That is the title of this story by Jonathan Martin for Thursday’s New York Times.
Trump INSTITUTE is not Trump University.
This is an entirely different scam. And I use that word advisedly.
Martin sets it up as the second of a two prong approach for Trump to make money off of the combination of his name and education:
...Mr. Trump also lent his name, and his credibility, to a seminar business he did not own, which was branded the Trump Institute. Its operators rented out hotel ballrooms across the country and invited people to pay up to $2,000 to come hear Mr. Trump’s “wealth-creating secrets and strategies.”
There were, like with the University, promises about Mr. Trump handpicking the faculty, etc. BUT
In fact, the institute was run by a couple who had run afoul of regulators in dozens of states and had been dogged by accusations of deceptive business practices and fraud for decades. Similar complaints soon emerged about the Trump Institute.
Yet there was an even more fundamental deceit to the business, unreported until now: Extensive portions of the materials that students received after paying their seminar fees, supposedly containing Mr. Trump’s special wisdom, had been plagiarized from an obscure real estate manual published a decade earlier.
Those words are immediately followed a 1995 text from Success Magazine and a passage that was clearly copied all but word for word in a 2006 book put out by the Institute.
The paragraph that follows is perhaps key, because it points far beyond either the University, of which the article says Trump owned 93%, and the Institute, run by a husband and wife with a several decades record of operating get rich quick schemes:
Together, the exaggerated claims about his own role, the checkered pasts of the people with whom he went into business and the theft of intellectual property at the venture’s heart all illustrate the fiction underpinning so many of Mr. Trump’s licensing businesses: Putting his name on products and services — and collecting fees — was often where his actual involvement began and ended.
His informercials, as we saw with Trump University, would imply that he had a much greater involvement in the operation of the enterprises involved than he di.
The couple had a long history of legal problems in several states, including Texas and Florida, with their schemes, before the Trump organization hooked up with them. While a legal representative of the organization claims Trump had no knowledge of their prior behavior, either that is untrue or else he/his organization failed to do basic due diligence in investigating his potential partners. By 2007 the attorneys general in 33 states were going after the couple for their enterprises, which had changed names over the years but apparently not become any more legitimate.
I am going to push fair use and also share the final two paragraphs of this article, because it illustrates something else, upon which I will then opine. The woman in the paragraphs was the listed author of the book in which the plagiarized material is found. A lawyer for Trump tried to put the blame on her, but acknowledged having forwarded to her material from the couple who actually ran the “seminars.”
Ms. Parker, a lawyer and legal writer in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., said that far from being handpicked by Mr. Trump, she had been hired to write the book after responding to a Craigslist ad. She said she never spoke to Mr. Trump, let alone received guidance from him on what to write. She said she drew on her own knowledge of real estate and a speed-reading of Mr. Trump’s books.
Ms. Parker said she did venture to one of the Trump Institute seminars — and was appalled: The speakers came off like used-car salesmen, she said, and their advice was nothing but banalities. “It was like I was in sleaze America,” she said. “It was all smoke and mirrors.”
Hired through Craig’s list. Not handpicked. Hmmmm. Perhaps in the exploration of the fraud trials including the one being overseen by Judge Curiel there should be a deposition of all the instructors for the people suing about how they came to be teaching for the “University” — since it was sold on the basis of Trump claiming he was handpicking them, that seems to be a prima facia case of fraud.
And then there are these words from the 2nd paragraph: The speakers came off like used-car salesmen, she said, and their advice was nothing but banalities. “It was like I was in sleaze America,” she said. “It was all smoke and mirrors.”
Gee, might those words also apply to most of what we hear from Mr. Trump, anytime he is not reading from a teleprompter? Think about the phraseology Trump uses, think of what you might expect to hear from a used car salesman (at least some — I did sell cars for several months, used as well as new, and i was not like that) — does not that sound very similar? How “great” things will be, like the “beautiful wall” for example. We are going to make America “Great Again” but without specifics.
Maybe either the Clinton campaign or an independent organization can find a video clip — perhaps from a movie — of the prototypical used car salesman and intercut it with a Trump speech?
Anyhow, the real picture of Donald John Trump continues to be fleshed out by good reporting, on a variety of topics.
So ask yourself this, America? Would you buy a used car from this man? If not, why put him in charge of the country?
And what else might we find out next?