After President Joe Biden unveiled his new policy on student loan debt relief, it was only a matter of time before his predecessor publicly condemned it. But I was less interested in whether Donald Trump would talk about the policy and more interested in how.
In a written statement, the former president peddled some familiar lines — the program is expensive, he thinks the United States is “in decline,” etc. — before pushing one argument he probably should’ve avoided:
“[N]ow Americans are bailing out College Administrators who fleeced students, and those who opted for Degrees there was no way they could afford.”
For now, let’s put aside the fact that the Republican seems to capitalize random words for no reason. Let’s also save for another day why the former president thought it’d be a good idea to criticize American students who try to advance their interests through higher education.
Instead, I found myself dwelling on Trump’s reference to “administrators who fleeced students.”
Here’s a radical thought: Perhaps the guy behind Trump University should steer clear of such sentences.
In case anyone needs a refresher, let’s circle back to our earlier coverage and review just how dramatic a scandal this was. In fact, it was seven years ago when The Washington Post reported on Trump’s “students” who sometimes “maxed out their credit cards to pay tens of thousands of dollars for insider knowledge they believed could make them wealthy.”
Never licensed as a school, Trump University was in reality a series of real estate workshops in hotel ballrooms around the country, not unlike many other for-profit self-help or motivational seminars…. Instead of a fast route to easy money, these Trump University students say they found generic seminars led by salesmen who pressured them to invest more cash in additional courses. The students say they didn’t learn Trump’s secrets and never received the one-on-one guidance they expected.
“He’s earned more in a day than most people do in a lifetime,” said one 2009 ad, featuring Trump’s photograph. “He’s living a life many men and women only dream about. And now he’s ready to share — with Americans like you — the Trump process for investing in today’s once-in-a-lifetime real estate market.”
Trump’s attorneys insisted that aspiring investors learned valuable lessons with which most students were satisfied. But the Post’s article also highlighted a Texas man, Louie Liu, who said he paid “$1,495 for a three-day seminar, then felt lured into paying $24,995 for more classes, an online training program and a three-day in-person mentorship.”
He later concluded that the Trump University program was a “scam.”
Another man, Bob Guillo, paid nearly $35,000 for the “Trump Gold Elite package,” which amounted to very little. “I really felt stupid that I was scammed by Trump,” Guillo said.
Remember, the guy behind this operation is the same guy who now feels comfortable accusing college administrators of “fleecing students.” During the 2016 presidential race, Trump boasted that the Better Business Bureau gave Trump University an “A” rating — a claim that turned out to be a brazen lie — while further insisting that he wouldn’t settle the fraud case filed by his former customers. That wasn’t true, either: Shortly before he was supposed to take the stand, Trump settled the fraud case he said he’d never settle. What’s more, during his White House tenure, the Republican was required to pay $25 million to his former “students” — a first-of-its-kind payment for a sitting American president. What I’ve long found important about this story are the parallels between the “school” and Trump’s rise to political power: A group of Americans, looking for easy solutions and wowed by a celebrity making too-good-to-be-true promises, put their faith in an accused scam artist, only to learn that Trump had no intention of delivering on outlandish pledges that never really made any sense. For him to now take aim at actual universities, as if they’re scamming the public, suggests the former president expects us all to have very short memories.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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