I knew I remembered this story about Trump University being a giant scam. Let me see, where did I see that?
Oh, yes, I saw it at the Washington Montlhly two freaking years ago when no one thought Donald Trump was a serious person and so no one much cared. The inspiration for that article was a piece by Steven Perlberg at Business Insider which detailed why the New York Education Department forced Trump to stop calling his “school” a “university,” and also why Trump was getting sued by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman:
The suit says that 5,000 students, many paying thousands of dollars, thought they would get to at least meet the Donald. Instead, they only got their picture taken with a cardboard cutout.
Between 2005 and 2011, Trump University swindled consumers into paying for a spate of expensive courses that did not deliver on promises to teach real estate investing techniques, the suit alleges.
“More than 5,000 people across the country who paid Donald Trump $40 million to teach them his hard sell tactics got a hard lesson in bait-and-switch,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “Mr. 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.”
Schneiderman argues that Trump promised free workshops taught by his own knowledgeable, hand-picked instructors who were, in fact, nothing of the sort.
The free workshops were actually designed to get students to sign up for another three-day, $1,495 seminar where Trump would supposedly appear in person, the suit alleges.
Those students were also pushed to sign up for a “Trump elite mentorship program” ranging from $10,000 to $35,000 a head.
Trump’s excuse will sound familiar to you now that you’ve seen this charlatan in action in the presidential race:
Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen denied the charges, arguing they were purely political. “The attorney general has been angry because he felt that Mr. Trump and his various companies should have done much more for him in terms of fundraising,” Cohen said.
See? If someone criticizes Trump, the answer is either that you didn’t have a problem with him when you asked him for money or that you have a big problem with him because he didn’t give you any money.
Works for anyone, virtually, but not for the people who had to take a photo next to a cardboard cutout of their hero.
2011 Daily Show: Lewis Black supports Trump for POTUS. Get the feeling that Black’s spiel would would sell with the Trump’s rubes.
Then there’s Huckabee hawking a Diabetes Solution Kit. Only $20 for the rubes that can’t afford the $1,500 for Trump’s “get rich quick” seminar.
This morning’s major story on cnn.com is about Fiorina rising in some poll while Trump is dropping. Looks to me like TPTB in GOP-Land are going to use Carly to take him out since he hasn’t been able to smack her down the way he has the other clowns.
No doubt when she’s ousted him from his celebriperch in the race they’ll find a way to push her aside for one of their chosen boys — Kasich, or maybe a refurbished Bush.
I saw somewhere that Fiorina was rising mostly at Carson’s expense. Either way, it still means that the outsiders are locking up near half of the GOP primary vote. Those three are wholly unqualified for the job, but so too are the other occupants of the clown car.
I don’t think Fiorina really counts as an outsider. Sure, she has no political experience, but she clearly represents the business wing of the party, and she’s not pandering to American tribalists like Trump is. She also has not, AFAIK, thrown in pages from the left like not cutting SS and Medicare, as Trump has. She’s not religious right. She’s banging the military drum, which suits the Repub establishment just fine.
Which is why I don’t think she is likely to simply knock Trump out. She’s not drawing from the same well. She’s the establishment Republican who does not look like an establishment Republican. Her strength will be to unify a substantial portion of the anyone-but-Trump vote, though she may also pull some of the “we need a CEO, not a politician” vote, for which she is the other contender than Trump (But that is ultimately very much an establishment Republican position). Like I said before, she is plan B if Jeb looks likely to fail.
To GOP ordinary voters, those with no record of having held any government office, elected or appointed, are outsiders. At this point it doesn’t even appear that GOP primary voters are bothering to label non-DC politicians as outsiders which is something they usually do.
Religious or not, Fiorina is rabidly anti-abortion which is really the only so-called moral issue that the GOP base views as non-negotiable.
There is only one GOP elite establishment candidate, Jeb? The others are all funded by a handful of wealthy benefactors from various business sectors and assorted small potato individuals affiliated with specific communities: religious, tea bagger, local political movers and shakers, etc. Only Jeb? has the backing of several industries — banking/Wall St, oil/gas, construction, etc. Fiorina is useful as token woman which allows the GOP elites not to squander a GOP female politician that could be used as a VP candidate, but there is no evidence that Fiorina was chosen for this role in the primaries by the GOP elites. (She received half a million dollars from one of Ted Cruz’s PACs and he’s not considered an establishment candidate; they mostly hate him.)
To ordinary GOP voters she is an outsider, but that does not make her an outsider in fact. That’s what makes her the establishment republican that does not look like an establishment republican. She and Trump are the only direct representatives of the business class, and Trump is a maverick, she is not. What she did at HP was conventional business thinking – too conventional, you don’t cut it in Silicon Valley with boilerplate merge and layoff strategies.
It is true that she overdid it with the Planned Parenthood thing and is now in a bit of a pickle. She can’t back down, and the fact that it is BS won’t hurt her much in the primary (look where her numbers are now), but it will if she makes it to the general. Right now, though, she has to play for the primary and deal with the general if it comes. It will be old news by then, so it may be hard for Clinton or Sanders to make that much of it.
I’m not saying she’s some brilliant candidate. But she is a candidate who is an outsider by the definition of the GOP base,as you said, but not in terms of her substantive politics and instincts, which is what counts. If the base is determined to buck the establishment, she is the Trojan Horse at hand.
If the GOP base wants her for their “Trojan horse,” then they really want to lose.
Seriously, other than generic Republican, generic business, and generic female Republican voters, she has no constituency of her own, either natural or built by her. There’s not one industry that favors her, and many loathe her. This isn’t like the 2010 CA Senate race where she spent $5 million of her own money against an incumbent that GOP elites, in and out of state, had been targeting for defeat since 1998. Even then, she wasn’t a match for fundraising and spending against Boxer.
Wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Koch brothers and Adelson are considering putting money on her. With their butt-boy Walker flailing, the Kochs need a new flunkie and Adelson needs a 2016 version of Newt. But they aren’t viewed as GOP elite insiders either.
At the presidential level neither party nominates a candidate that is objectively a political and/or government novice and outsider but secretly an insider.
Barack Obama was pretty close to a novice really. And I’m not saying Fiorina is a Trojan Horse for the base; she is one for the elite.
Barack Obama was pretty close to a novice really.
Well, sure, if we erase his five pre-presidential campaigns for office and the ten years he served in office as of 1/09. By that standard, so was GWB — two prior elections and six years in office. So was FDR, six campaigns (lost two) and six years in office (plus seven years in the lowly position of Asst. Sec of the Navy). Carter — four elections, eight years in office.
How about dilettante for those with zero years in public office (elected or appointed) that first run for office at the Senatorial, Gubernatorial, and Presidential level and lose? And novice with one win for that high office and less than one term in office. Trump, Carson and Fiorina are dilettantes. Cruz and Paul are novices.
Personally, I would prefer presidential candidates that have in their own right won more than two elections and been in federal office for at least ten years. Governors, that the public seems to like t promote to president, enter DC not knowing diddly squat about national public policies.
If you’re going to dismiss state governors, it is really ridiculous to account Obama’s time as a state senator or his elections running for it as more than diddly squat. He was a freshman senator who had no distinguished legislation under his hat.
Did I say that Obama’s political resume met my preferred criteria for president? I don’t think so.
I also didn’t specify some minimum number of prior elections and years in office to run for president or that these are the only relevant criteria. Getting it right on major issues in real time is at the top of my list. Thus, Biden with his fat electoral resume was unacceptable to me because of his IWR vote and his sponsorship if the 2005 bankruptcy bill and if I looked more closely and further back, I would probably find many other important votes that he also got wrong.
OTOH, if 2008 had come down to a choice between Clinton and Biden, getting it wrong on major issues in real time would have been a wash. So, the electoral resumes would have been elevated in importance. Added to that is the fact that he made his own way in politics — not a beneficiary of family wealth and/or name.
I said he was pretty close to a novice and you invoked the number of years in office and elections he had had, the bulk of it merely state senate. Then you dismissed state governorship experience, which, whatever its shortcomings, is clearly more relevant to the Presidency than the state senate. Now you seem to have skated from whether novice status is a fatal obstacle for a major party candidate to your personal priorities in supporting a candidate, which is an entirely other question. I don’t like Fiorina either, but I think she is in a position to get serious establishment backing as Jeb fizzles.
I agree with your POV re. Fiorina. Her record as a CEO was bad, she ran poorly in her Senate race, and she was a top advisor and media mouthpiece for the McCain POTUS campaigns; I heard that campaign didn’t do so well.
And now, with the Planned Parenthood lies, she has given away her chances to gain a ton of votes from the general electorate. The despicable delivery of those PP lies really increased her slim chance of gaining the GOP nomination, however. Their base rewards people who bring the crazy with maximum hostility.
She sucks at politics. The presidential race is not for anyone that sucks at politics. She’ll get eaten alive if she somehow wins the nomination. If she wins, you can dance on the GOP’s grave for allowing that clown to get nominated.
ABC News Hillary Clinton Says She Would Be a Political `Outsider’ as President
All things to all people. A liberal and a moderate centrist. An outsider with a decades long insider resume. A leader on getting big money out of politics while she stuffs her campaign and PAC warchests with big money. Etc.
If this woman said that sun will rise tomorrow, I know that is an truthful statement (and not an issue of belief), but the way she’d speak it would still look as if she wasn’t telling the truth.
And if Hillary is nominated as the Democratic candidate, we better work, hope and pray for her to win the general election, because Hillary would be miles superior to any Republican candidate.
It does sort of look as if guys like Cruz and Rand Paul have fallen victim to their own anti-government rhetoric. That’s one thing I find amusing. Their only goal in running for Senate was to tear the place down, but now they’re the establishment simply by virtue of being in office.
Well, and obviously they also see the Senate as a platform for all their grandstanding. But that’s not so great when no one is interested.
And on abortion, she’s less extreme than some in the GOP herd: not opposed to stem-cell research, not supporting legal personhood at conception, exceptions for rape, incest and maternal endangerment. Part of the function of the extreme PP allegations was to move the debate away from abortion itself. Carly opposes sitting fetuses on the table and keeping them alive to get more money for their brains. Well, by Jove, I am opposed to that too! I just don’t think anything like that has ever happened outside of really bad horror movies.
Well, if Fiorina is not opposed to stem cell research, her pandering attack on Planned Parenthood is particularly incoherent, since fetuses need to be gathered to conduct the research and PP is far from the only provider of health care services which provides fetal tissue to researchers.
It’s not as if pandering from candidates on this and other issues don’t create logical inconsistencies in positions. It’s just that this inconsistency is particularly awful and obvious, due to Carly’s willingness to take advantage of her narrow window of attention by saying something spectacularly hostile and false that would gain attention from the GOP base and the media.
That’s the sense of the extremity of the accusation. You support stem cell research? You opposed to keeping fetuses alive to make more money harvesting their brains? There is no inconsistency in answering yes to both questions, in fact I bet you do.
I saw that poll. The BIG news is that Carson took it on the chops more than Trump.
Actual condidates that got better were Fiorina and Rubio. The also ran’s got worse or stayed the same. Walker is at 0, Kasich is not much better. For all intents and purpose Cruz, Huck and Santorum didn’t move.
Its not looking good for the Fundie Xtians OR the establishment.
I didn’t watch much of the bobblehead discussions this morning, but I did catch Ken Cuccinelli’s aggressive attack on Fiorina’s centrist record on multiple immigration issues and her support for bailing out the financial firms during the 2008 crisis.
Cuccinelli’s rise in electoral politics leaned heavily on his campaign promises to bring Dominionism into Virginia State governance. You would have thought that Fiorina’s despicably constructed and emotionally delivered false claims against Planned Parenthood at this week’s debate would have gained Cuccinelli’s enthusiastic support.
Oh well, I guess the benefactors Cuccinelli seeks for his next campaign want someone other than Carly to win the GOP POTUS nomination.
Riddle me this, Batman … can the R’s win without Virginia?
Given the composition of their base? Unless Virginia was an outlier for that election (such as a massive statewide scandal) then no, not really. Even a Wallace-style campaign that accepts getting <20% of non-black racial minority votes and <10% of black votes (and instead tries to snag Democratic-leaning, mostly white states like Minnesota and New Hampshire) uses Virginia as a last resort. If the GOP completely ran the table with Romney states + Minnesota/Michigan/New Hampshire/Pennsylvania/Ohio/Iowa they could win without Virginia, which would be the hardest state to win out of that column anyway.
You may as well get used to saying President Clinton for the next 8 years. The only states they have a chance with in that group are Ohio and Iowa. I’m tempted to put Va in the blue column if it’s harder to win than the listed states.
Pretty doubtful at the moment. Yes, GOP POTUS candidates really need Virginia. Which makes me contemplate the concept of the Cooch, Republican kingmaker. Delightful.
I’m thinking more and more of a quote from “The Filth And The Fury, Julian Temple’s fine documentary about the Sex Pistols. The manager of the Pistols, Malcolm McLaren, ran a sex fetish shop in London. Someone said the following in relation to the running of that shop:
“Fascinating that people can get themselves into such a predicament that the only way they can have sex is in a face mask and a rubber T-shirt.“
I’m starting to feel that way about the modern Republican Party. The predicaments that aspiring GOP leaders must get themselves into in order to access the only way they can gain power.
Well, the gloves will have to come off soon for the candidates running against Trump. No one has really dished any dirt on him yet, other than timid responses to his campaign statements and Carly’s snippy responses to his comments about her.
Hopefully there are research students on the Dem side already compliling lists of all of his gaffes, dishonest business deals, hateful and harmful behavior over the years. Lord knows there is a shit ton of it. And if the Republicans aren’t going to do it, then the Democrats should.
Even Teflon wears away with repeated abuse. Time to grab the steel wool!