Joe Shapiro -- the man who took Trump's SATs for him
The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School is being thrust into the spotlight after it was alleged that President Donald Trump was admitted after his sister did his homework for him and a friend named Joe Shapiro took his SATs.
In a new tell-all book by the president's niece, Mary Trump, it was revealed that the Penn graduate wasn't quite the "genius" he has claimed to be. He announced he was "first in his class at Wharton," though he never was admitted to the prestigious MBA program at the school and he was never listed on the dean's list the year he graduated, the Penn student newspaper reported in 2017.
“I recognize virtually all the names on that list,” 1968 Wharton graduate Stephen Foxman told the Daily Pennsylvanian. “And Trump just wasn’t one of them.”
“If he had done well, his name would have shown up,” Foxman said.
“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. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well," Mary Trump's book details.
According to a 1980 profile in New York Magazine, Shapiro noted Trump was "bored" at Wharton.
Shapiro passed away in 1999 at the age of 52 and the New York Times biography of him describes his sterling educational career that is far from the likes of Trump's lies of being a "very stable genius." He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Penn and went on to get a law degree from Harvard with honors.
He served as an Executive Vice President of Walt Disney and "served as the company’s general counsel under CEO Michael Eisner, and specialized in the negotiation of major contracts," said Variety.
As he battled non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma he taught at California State University in Los Angeles.
“Joe rebuilt our entire legal department … He had a brilliant mind both for the law and for business, and he has been much missed throughout Disney,” said Eisner of Shapiro.
Since the news that Shapiro took Trump's SATs, NPR correspondent Joe Shapiro has been fielding questions. He is not the Shapiro who took the SATs for Trump, though his responses to questions about it have been amusing.