Trump helps AP essay writers justify the artifice of the deal

Frank Cerabino

However things sort out for our beleaguered President Donald Trump, never let it be said that he didn’t help out hundreds of thousands of American high school students — including my son.

All across the country, college-bound high schoolers have been taking those high-pressure Advanced Placement tests for courses that can both boost grade-point averages and satisfy a college credit.

Last week, one of those tests was the AP Language and Composition Exam, a test that included multiple-choice questions related to excerpts of nonfiction texts as well as free-response questions that prompted students to write essays that demonstrated their ability to “create an evidence-based argument that responds to a given topic.”

The prompt for Question No. 3 on this essay portion of the test was as follows: “The most essential skill in political theater and the consumer culture is artifice. Those who are best at artifice succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail.”

After the exam, I asked my son about how the test went.

“They wanted us to write about Trump,” he explained.

Well, maybe. Somebody who watches Rachel Maddow every night might give the top grade of “5” to a well-reasoned essay on “Donald Trump, the master of artifice.” But a Sean Hannity grader might give it a “1.”

“What happens if you get a Republican grader?” I asked.

“I think everybody wrote about Trump,” my son said.

And as it turns out, a lot of the nearly half-million high schoolers who took the test did. And we know, because they wrote about it on social media soon after taking the test.

Seamus Patrick, a high schooler in Alaska wrote on Twitter: “So we all roasted Trump on that #APlang essay, right?”

“I knew it wasn’t just me,”