March 12, 2019

Trump Jr. Has Some Thoughts About Felicity Huffman’s Arrest in the College Scam Scandal

No one asked for these ill-advised musings. We got them anyway.

Lev Radin/ZUMA

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On Tuesday, federal prosecutors charged nearly 50 people, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, in a damning college admissions scam, wherein parents sought to help their children secure admission at prestigious colleges around the country. The scheme, the largest admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Justice Department, allegedly involved wealthy parents paying college prep officials to take entrance exams for their children and bribing coaches at elite schools such as Georgetown, Stanford, and Yale.

The responses to the high-profile scheme were swift and furious, as many condemned the glaring privilege demonstrated by the parents charged in the alleged scam. One person, however, would have likely benefitted from abstaining from commenting on the scandal altogether: The president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who in 2000 graduated from his father’s alma mater, Wharton. (Ivanka and Eric Trump are also alumni.) But of course, on Tuesday, Trump Jr. did so anyway:

There are not enough words to sufficiently explain why Trump Jr.’s unsolicited musings on Huffman’s alleged involvement in the bribery scheme smack so deeply with a lack of self-awareness. It should also not be lost on anyone that they come as his father’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, recently testified that the president had repeatedly directed him to threaten his former schools to not release his grades or SAT scores to the public. The Trump family has also donated to Wharton fairly regularly.

We are, however, eagerly waiting on a potential response from Jared Kushner, whose father paid a cool $2.5 million to Harvard shortly before Jared was accepted to the school.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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