Real-estate developer Donald Trump announced the creation of Trump University by saying it would not be like his other businesses.
He said it would emphasize education over profits.
“If I had a choice of making lots of money or imparting lots of knowledge, I think I’d be as happy to impart knowledge as to make money,” Trump said at the inaugural news conference for Trump University at Trump Tower in 2005.
If the university made a profit, Trump promised he would donate that money to charity.
(Muffled laughter).
Trump lied.
Trump couldn’t impart knowledge in the traditional sense because he didn’t have any to impart.
Trump did, however, impart the lesson of the streets by educating people to beware of grifters and con men — like him.
What Trump opened was not a university, it was, as the Washington Post called it, “a series of seminars held in hotel ballrooms across the country that promised attendees they could get rich quick but were mostly devoted to enriching the people who ran them.”
“I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you,” Trump said.
Trump University was another Trump con job.
Here is a partial list of phony and fraudulent Trump businesses.
Trump University’s motto was “Abandon all hope (and cash) ye who enter here.”
Trump University was closed in 2010 after Trump was sued in New York and California for committing fraud. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s lawsuit charged Trump University with running a scam.
“Despite what was advertised, few instructors and mentors were successful real estate entrepreneurs, according to the lawsuit,” The Post reported. “In fact, many of them came to Trump University after their real estate investments caused them to declare bankruptcy.”
Schneiderman estimated Trump made more than $5 million from the university scam.
Trump admitted he gave none of the money to charity.
Repeat: He admitted he gave none of the money to charity.
This is how Trump runs his businesses and how he runs his charities.
SEE TRUMP FOUNDATION
Lying about promising to give money to charity and not doing it isn’t necessarily illegal.
But it does make you an awful person.
Trump obviously didn’t care about that. He willingly chose decades earlier to be an awful person.
But saying you created a university, charging people to become students, and then stiffing them is a crime.
It’s called fraud.
Schneiderman filed a $40 million lawsuit in 2013 that charged Trump and Trump University with fraud. Schneiderman “charged that Trump operated an unlicensed, illegal education institution,” the Washington Post reported.
There were additional class-action lawsuits by a number of former students who demanded their money back.
Trump vowed he would never settle in the lawsuits against him.
https://time.com/4568215/donald-trump-university-lawsuit/
He lied.
Again.
In April 2018, a federal judge, Gonzalo Curiel, who Trump claimed in an earlier lawsuit could not be impartial because he was Mexican, finalized a $25 million settlement between Trump and former Trump University students.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/27/politics/judge-curiel-trump-border-wall/index.html
