Attorney Peter Ticktin has fond memories of attending the New York Military Academy with former President Donald Trump.
“He was just a really decent person,” Ticktin told The Dallas Express. “I first really got to know him when we were both on the soccer team. We were in the same class. On bus trips with the soccer team is when we got to know each other.”
When Trump became captain of Company A, he appointed Ticktin platoon sergeant.
“He gave me the delegation of being a platoon sergeant of the first platoon of the first company,” Ticktin said in an interview. “So, we’d have to be in parade formation to march around the quadrangle and into the parade fields. It was Donald and I who would set the pace and direction because the guy who’s on the very front right of the very first platoon sets the pace.”
They were both teenagers at the time.
“Donald was the kind of guy who led in a way that nobody was afraid of him, and nobody wanted to let him down because we knew he had our backs,” Ticktin said.
Although Trump was unseated as President by Joe Biden on Election Day in 2020, he has been campaigning for Republican candidate ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
For example, Trump was a featured speaker last week in Phoenix at Clay Clark’s Reawaken America Tour and is scheduled to speak in Conroe, Texas, on January 29 at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds near Houston.
“I sure hope he does run for president again,” Ticktin said. “The world needs him.”
After they graduated from the New York Military Academy, Trump went on to become the 45th President of the United States, and Ticktin, who pursued law, wrote a book called “What Makes Trump Tick” about his time with the real estate magnate at the tony college preparatory boarding school in Cornwall, New York.
“It was a much more serious time,” Ticktin recalled. “We were boys together in American history class when we were told that President Kennedy was shot. We went through the Cuban missile crisis together. It was a different time.”
Ticktin founded The Ticktin Law Group, where he is a senior partner handling legal cases nationwide, and when he heard Trump was running for U.S. President in 2016, he was proud.
“I know who this man is and that’s why I had to write this book because there are all these things being said about him that just are so untrue,” he said. “This is a man who would go out of his way to help other people for nothing, for no reward at all, and even back then when we were 16 and 17 years old, he was that way.”
For example, Trump isn’t a bigot, according to Ticktin.
“Trump was a guy who never used the N-word when describing black people,” he said. “We lived in a world back then where people used the real N-word and it was okay to use that word. It never came out of his mouth.”
Ticktin also disputes claims by his niece, Mary Trump, that somebody else took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) for him.
“I took the SAT, too, and there was nobody there pretending to be him,” Ticktin added. “There were only a hundred guys in our class that took that exam together and there was only one exam a year. If Donald weren’t there, I would have remembered it because it was too important. If you didn’t take it, you didn’t go to college.”
