Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
PRETTY LITTLE LIAR
In a report exploring the fate of the former model’s caviar-based skin-care line, journalists inadvertently stumbled upon a 2013 court deposition in which she said, under oath, that she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture.
“Would you please explain to the Judge your formal education including what schools you attended and from which you graduated?” an attorney asked, according to a transcript.
“I attended and graduated from design school, from Fashion and Industrial Design School and also attended, graduated from architecture degree, bachelor degree,” she responded.
Melania’s degree, or lack thereof, has come under the microscope before.
Earlier this summer, the Republican National Convention published a biography of the third Mrs. Trump, in its official convention program, in which she was described as having obtained “a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia.”
Before her Web site was scrubbed entirely and started redirecting visitors to her husband’s page, the official bio on her site boasted the same credentials.
A number of reports, however, have suggested otherwise. Julia Ioffe, who wrote a profile about Melania that was ultimately derided by Melania herself, noted that Mrs. Trump had dropped out after a year.
The New Yorker reported the same in May, and The New York Times in July. Both publications found that Melania dropped out of college, despite her claim to have received a degree.
To be clear, it doesn’t make much difference one way or another whether Melania has a bachelor’s degree in architecture or whether she never set foot in a classroom.
She isn’t running for president, or designing anything, for that matter, so her exact accreditation means very little. It’s hard to imagine that any voter would deem her husband more fit to run the country because his wife had a design degree from a university in Eastern Europe. And Melania certainly wouldn’t be the first entrepreneur to have achieved success without graduating from college.
But the revelation that Melania may have lied under oath is concerning for two reasons.
First, it points to the Trump campaign’s underlying tolerance for playing fast and loose with the truth—from the candidate’s repeated claims to have been against the Iraq War, despite documentation of his past support for the invasion, to claims about the size of his fortune (or hands, for that matter), to ongoing obfuscation about the breadth of his charitable donations.
More troubling is how Melania, despite repeatedly indicating she does not want to be a public figure, has repeatedly been hung out to dry under the campaign spotlight. In the most high-profile incident, Melania was pilloried when it became clear that the speech she delivered at the R.N.C. borrowed lines that First Lady Michelle Obama had delivered years earlier.
A Trump Organization staffer appeared to take the fall for the mistake, but her statements still pointed the finger back at Melania (it certainly took all blame away from Trump or anyone else on his campaign staff). More recently, the campaign limelight cast a shadow on the legitimacy of her visa status as an immigrant in the mid-1990s.
Melania, who shuttered her Web site in the days following the Republican convention, tweeted in July that it had been taken down because it no longer accurately reflected her current business and professional interests.
College degree or not, Melania is sharp enough to have seen the bus coming straight towards her. It’s her husband who has repeatedly left her right in its path.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/did-melania-trump-lie-under-oath
