President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused Georgetown University’s law school of canceling graduation ceremonies five years ago as a way to avoid highlighting his daughter Tiffany’s academic success and not because it was the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Trump was in the middle of a rambling, off-script appearance at a Saudi-U.S. investment forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington when he began calling out to audience members, including his youngest daughter.
He noted that Tiffany was present with her husband, Michael Boulos, and claimed she had been a “great student” at Georgetown University Law Center, where she had been a member of the Class of 2020.
“She finished really right at the top and we were proud of you. And she was so proud, and her graduation got canceled because of Covid — but I say if her name was something else, they probably wouldn‘t of canceled it,” he said.
“They didn‘t like that she did so well in school. They weren‘t happy about it,” he continued, adding moments later that Georgetown had “canceled” the graduation ceremony because Tiffany had been “a great student.”
Although Tiffany Trump graduated from the Georgetown University Law School with a Juris Doctor degree that year, a review of the school’s online records by The Independent found that she did not earn cum laude honors with her degree, nor was she listed as being part of her class’ Order of the Coif honorees — a legal educational honor afforded to the top ten percent of law school classes.
The president’s youngest daughter was also not named on a roster of students who were part of the school’s various law reviews and legal journals.
Georgetown was also one of the countless American universities and secondary schools that moved to virtual instruction at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 to avoid the risk of students gathering in large groups and spreading the then-novel coronavirus, for which no treatment or vaccine would be available until much later in the year.
According to the school’s student newspaper, The Georgetown Voice, Georgetown’s class of 2020 graduated virtually in a series of online ceremonies starting on May 13, 2020 and ending on May 17, 2020.
The law school’s graduation ceremony took place on May 16 as part of what the student newspaper called “Conferral of Degrees in Course unto graduates of all Main Campus, Medical, and Law Center programs.”
At the time, university president John DeGioia said it was “a source of consolation and inspiration” that the students had “accepted responsibility for caring for everyone around you” and pledged to hold an in-person ceremony to honor Class of 2020 graduates at a later date.
