Opinion | What Trump?s secret school records tell us about 2016 and 2020

But it’s actually an important part of the story of this entire era, of Barack Obama and the racial backlash that put Trump in the White House, a backlash that is ongoing and will feature prominently in the 2020 campaign.In one of the more colorful moments in Cohen's recent testimony before the House, the former Trump factotum explained how his boss ordered him to contact his high schools and colleges and deliver a threat: If Trump's transcripts or test scores were ever to see the light of day, there'd be trouble.Fordham University, which Trump attended before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, soon confirmed that it did indeed receive a threatening letter from Cohen, as did the New York Military Academy, where Trump went to high school. People who are actually smart don't go around telling you how smart they are, but Trump regularly feels it necessary to proclaim himself a genius; here's a representative stream-of-consciousness soliloquy from 2016, which actually began as a rumination on nuclear weapons:Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world.The subtext of Trump’s repeated claims to genius and his criticisms of Obama was that electing him would replace the falsely intelligent and undeserving president (Obama) with an actually intelligent and deserving president (himself).By 2016, that was a message the conservative base was eager to hear.