Ego Maximus Mundi

A letter from the principal of Donald Trump's college to his father, Mr  Fred Trump, expressing the faculty's distress at its failure to penetrate Trump's infallibility shield.

Dear Mr Trump

I write to you with an overwhelming sense of regret regarding our collective inability to further the education of your son Donald in any meaningful way.

During my three decades as Principal here at NY College, I have encountered a range of difficult pupils; from the disruptive, the aggressive and the bone idle, to the persistently incurious and even the regularly comatose. Donald, however has initiated a category uniquely his own – one in which any real engagement proves unnecessary because he already knows everything worth knowing.

Donald attends classes not as an enquiring pupil, but as a visiting authority, there to repudiate, contradict and correct. Mathematics will be dismissed as too obvious; History scorned on the basis that he would have done it so much better and at half the cost; and English Literature rejected as either fake news or having been written by a Democrat.

Donald's ego has grown so large that it now enters the room before he does, allowing him to engage in constant interruption and denigration of staff and fellow students, free of any accountability. He doesn't answer questions, he overrules them. He treats long-established fact as negotiable. He treats expertise as suspicious and he treats his teachers as employees strangely reticent in recognising his superiority. In short, he has an unshakeable belief that he already possesses knowledge so comprehensive, that this college's only task is to admire him.

On the sports field your son approaches exercise with the strategic caution of a chess grand master. His reticence to take part is, he insists, clear evidence of advanced tactical thinking rather than reluctance. While others throw themselves eagerly into activity, Donald mostly prefers to observe from the side lines, offering loud advice on how to complete the task better and faster.

On the rare occasions he does participate, his achievements are, by his own account, legendary. He frequently recalls victories that never happened and has apparently twice been the recipient of the college's much coveted Silver Spur Award for outstanding performance. I have to inform you that spurs - silver or otherwise - are a figment of Donald's ever expanding imagination.

His contribution to college society is zero, preferring to spend his free time at the local golf course where he induces innocent members to compete with him on the course. By all accounts, a round of golf with Donald invariably includes several miraculous reappearances of lost balls and the 'taking' of twenty foot gimmies without reference to his opponent or established protocols.

In spite of our best efforts to endow your son with the skills of listening, enquiring and learning, we have been unable to penetrate his sense of absolute infallibility deeply enough for anything meaningful to register. I must therefore, for the good of everyone concerned, formally request that you seek another institution better suited to a student of Donald's temperament.

Donald is clearly at his happiest when realities conform with his vision of a compliant society; where intellect, logic, compassion and diplomacy are subservient to adolescent whimsy and thuggish tantrum. Although I find myself at a loss to recommend such an establishment, I am convinced that Donald will one day find a home for his unique qualities and reap his just rewards.

Yours sincerely,

Ivor Haddenough

Principal