‘Class’ isn’t a word that comes immediately to mind when most people think of Trump University. In fact, the way Trump’s company treated students – who signed up after hearing promises of wealth and success beyond their wildest dreams – was about as classless as you can get. Though it was marketed as a premiere institution of higher learning rivaling the Wharton School of Business, it was, in reality, one of the great swindles of our time.
It went something like this: Donald Trump and Trump University sold real estate seminars and “mentorships” to students who were promised world-class seminars from instructors “hand picked” by Trump himself. After hearing all kinds of promises, and then ponying up between $1,500 and $35,000, students would learn Trump’s real estate investment secrets. (You know, the same ones that led to six bankruptcies.) Thousands of Americans believed Donald Trump’s promises that his “University” would help them change their lives and build their own wealth.
Those promises did not come true for the people who trusted their savings or borrowed student loans to go to Trump University.
As Trump himself would later admit, he was hardly a University dean. In fact, he was AWOL at the seminars bearing his name. He did not hand pick mentors or instructors. (In fact, he didn’t know them and never even met them.) He had no significant role in designing the course materials. And he never personally mentored a single student. So it’s no wonder that, even though he insisted on marketing the business as a “University,” the New York Department of Education warned him in writing – years before his scheme collapsed all around him – that he must stop using the name “Trump University,” because the for-profit venture could not meet the legal definition of a university.
So when thousands of students were left stranded and in debt by Trump’s very déclassé venture, it was the courts that stepped in and found the class that mattered.
In one of the most talked about class action suits of the past few years – Low v. Trump University, LLC and Donald J. Trump – lawyers brought suit against Trump and his school on behalf of nearly 7,000 students who were defrauded of significant amounts of money and left with nothing to show for it: No business secrets, no hand picked mentors and no degree worth more than the paper it was printed on. The judge in the case – who was personally attacked by Trump himself, exhibiting a level of involvement in the case that he never demonstrated with his “university” – rightly recognized that these students had been ripped off as a group, and should find justice as a group, too.
The case settled for $25 million, and each student will receive between 50% and 100% of the money they originally paid out to Trump.
It is just one recent example of how class action lawsuits – which allow workers and consumers to band together to take on fraud, abuse and other wrongdoing – ensure that those who are wronged together can seek to make things right together and have their day in court.
Now, however, the House GOP leadership wants no more of that.
A sweeping new bill introduced by Congressman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia (R-Wall Street) would make it virtually impossible to bring just about any class action lawsuit, including the one against Trump University. The misleadlingly titled “Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act” – a title about as appropriate as the “University” in Trump U – would wipe away countless class action suits meant to battle discrimination, banking fraud, product defects and more. It would even take away consumers’ ability to fight invasions of privacy.
It is, in short, a huge gift to banks that cheat their customers, corporations tht pay women less than men and businesses like Trump University. For every swindler, cheat and so-called for-profit university dean in America, Christmas this year seems to have come a little early, thanks to Bob Goodlatte.
Fortunately, it’s not a done deal just yet, though the current Republican leadership in the Congress is certainly doing its best to deliver on its promises to lobbyists and various other swamp creatures. Goodlatte succeeded in pushing the bill through the House Judiciary Committee – which, conveniently, he chairs – without any public hearing or testimony. But as we’ve seen as Congressional town halls all across America recently, there are still voices to be heard.
For every American who believes in access to justice and our right to a day in court, class is now in session. Get to a town hall, your Member of Congress’s district office or pick up the phone and make a call. In the last Congress, 17 Republican House members rejected this gift to Corporate America and refused to follow the party leadership; hopefully it will be far more this time around. And the last time around, a few Democrats in the House abandoned their worker and consumer constituents and sided with corporate cheats; hopefully none will do so this time. Then, when this reaches the Senate, the real fight will begin, and people who care about corporate cheating need to make their voices heard there, too.
Goodlatte’s bill is – just as Stephen Colbert suggested Trump University’s slogan should be – “very expensive bullshit.” If the corporate lobbyists win, we pay the price. And as nearly 7,000 students of Trump Univeristy can tell you, some lessons should never have to learned.
Graphic by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, via Flickr