When you look up Trump University LLC on Google, you won't find anything positive to sum up how successful the American for-profit education company was. Rather, you'll find endless lists of horrifying articles gathered by multiple news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, National Review and the New Yorker. They all share one thing in common; they state that the business mogul and Republican Presidential nominee ran a University that robbed the hard-earned money of thousands of innocent people, and in extreme cases, deliberately spiraled some into debt.
Trump University LLC was founded by Donald Trump, Michael Sexton and Jonathan Spitalny in 2004. During its early years, Trump claimed, "I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you." Sure enough, it was a simple promise, a simple promise by a powerful man made to thousands, whom I might add, paid upwards to $35,000 for his classes in the hopes of, as he said, becoming a "successful real estate investor." It wasn't long before the university had to close its doors for good when it was revealed that none of the classes paid off, and the lawsuits built up. Donald Trump and his associates spent exactly six years "educating" on how to make good real estate investment.
The questions become, what exactly was it about real estate that Donald Trump and his associates felt that they needed a school of real estate hacks? Or rather, did they truly believe they were experts about the struggles of investment and they in turn could provide significant knowledge on real estate hacks? Or was it just a scam from the beginning, and they had no real intentions of providing real knowledge to the thousands who signed up, but would instead rely on Donald Trump's celebrity status to make money? I'll answer the last question because the first two are all too obvious. New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman in a press conference not long ago claimed, "Trump used his celebrity status and personally appeared in commercials making false promises to convince people to spend tens of thousands of dollars they couldn’t afford for lessons they never got.” Real estate is a lifetime investment; one wrong move and your entire life will come down falling on you. It's hard enough to make it successfully in that area of business and in life, and to add to the hardship, have someone deliberately prey on your hopes and dreams and money?
It is very easy to lay Donald Trump out in the field to bleed, and have him and him alone be responsible for the disaster that took place with Trump University. But in fact, that's exactly what I intend on doing. Donald Trump, Republican Party Presidential nominee, has been nothing but a thorn at America's side ever since he decided to run for President. But I believe the people who had been robbed of their money and trust, as well as President Obama, would argue otherwise.
If any of Trump's supporters can justify the wild goose chase he led these poor people on, well, I am very welcome to hear it. But, he just didn't give these thousands a run for their money; they were also coerced them into giving great reviews in order to make it seem like the classes they took were that great. How calculative was that? According to students of the "University," they were hounded and forced to give these glowing ratings. Now that the lawsuits are becoming a bigger issue, what seems to be his only line of defense? Those exact same ratings. Donald Trump even boasted, "You know Harvard doesn’t have a 98 percent approval rating.” According to NYtimes, the problematic website has little validity, in part due to out of the 10,000 student evaluations, over 3,000 of them were not from paying students. They were from the free guests that the paying students were encouraged to bring to the classes.
It is abundantly clear that Donald Trump will go to lengths to avoid taking any sort of damages. He no doubt is not a fan of failure, and more importantly, he has no soul nor does he feel any remorse for those he tramples on. I can already entertain the idea that if Donald Trump becomes President, whenever he meets a roadblock and is unable to fulfill his duty, he will no doubt put all the blame on the shoulders of Congress, the Senate and anybody really who he deems responsible for his failures.
