A classic bait-and-switch
And then there’s the Trump “University” fraud.
The New Yorker was on it in June:
Following the release, earlier this week, of testimony filed in a federal lawsuit against Trump University, the United States is facing a high-stakes social-science experiment. Will one of the world’s leading democracies elect as its President a businessman who founded and operated a for-profit learning annex that some of its own employees regarded as a giant ripoff, and that the highest legal officer in New York State has described as a classic bait-and-switch scheme?
It’s certainly coming way too close. Why isn’t fraud and theft a disqualifier? Can we do something about that? Before 2020?
If anyone still has any doubt about the troubling nature of Donald Trump’s record, he or she should be obliged to read the affidavit of Ronald Schnackenberg, a former salesman for Trump University. Schnackenberg’s testimony was one of the documents unsealed by a judge in the class-action suit, which was brought in California by some of Trump University’s disgruntled former attendees.
Schnackenberg, who worked in Trump’s office at 40 Wall Street, testified that “while Trump University claimed it wanted to help consumers make money in real estate, in fact Trump University was only interested in selling every person the most expensive seminars they possibly could.” The affidavit concludes, “Based upon my personal experience and employment, I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.”
That’s bottom-dwelling, that is. This very rich man fools vulnerable people into wasting their money to make him richer. He’s a heartless thief and liar, and we could be stuck with him.
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And now he is fooling vulnerable people into wasting their votes to make him more powerful
Yeah, but Hillary had pneumonia! Or… did she?
Ben: One of my regular reads points out:, “You know, if Hillary Clinton is a liar, that makes one more thing she’s more competent at than Trump. It took us three days and a fainting spell to find out she had pneumonia. That’s pretty good.”
I’m not certain I can discount the ability to occasionally tell a plausible lie as a negative in a candidate; the world is a little too complex for that. Yet Trump’s lies are all so blatant and transparent to anyone who wants to examine what he says, that I genuinely think he’d be dog meat in the international diplomacy field.
And…Hillary “lied” about pneumonia (I’m not sure keeping your illness private is the same as lying, especially since she was being targeted as being “too ill”). FDR lied about polio. That took some real work!
Yes, and, see, also, The Clinton Foundation, in networking charities, which otherwise were probably parts of solutions to nagging, serious, and stubborn social and economic problems, may have risked giving more influence and access than they might have otherwise had to persons associated with the same organizations… So.. Umm..
Well, see, that’s bad, right? Maybe if they’d just have stuck to directly bilking the economically vulnerable and desperate, I’d be down with this.
Trump wins and then has lawsuit dismissed (could this happen?).
No. No it could not. Presidents have been expanding the power of the executive branch for decades, but that’s a whole other level. Separation of powers. An independent judiciary. No, it could not.
Well, if it did happen that would be the final descent in fascism and the abrogation of the Constitution would it not? Isn’t that type of possibility a part of what scares the bejeezus out of us? That even if not Trump, the next guy could build on what damage he does…
Oh, that’s what scares the bejeezus out of us all right, but I meant…well he couldn’t do that unless he just plain staged a coup, and in that case we would have bigger worries. He couldn’t do that in a normal presidency.
There are definitely major obstacles to his ability to abrogate the Constitution. He terrifies me but I don’t think he has the ability to do a Hitler the minute he strolls in.
FWIW,
from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_v._Jones