The Trump University case will dramatically head to court during the GOP convention despite the presumptive Republican nominee’s insistence that nothing is amiss. Trump believes this is only happening because of a “Mexican” judge‘s alleged conflict of interest. Never mind the plaintiffs who blew money on online classes that revealed how to commit bank fraud. And it looks like Trump didn’t simply associate himself with one sketchy educational institution in addition to a string of failed businesses.
The New York Times has uncovered another shady venture, the Trump Institute. This time around, Trump didn’t own the business, but he did sell his name and make a crapton of promises to prospective students. The institute traveled around the country with $2000 seminars set in hotel ballrooms. These sessions promised to bestow protegees with “wealth-creating secrets and strategies.” Trump also starred in this classy infomercial that vaguely resembles a Heaven’s Gate cult recruitment video.
In this clip, Trump pretended that he’d be very hands-on in selecting instructors, and the school would impart every one of his business success strategies — “I’m teaching what I’ve learned.” And then Trump ditched those promises and passed all duties off to a couple (Irene and Mike Milin) with a sketchy history of peddling get-rich-quick schemes:
Reality fell far short. In fact, the institute was run by a couple who had run afoul of regulators in dozens of states and 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 forking over their seminar fees, supposedly containing Mr. Trump’s special wisdom, had been plagiarized from an obscure real estate manual published a decade earlier.
The NY Times has screenshots of plagiarized text that appeared within Trump Institute training manuals. Although Trump didn’t operate this school, he never bothered to vet the couple who did so. And he cheerily posed for advertising materials that read, “I am the American Dream, supersized version.”
The paper digs a lot further into the Milins’ history, which would have been very easy for Trump to uncover if he would have done any research at all. When quizzed about how Trump (or his people) dropped the ball here, his lawyer, Alan Garten, simply said that his client wasn’t aware of any problems. One of the institute’s textbook writers went on record saying that the seminars played like “sleaze America” car salesmen, which — coincidentally — is a common criticism of Trump’s campaign speeches.
(Via New York Times)