Posted on 02/27/2016 12:19:21 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Many people believe that higher education is a de facto scam. Trump University, Donald Trump's real-estate institution, was a de jure one.
First thing first, Trump University was never a university. When the "school" was established in 2005, the New York State Education Department warned that it was in violation of state law for operating without a NYSED license. Trump ignored the warnings. (The institution is now called, ahem, "Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.") Cue lawsuits.
Trump University is currently the defendant in three lawsuits - two class-action lawsuits filed in California, and one filed in New York by then-attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who told CNN's New Day in 2013: "We started looking at Trump University and discovered that it was a classic bait-and-switch scheme. It was a scam, starting with the fact that it was not a university."
Trump U "students" say the same. In his affidavit, Richard Hewson reported that he and his wife "concluded that we had paid over $20,000 for nothing, based on our belief in Donald Trump and the promises made at the [organization’s] free seminar and three-day workshop." But "the whole thing was a scam."
In fact, $20,000 is only a mid-range loss. The lead plaintiff in one of the California suits, yoga instructor Tarla Makaeff, says she was "scammed" out of $60,000 over the course of her time in Trump U.
How could that have happened? The New York suit offers a suggestion:
The free seminars were the first step in a bait and switch to induce prospective students to enroll in increasingly expensive seminars starting with the three-day $1495 seminar and ultimately one of respondents’ advanced seminars such as the "Gold Elite" program costing $35,000.
At the "free" 90-minute introductory seminars to which Trump University advertisements and solicitations invited prospective students, Trump University instructors engaged in a methodical, systematic series of misrepresentations designed to convince students to sign up for the Trump University three-day seminar at a cost of $1495.
The Atlantic, which got hold of a 41-page "Private & Confidential" playbook from Trump U, has attested to the same:
The playbook says almost nothing about the guest speaker presentations, the ostensible reason why people showed up to the seminar in the first place. Instead, the playbook focuses on the seminars' real purpose: to browbeat attendees into purchasing expensive Trump University course packages.
To do that, instructors touted Trump's own promises: that students would be "mentored" by "handpicked" real-estate experts, who would use Trump's own real-estate strategies. Here’s Trump making the pitch himself:
But according to the New York complaint, none of the instructors was "handpicked" by Trump, many of them came from fields having nothing to do with real-estate, and Trump "'never' reviewed any of Trump University's curricula or programming materials." The materials were "in large part developed by a third-party company that creates and develops materials for an array of motivational speakers and seminar and timeshare rental companies."
Furthermore, Trump's promises that the three-day seminar ($1,495) would include "access to 'private' or 'hard money' lenders and financing," that it would include a "year-long 'apprenticeship support' program," and that it would 'improve the credit scores' of students were empty.
Those empty promises are the subject of a new series of anti-Trump ads by superPAC American Future Fund:
According to Bob, "I never heard from anybody about giving me a list of hard-money lenders":
Kevin, another Trump U "student," says Trump University "ruined" his credit score:
And according to Sherri, a single mother who participated in Trump U: "It was all supposedly supervised by Donald Trump, run by Donald Trump. All of it was just a fake."
In fact, Sherri isn't alone. No student ever met the Donald. Despite hints from Trump University instructors that Trump was "going to be in town," "often drops by," or "might show up," he never did. As Matt Labash recounted in The Weekly Standard: "At one seminar, attendees were told they’d get to have their picture taken with Trump. Instead, they ended up getting snapped with his cardboard cutout." Bob.., had such an "opportunity":
There could be many more ads to come. The New York lawsuit alone represents some 5,000 victims.
Meanwhile, Trump - who maintains that Trump University was "a terrific school that did a fantastic job" - has tried to bully his opponents out of the suit. Lawyers for Tarla Makaeff have requested a protective order from the court "to protect her from further retaliation." According to court documents, Trump has threatened to sue Makaeff personally, as well as her attorneys. He's already brought a $100 million counterclaim against the New York attorney general's office.
But it's not working. Trump himself will have to take the witness stand in San Diego federal court sometime during the election season - and because of the timeline of the cases, a "President Trump" would be embroiled in these suits long after November.
Meanwhile, if there is any doubt that Trump U was designed to be a scam, The Atlantic puts that to rest with a few other choice tidbits from that "Private & Confidential" playbook used by Trump presenters:
Every university has admission standards and Trump University was no exception. The playbook spells out the one essential qualification in caps: "ALL PAYMENTS MUST BE RECEIVED IN FULL." Basically, anyone with a valid credit card was “admitted” to Trump University....
If a member of the media happened to approach the registration table, Trump staffers were instructed not to talk to him or her under any circumstance. "Reporters are rarely on your side and they are not sympathetic," the playbook advises.
And:
At one point, the playbook advises Trump staffers: "If a district attorney arrives on the scene, contact the appropriate media spokesperson immediately."
Sounds legit.
It’s like any other scam, greed is appealed to, reason is suspended and money is entrusted to untrustworthy people.
The way he was all buddy-buddy with Rubio at the debate. And how he basically sung praises of Rubio afterwards, declaring him not an enemy but a friend, as well as presidential material:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el5FEujGi50#t=291
I don’t believe anyone should be praising an empty cretin like Rubio under any circumstances, and Ted lost my respect for doing so.
Yet you have no problem with the man who cozied up with Bill and Hill and donated big bucks to their causes - causes 100% opposed to ours.
Interesting.
Trump:
"I'm going to make America GREAT AGAIN! We're going to be WINNING all the time!"
Trump:
Art of the Deal:
The final key to the way I promote is bravado.
I play to people's fantasies.
People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do.
That's why a little hyperbole never hurts.
People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.
I call it truthful hyperbole.
It's an innocent form of exaggeration
and a very effective form of promotion. - Source
Never said I didn’t have problems with Trump.
I’m still voting for Trump! :-D
Always rough when people part with their money - but Trump University taught them A GREAT LIFE LESSON - which is that big money simply DOES NOT COME EASY.
So, for these people LOOKING FOR A QUICK SCORE, they now know it’s not that easy, and hopefully they go back to their old careers, having learned a MAJOR LIFE LESSON for very little money (relatively speaking).
Fair enough. Just so I better understand your position, how would you feel about someone-anyone-who praises Barack Obama?
Credibility kind of went down the tubes about there.
That’s why it was rebranded.
You can get rich in real estate but it takes initiative, risk and lots of hard work.
If you think you’re going to get rich sitting down and doing nothing, you won’t make money.
If you get the tools to make money you have to put them to work.
And no one will ever guarantee you make money.
And Hillary "believes she's never lied."
We are so screwed.
“As an example, the house is being foreclosed. You go see your bank - maybe you can make a deal, maybe you can’t. But you can make a deal with a bank on another house, Larry, because - and much better than the one you’re living in. And they’ll take back financing. They’ll do any deal to get rid of their product.”
Maybe that works for billionaires, but I doubt the rest of us could expect a better house we still can’t pay for.
But Ted fully lost me after witnessing him cozying up to Rubio these past few days.
Obviously we are on different planets.
Obama is obviously far worse than Rubio. Does that clarify?
So, for these people LOOKING FOR A QUICK SCORE, they now know it’s not that easy, and hopefully they go back to their old careers, having learned a MAJOR LIFE LESSON for very little money (relatively speaking).
Honestly speaking, if Trump scams his way into the White House (more probably gives us President Hillary) that will be the "GREAT LIFE LESSON" you're praising, the "QUICK SCORE" that you envision for America.
You sound like a time share pitchmen, fresh from a day of signing people up for something they cannot afford, yucking it up with his boiler room co-scammers about the "stupid people," as they relax and unwind down at the local bar.
Snip:
The younger Trump showed an aptitude for real estate wheeling and dealing (and an even greater talent for self-promotion) that allowed him to parlay his share of his father’s already successful business into a fortune of several hundred million by the 1980s, but as detailed in a 2005 profile by Timothy O’Brien in the New York Times, Trump had blown through it all by the mid-nineties and was in serious debt. Only 20 million dollars in loans from his rich siblings (each had inherited 35 million from father Fred, who was by then deceased) kept Trump afloat and allowed him to stage a comeback.
http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/list/trump.html
Definition of a scam is someone who promises you something for nothing.
A lot of Americans are eager to believe all they have to do is listen to someone tell them they will be rich without any effort on their part.
In a scam, both sides are not exactly the perpetrator and victim in the classic sense of a crime.
I’ve always detested Rubio on a visceral level, and can’t understand why anyone would think positively of him.
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