THE TRUMP UNIVERSITY SCAM

Now that a black man just got killed by police after allegedly trying to use a forged twenty, I present a thread on some actual serious crime: Trump University (AKA the Trump Wealth Institute or Trump Entrepreneur Initiative LLC), just one reason...

...that lying bitch Donald Trump should be in jail. In 2016, white lifelong criminal Trump was ordered to pay $25 million to settle two class actions lawsuits and one with the State of New York, the last filed by then-attorney general Eric Schneiderman.

Trump University ran from 2005 until 2010 and was essentially a long-winded and expensive way to get mugged by a lazy Caucasian grifter. Trump shifted over 7,600 ‘tickets’ to his fake real estate classes, and more than 3,700 of these customers filed claim for a piece of the...

...class action suits. Trump University was formed as a corporate entity in 2004 by Trump, along with accomplices Michael Sexton and Jonathan Spitalny, though Trump had 93% ownership. Sexton, a management consultant with a master’s from Tuck School of Business at...

...Dartmouth, who had 4.5% of the venture, approached Trump with the idea in 2004 even though, like Trump, he knew nearly fuck all about legit real estate dealings. Jonathan Spitalny was a senior managing director at Bear, Stearns & Co., which later merged into JP Morgan Chase.

He’s a low-key kind of guy who presently works for Stephens, Inc., where he declines to list his work for Trump as career chops on the website resume. The sham ‘school’ was a simple operation: pulled in by promises of success in the world of real estate, students were fleeced...

...of their savings through high-pressure selling techniques. The whole shabby process began at free seminars, usually held in hotel meeting rooms and the like, which were used to ‘set the hook’, in the words of the ‘Registration Goal & Procedure’ section of a...

...Trump University playbook from 2009 which quotes a Yale University study finding the most persuasive words in English to be ‘you, new, money, easy, discovery, free, results, health, save, proven, guarantee and love’. There wasn’t much love involved, though, when...

...Trump’s salespeople used such events to pressure hopefuls like Kathleen Meese to max out their credit cards on tickets to bullshit courses like the $25,000 ‘Gold Elite Program’. Kathleen was nervous about the heavy outlay, worrying it would hinder her ability to care for...

...her child with Down’s Syndrome, but the Trump University folk persisted until she coughed up. Trump University speakers even told students to raise their credit card limits so they could pay up to $35,000 for low-quality business instruction.

Ex-Trump U ‘professor’ Stephen Gilpin was so spooked by these practices that he went to Sexton and said someone ought to audit the seminars. He worried things were ‘not kosher or illegal’ then found out for sure when subpoenas started dropping.

Trump boasted he’d ‘hand-picked’ the school’s faculty, but testified in deposition later that he couldn’t identify a single one. Who were the teachers? They were motivational speakers and guys like child molester Ron P. Broussard, cocaine connoisseur Timothy Gorsline, and...

...felon James Harris, who had been convicted for aggravated assault by the time he was hired by Trump in 2008. Harris went on CNN in 2016 and described in an interview how his job was to continually upsell more and more expensive lessons to students, rather than impart...

...knowledge about real estate to them. Additionally, dozens of the former faculty and staff Trump tasked with imparting his wealth-generating tips (lol) and secrets to the paying public have been confirmed to have histories of bankruptcy, foreclosures, credit card default and...

...tax liens. As an aside, further to Trump’s phony courses there was a separate entity called ‘The Trump Institute’, run by get-rich-quick scammers Mike and Irene Milin, a couple previously prosecuted in Texas for deceptive trade practices.

Trump let the two slap his name on the Institute, which he owned no part of but took a cut for every seat filled. The Trump Institute earned an ‘F’ grade (even worse than the ‘D’ awarded to Trump University itself) from the Better Business Bureau and plagiarised fat...

...stretches of its course literature from Success Magazine. Back to Trump University, despite the thousands throwing in on class action lawsuits against him, the president claimed a massive 98% of students were satisfied with what they had learned, however it seems a great...

...many of the positive reviews have since been walked back. Ex-marine Ryan Maddings wrote positively of his 2008 experience at the ‘university’ only to reveal later that he’d been lying. When The Daily Beast tried to track down other ex-customers to confirm their...

...complimentary accounts of the course content, four of the five they reached said on reflection they’d changed their minds. The point is that the robber Trump, as usual, forged milions of dollars in value out of thin air, through lying, at other people’s...

...expense, repeatedly, over years, and with malice aforethought, secure in the knowledge that the worst that would befall him was a slap on the wrist. Now, after supercharging a nation’s bigotry and inciting violence at rallies, he’s a president paid to play golf and...

...run for re-election. A stark contrast to what happened to George Floyd.