NEW YORK (Legal Newsline) - When Peter Ticktin was a student at the New York Military Academy with Donald Trump, he never dreamed that his schoolmate would one day become the 45th president of the United States.
“It wouldn’t have been seen as realistic back then,” Ticktin told Legal Newsline. “It was a much more serious time. 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.”
While Donald Trump went on to become a real estate magnate, Ticktin pursued law and has since written a book called What Makes Trump Tick about his time at the New York Military Academy where Trump appointed him to be a platoon sergeant.
"He was just a really decent person," he said. "Donald was the kind of guy that led in a way that nobody was afraid of him, and nobody wanted to disappoint him. Nobody wanted to let him down because we knew he had our backs."
Ticktin disputes the claim by Mary Trump, Trump's niece, 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," he said. "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."
Ticktin also disputes allegations that Trump is a bigot.
“Trump was a guy who never used the N word when describing black people,” he said. “We lived in a world where people used the real N word and it was okay to use that word. It never came out of his mouth.”
Ticktin founded The Ticktin Law Group where he is a senior partner handling legal cases nationwide. One of his recent tasks involved helping Jim Batsian, a South Florida commercial real estate developer, secure a presidential pardon.
“I did manage to get the pardon to Donald,” he said. “I'm pretty sure it would have gone immediately from him to the committee he had set up for pardons. It's not like he's going to read what I send him. It's not like he's not busy but I did send it on and I think Donald knows me well enough to know that I wouldn't send something like that unless I had a personal belief in and support of it. I didn't do it for a fee. I did it because I realized that Jim Batsian was a good man doing good things.”
Batsian was pardoned in December 2020 by Trump after he served eight months in federal prison for failing to pay the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) $250,000.
“He has some very creative ways of getting people off the street and back into life that are just absolutely amazing,” Ticktin said.
Trump, in the meantime, has been campaigning for Republican candidates ahead of the midterm elections.
“I sure hope he does run for president again,” Ticktin said. “The world needs him.”
Trump was a featured speaker recently in Phoenix at Clay Clark's Reawaken America Tour and is scheduled to speak in Conroe, Texas on Jan. 29 in at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds near Houston.
“He has a better chance in 2024 than he did in 2020 because he's not stepping on anybody's toes,” Ticktin said. “He's out of power. So, Russia, Iran and especially China are not going to be as motivated to interfere in the election and there isn't this swell of hatred that's being advanced every day by the media because he is not there.”
However, if Trump does throw his hat back into the ring, he could face funding challenges, according to Ticktin.
“There are many people who are afraid to even make a donation now,” he said. “People are afraid of the new administration because they believe that the criminals have taken over and that there will be retribution. So, you have all these people who were donors last time but are afraid to donate this time. We know that Biden couldn’t have stolen the election himself because he's not competent to do anything but, meanwhile, whatever is behind Biden is what people are afraid of.”