’s changed. This time around he’s pro-life, pro-religion, pro-bombing for Mideast oil, and anti-health care reform. (He used to support a single-payer system.) He once proposed a 20 percent surtax on Japanese imports, back when he hated Japan for the Toyotas they made the way he now loathes the Chinese for the cheap building materials they provide.

Amateur Hour
Trump is a more clownish and vulgar version of the amateurs who jump into presidential politics without engaging much but their mouths previously: the Pats (Buchanan and Robertson), moralists (Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer), and businessmen (tire magnate Morry Taylor, data-processing magnate Ross Perot and magnate-chronicler Steve Forbes).

At least some of the amateurs had a cause. Perot, whose flameout included imagined black helicopters buzzing his daughter’s wedding, ran on the idea that deficits were bad, Buchanan on “America First,” Forbes on a flat tax. Trump is running on almost no ideas at all.

That doesn’t seem to bother one high-profile conservative, Franklin Graham. The Christian evangelist and son of Billy Graham told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that the more you listen to Trump, “the more you say to yourself, you know, maybe the guy is right.”

Donald Trump, prospective candidate of the godly set. Try selling that as a reality show.

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