The University of Michigan is home to the Ford Library and the Ford School of Public Policy, which sound as if Henry Ford had shared some of his profits from the Mustang with his alma mater. Actually, both the school and library honor Gerald Ford, the 35th President of the United States.
President Ford was never elected to the presidency. On Oct. 10, 1973, Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice-president, resigned after the US Justice Department uncovered widespread evidence of his political corruption, including allegations that his practice of accepting bribes had continued into his tenure as US vice president. Under the 25th amendment, President Nixon was instructed to fill the vacant office of vice president by nominating a candidate who had to be approved by both houses of Congress. President Nixon nominated Rep. Gerald Ford of Michigan, who became president a year later when Nixon resigned his office.
There was some debate about President Ford’s decision to pardon President Nixon, but after President Ford died, “Retrospectives of Mr. Ford’s life document a gradual vindication of his decisions, from his pardon of Mr. Nixon to his support of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Senator Edward M. Kennedy presented Mr. Ford with a ‘Profile in Courage’ Award, saying that ‘time has a way of clarifying past events, and now we see that President Ford was right’ to pardon Mr. Nixon.” (New York Times 12/27/06). President Ford lost his bid for election, but, yes, history has been kind to Gerald Ford, and his college honors his memory.
This doesn’t seem to be the case with Donald J. Trump’s relationship with his own alma mater. On March 29, 2019, President Trump said, “You know, I always hear ‘the elite, the elite.’ Well, I always said … ‘they are the elite, I’m not, I have a better education than them, I’m smarter than them, I went to the best schools, they didn’t” (Newsweek).
President Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, which seems quite willing to forget the whole thing. After the election, the Pennsylvania Gazette, the school’s alumni magazine, faced with the prospect of putting President Trump’s picture on the cover, chose to highlight Alisa Kauffman DMD, a faculty member who pioneered the practice of house call dentistry,
House call dentistry is a major innovation in an aging society. It permits the infirm, elderly, and even patients with dementia to get care for gum and dental problems that would otherwise be untreated. The Trump administration is considerably less beneficial.
The current college admission scandal has emphasized the abuses of people of wealth and power in a way that any round of tax cuts can’t, but a report in the Daily Pennsylvanian, a student run newspaper (2/28/18) makes this, if anything clearer. The headline reads, “Records show that all three Trump children who went to Penn have donated to the University.” This, by itself, just means that they bought their way into the Ivy League the old fashioned way, with donations to the school.
But, the report implies that the money came, not from the Trump family, but from the Trump Foundation. According to the New York Times (12/18/18) “The foundation was accused by the [New York] attorney general, Barbara Underwood, of ‘functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests,’ and of engaging in ‘a shocking pattern of illegality’ that included unlawfully coordinating with Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.”
The Trumps did not fund the Trump Foundation themselves, but solicited donations by others, which they then spent for their own benefit. In the best known example, the Trump Foundation paid $10,000 for a portrait of Mr. Trump, which was then hung in one of the Trump Florida resorts. This violated the law against self-dealing, the practice of having foundation officers disburse funds for their own benefit. According to the New York Times (12/18/18), the Trump Foundation agreed to dissolve and the New York State Attorney General’s “office has pursued a lawsuit that could bar President Trump and his three oldest children from the boards of other New York charities, as well as force the payment of millions in restitution and penalties.”
According to a National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP survey, approximately 43.5 million caregivers have provided unpaid care to an adult or child since 2015. Probably all of them will have reason to thank Dr. Kauffman for her innovation in dental care. As for Donald J. Trump, he’s still waiting for thanks from Sen. John McCain for the senator’s nice funeral.
Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2019
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