We begin today’s roundup with USA Today’s Paul Singer and David McKay Wilson’s take on the scam that is Trump University:
A California judge Tuesday unsealed hundreds of pages of Trump University manuals that gave detailed instructions to staff on how to aggressively push students to buy tens of thousands of dollars on Trump seminars, even going deeply into credit card debt to pay for it. The manuals provided a raft of "rebuttals" for students who were hesitating to make a purchase, emphasizing that they needed the assistance of a "Trump-trained mentor" and "a proven system from Mr. Trump" to make money in real estate. [...]
On Wednesday, Trump's campaign posted a video of three people identified as former Trump University students speaking about how pleased they were with the program. But USA TODAY discovered that the participants in the video all had other ties to Trump, including one whose company makes a protein drink that Trump is selling at several of his properties.
Charles Pierce at Esquire lashes out at what he says is a swindler culture:
This isn't cynicism. This is the universe of our politics today, and it has been for almost four decades now. There are those In The Know and there are the suckers. There's nobody in between any more, and it's certainly not the government. Too often, the government is on one side while pretending to be on the other.
So, yeah, it's a goddamn shame what Trump University did to those poor people and I hope they sue him for everything, including his socks and underwear. But please, don't ask me to be shocked. This is the world we live in. The American democracy is becoming the longest con of all.
Rich Newman at Yahoo! Finance:
Trump claims 98% of the people who filled out student evaluations said they were satisfied with Trump University. But that too might be fishy. The 98% rating is based on roughly 10,000 completed surveys. Yet court documents reveal this breakdown of attendees at Trump University over the years: 80,308 showed up at a free event, 9,208 attended a three-day workshop and only 794 purchased one of the costlier custom programs. So it’s possible most or even all of those 10,000 evaluations were completed by people who only attended the free program and never paid a dime to Trump University. We certainly don’t know how satisfied the 794 folks who paid top dollar feel (except for those participating in the class action lawsuit).
Some of the seminar attendees have since said they were pressured to fill out positive reviews. Trump, meanwhile, points out that some of the named plaintiffs in at least one class-action suit wrote upbeat evaluations of the program, undermining the fraud they claim in the suit.
And here’s your morning belly laugh:
Eric Trump, the son of presumptive GOP presidential nominee
Donald Trump, on Thursday drew a comparison between Harvard University and Trump University while pushing back on criticism of his father's now-defunct real estate education program. [...]
“There's probably people that go to Harvard and say, 'Listen, I went to Harvard, I got a great education and I can't find a job or I didn't become the success that I could have been," Eric Trump said on Fox's "America's Newsroom." "Sure, I mean, you probably have that at every major university," he added.
Daniel Drezner believes that the entire Trump campaign is one big attempt to shore up Trump’s finances:
[Trump] has said for years that he believes that a large part of his fortune is tied up in the value of his brand, which he has never been shy about promoting. Recall that it was only a few months ago that Trump turned a news conference following three of his primary and caucus victories into an infomercial in which he touted the virtues of Trump Water, Trump Wine and Trump Steaks (Trump’s steak business is actually defunct and he was displaying another company’s product). So it’s worth pondering whether Trump might turn the White House into his own version of Wal-Mart. [...]
I don’t know why Donald Trump decided to run for president in the first place. But I’m beginning to wonder if his motivation to win now is less about making America great again and more about avoiding yet another Trump bankruptcy.
And here’s an excellent analysis by David Lazarus at The Los Angeles Times:
What’s clear from the newly released documents in the federal cases is that even if Trump University students weren’t deliberately fleeced, one of Trump’s top priorities was to separate them from as much cash as possible – regardless of the amount they might actually have available. [...]
I was one of the few reporters who actually attended a Trump University seminar and wrote about the experience. I’d seen the ad described above and decided, what the heck, I might as well spend a couple of hours at the Pasadena Hilton seeing what Trump (or his minions) had to say about scoring big bucks off foreclosures.
The seminar turned out to be nothing more than a two-hour sales pitch for a three-day workshop costing nearly $1,500. That priceless information on making millions from real estate could be boiled down to this: Buy low, sell high.
John Cassidy at The New Yorker:
The Clinton campaign is clearly hoping that Trump University will be to Trump as Bain Capital was to Mitt Romney—a way to portray him as just another selfish rich guy who is out to profit at the expense of ordinary folk. Commenting on Twitter, Clinton’s press secretary, Brian Fallon, wrote, “Trump U is devastating because it’s metaphor for his whole campaign: promising hardworking Americans way to get ahead, but all based on lies.” [...]
One thing is clear, though. If the revelations about Trump University don’t do any damage to Trump, it’s time to worry—or worry even more—about American democracy.
Eric Alterman at The Nation slams the media’s obsession with false equivalence:
Why do so many reporters and pundits blame “both sides” when only one is responsible? The reasons are myriad and multifaceted. First, there is the old-fashioned loyalty to “objectivity.” No matter what the context, reporters feel compelled, for the record, to offer an opposing view in what journalists call a “to be sure” paragraph. Often, they just drop the phrase in the piece. [...]
Another important factor is the clubbiness of Beltway culture, which is exacerbated during presidential elections, when the demand for even the most trivial details on the inner workings of each campaign is at a premium. Journalists rely on politicians and consultants for the scooplets that drive their horse-race reporting. They drink together after campaign events and engage in mutual back-scratching, all with the implicit assumption that only a fool or a naïf takes this politics stuff too seriously.
Frank Rich & Alex Carp at New York Magazine:
Since Donald Trump lashed out at the press over questions about his fundraising for veterans, his week has only gotten worse, with former staffers at his Trump University calling the school a fraud and "a total lie." Do either of these criticisms have a chance of swaying Trump supporters?
By any civilized standard, Trump has had about the worst week a presidential candidate could have. He was caught trying to cheat America’s veterans out of the $6 million he had promised them. He nastily assailed the press for daring to question his bogus philanthropy. He not only attacked the legitimacy of the U.S. district judge presiding over the Trump University case, but tried to denigrate him as “Mexican.” (The judge, Gonzalo Curiel, was born in Indiana.) Then there’s Trump U itself: a scam worthy of Bernie Madoff that preyed on victims far more vulnerable than most of Madoff’s clients. And the week is not over. There’s still time for more Trump outrage. Maybe he’ll slap a baby instead of kissing one at a campaign event.
The question remains, however, whether any of it matters to those voters who see Trump as their champion and have stood steadfastly by him even after he previously insulted one of America’s most famous veterans, mocked a disabled member of the press, slimed Mexicans as rapists, and all the rest. We won’t know until November, I’m afraid, if anything will shake their loyalty.
Turning to President Obama, Jared Bernstein at The Washington Post highlights the President’s push to expand Social Security:
It’s great to hear the president defending this essential, efficient, progressive program. And while I don’t expect to hear an expansion proposal from this White House so late in the administration’s tenure, Obama is clearly teeing the issue up for the campaign for his successor. Let the record show: Those who would be president, we’re all listening to what you have to say about this.
Eugene Robinson, meanwhile, reflects on President Obama’s legacy:
If you look at the polls, it is clear who’s winning the 2016 presidential contest: Barack Obama.
There remains the technical impediment that the president is constitutionally barred from a third term. But the longer the campaign goes on, the higher Obama’s approval rating rises. This should be bad for Donald Trump and good for the eventual Democratic nominee, almost certainly Hillary Clinton. But it is even better for Obama’s legacy.
We’ll end today’s roundup with a write-up of Hillary Clinton’s excellent take down of Trump’s foreign policy positions. Here’s Eric Levitz at New York Magazine:
Hillary Clinton's argument for why she would make a better commander-in-chief than her Republican opponent is fairly simple: She is not an emotionally erratic ignoramus who has praised the Tiananmen Squarecrackdown, refused to issue any plan for combating ISIS, and called on the American military to kill more civilians. On the other hand, she was in the room when President Obama ordered the hit on Bin Laden. And she did a bunch of other great things as Secretary of State. (You've forgotten about that Libya intervention by now, haven't you?)
The likely Democratic nominee laid out this case in exacting detail in San Diego on Thursday. Her campaign had billed the speech as an attempt to paint Donald Trump as "unfit for the presidency." This is not a terribly difficult task, but she accomplished it with aplomb — deploying the old rhetorical trick of reciting all the insane, mutually exclusive proposals her opponent had improvised over the course of a 12-month campaign. [...]