For all of the self-hype about Donald Trump’s great successes as a businessman, his business failures are even more instructive. While failure in business can certainly be overcome and there can be valuable lessons learned from mistakes, there are also instances when the business itself becomes more important than the people it’s supposed to be helping or serving. One such example is Trump University.
Thankfully, during the last Republican presidential debate, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz finally started going after the frontrunnerinstead of each other. Rubio landed a good punch, sarcastically conceding that he didn’t “know anything about starting a fake university.”
Naturally, Trump defended his creation of Trump University. During an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he insisted he would do it all over again because, he boasted, “98% of the people who took the courses approved the courses” and “said they were great.” As usual Trump left out many, many details.
What exactly was Trump University? David Marcus notes, “To understand what Trump University was, it is important to understand what it wasn’t — namely, a university.” In fact, a lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general in 2013 forced Trump University to change its name to Trump Entrepreneur Initiative. It turns out that Trump U was operating illegally as a non-accredited university and did not offer any degrees or well-rounded curriculum. Trump ignored warnings dating to 2005.
What did it offer? It offered educational products, some with a price tag of $35,000, which were designed to teach students how to make big profits in real estate. At the lower levels, seminars were offered to teach students how to flip properties but they were designed to upsell the student to the next higher level course. Indeed, upselling was the name of the game, and many students were coaxed into paying a hefty price for useless information.
It was a classic bait-and-switch scam — a lie, a fraud. People paid generous sums of money to attend these courses that benefitted not the students but the businessman Donald Trump. And his outfit is now the defendant in three lawsuits.
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He is worth 10 billion or more. Not a failure. Hope he surrounds himself with good people when he wins.
ReplyDeleteIf he wins, he will definitely surround himself with top notice intelligent, good people. No doubt about it. I would rather see 10 Trumps than one Hillary in charge.
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