I once had a discussion with a man who said, about the probability that any given thing Trump says might be a lie, that Donald would lie to you about the time of day, just for the practice.

That is to say, the man lies. A lot.

The saying stuck with me over time. In the years I’ve been writing about Donald Trump, I don’t think there’s been a single other aspect of his public life that makes an appearance as a topic more that the sheer frequency and amplitude of his lying. There’s definitely some psychology to his case, and I think that — in a way that he probably won’t like — people will talk about him for a long time.

It’s probably because so many of Trump’s lies are pointless.

I mean, we get the save-your-ass lies, like “I never MET the woman” and “I had nothing to do with Project 2025.” But he lies about stuff he just doesn’t have to make up things about all the time, like it’s a compulsion. Think Sharpiegate, or Inauguration Crowd Size.

His favorite lie, the one he takes with him everywhere, however, is a personal achievement one. Even an amateur psychologist could tell you that Trump has a deep need to be admired. It’s become almost legendary in the world of golf; Trump figures with as many courses as he owns, he’d better be a pretty good golfer, and instead, he’s just known among other golfers as a guy who lies about his scores.

He probably got a lot of practice doing that lying about his grades. That’s his go-to. I bet he has a special place for his Wharton School of Business Lie in his gold-plated suitcase, for use on golf trips and at rallies and in TV interviews. This is the one where, when he starts telling it, we all go, “This one again?”

The reason it’s on standby so much is because it’s all-purpose. He can just use it to brag if he likes, or he can use it as a sign of incredulity that someone would dare question him or his motives.

In the thick of Trump’s series of indictments (mostly for a bunch of stuff he lied about), he pulled it out all the time. Just after the news of his illegal classified document smuggling broke, Trump went on a tour of friendly faces to play martyr with, including one of his favorite allies, Kari Lake.

You might remember Kari as the ex-newscaster turned failed Trump wannabe after her run at the Arizona Governor’s seat in 2022. She “Pulled a Donnie,” as I hope they one day will say, and claimed left and right that the election was stolen from her.

The two became fast friends.

And as Trump was railing against the unfairness of the consequences of his own actions, he broke out Wharton like a secret weapon: “Kari, I never thought this is what my future would look like, when I graduated first in my class at Wharton. I didn’t think they’d be indicting me and trying to call me a criminal.”

We call this one Inception, because it’s a lie about a lie about a lie. Trump:

• Absolutely didn’t graduate first in his class at Wharton
• Totally didn’t think about what his future would look like WHEN he graduated first in his class, because he didn’t, and
• 100% knew that they would be calling him a criminal one day, especially since it had already been 50 years since the first time he’d lost a case to the Justice Department (for refusing to rent to Black people way back in the day)

Here’s the reporter who was on the scene speaking to Kari Lake after Trump came and complained to her about his unfair treatment:

.@KariLake of her conversation with Trump tonight: “And he just said, ‘Kari, I never thought this is what my future would look like, when I graduated first in my class at Wharton. I didn’t think they’d be indicting me and trying to call me a criminal. But, but he’s OK with it.” https://t.co/4yL247FT9p

— Yvonne Wingett Sanchez (@yvonnewingett) June 9, 2023

Now, it’s important to remember that the reason he uses this lie so casually is because he’s said it so many times, he probably almost believes it at this point. But if you make a claim like that a hundred times, it’s eventually going to get fact-checked.

Now, he does slightly alter the lie here and there. One day he graduated at the top of his class, and the next he graduated near the top, but with honors. The alterations, however, serve only to make the lie worse: They don’t change the fundamental fact that it’s a lie, and the inconsistency makes it even more obvious.

It’s the fact that he keeps saying it, though, AFTER it being so thoroughly debunked that baffles the mind.

How debunked is it, you ask? Well, I mean, there are pictures of the graduating class list from his year, 1968, and specifically those on the Dean’s List. There were 56 of them, and Trump was not one of those 56 people. Surely the valedictorian  makes the Dean’s List, right?

Nope, no Trump there. The list was published in its entirety by the Daily Pennsylvanian and his name is not on it.

“I recognize virtually all the names on that list,” 1968 Wharton graduate Stephen Foxman — Donald’s CLASSMATE — said, “and Trump just wasn’t one of them.”

Well, what about at least the “with honors” part, if he wasn’t at the top of the class alone? It turns out they published that list, too. It’s right next to the alphabetical list of the people who just plain old graduated with a Bachelor’s degree, which Trump’s name IS on. He’s nowhere on the honors list.

Another classmate, 1968 Wharton graduate Jon Hillsberg, added that there was no indication on the 1968 Commencement Program that Trump graduated with any honors whatsoever. A copy of the program acquired from the Penn Archives lists 20 Wharton award and prize recipients, 15 cum laude recipients, four magna cum laude recipients and two summa cum laude recipients for the Class of 1968. Trump’s name isn’t anywhere on those lists.

Just for the record, and to drive the point home, all that Latin up there means something. The last one, summa cum laude, means “with highest praise.” It makes sense that there would be only two recipients. The middle one, magna, is for “with pretty high praise” and the first one, is just “with praise.”

Trump didn’t even merit a “with.”

If you’re still with me on this, welcome to the math portion. There were 366 graduating students. Just 56 made the Dean’s List. That’s 15% of the students. Students in the top 6–15% of most graduating classes are considered magna cum laude graduates.

We already scratched “THE top of his class” off the possibilities here, just based on him not being summa cum laude. Those two were the top of the class. And we really, in fairness, should throw out the Dean’s List thing too, just on account of that being an academic thing awarded during school, not AT graduation.

Now we can scratch off the top 15% of his class, because he’s not a magna graduate.

Well, what about just plain old cum laude? What do you have to do to get that? A quick peek at today’s scale says that it requires you to be merely in the top 35% of your class. I mean, that’s still good, but when does the top percentage stop mattering, and you start considering it the bottom 65% of the class on the other side of the equation?

Is it one of those “How long do you tell people how many months old your baby is before you switch to years” questions? No ma’am, your baby is not 49 months old. He’s 4.

Anyway, Trump wasn’t even in that percentile. So we scratch that off, and just to be completely fair, we take only one percentage point away from cum laude to allow for Trump to have graduated as high as possible without being on that list: He’s now in the bottom 64% of his class.

For someone as smart as he claims to be, you’d have to be astoundingly dumb to believe that was anywhere near the top. That’s less than the percentage of Americans who believe that actual, literal angels exist.

And then there’s this:

Michael Cohen says Trump directed him to threaten his high school, colleges, and the College Board to never release the president’s grades or SAT scores pic.twitter.com/TQyFEdAzgo

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) February 27, 2019

That’s Michael Cohen’s testimony under oath before Congress with a copy of the letter he sent to Trump’s schools warning them of legal action if they ever released his grades “without his permission.” And what’s messed up about that is, Wharton already needs permission according to their own legal guidelines.

Sigh.

Okay, one more thing before you go back to your daily life armed with a mountain of knowledge of how intricately Trump’s lies are woven into his everyday interactions.

This article right here, from like, a bazillion years ago, says Trump only even got in to the school in the first place because his family pulled some strings. And this was a school whose acceptance rate for his exact year isn’t known, but the rate two years after he graduated was about 70%. Today’s Wharton acceptance rate is less than 8%.

Let’s recap one more time. The Very Stable Genius™ is:

• Lying about how hard it was to get in to his school
• Lying about how he did in school
• Lying that he very specifically did excellent in his school
• Threatening all of his schools to never release his academic records or they will face legal action
• Still telling the same lie he’s been telling for 56 years.

Trump’s been lying about this one thing for longer than I’ve been alive, and that will never change, because he’ll lie about it until the day he dies. He would lie about the time of day, just for the practice.