This isn’t illegal, but many of the documents released in the civil lawsuit against Trump University show the high-pressure sales pressure put on unsuspecting prospective “students”.
Below are pages from the so-called “playbook” used by Trump University recruiters. The playbook instructed employees on how to get attendees to a free “Trump” seminar to cough up $35,000 to attend the full “university” (a classic bait-and-switch tactic).
Loading...
Reload document 
Open in new tab The New York Times fleshes this out:
Jason Nicholas, a sales executive at Trump University, recalled a deceptive pitch used to lure students — that Mr. Trump would be “actively involved” in their education. “This was not true,” Mr. Nicholas testified, saying Mr. Trump was hardly involved at all. Trump University, Mr. Nicholas concluded, was “a facade, a total lie.”
Lawyers for Mr. Trump on Tuesday challenged those characterizations, saying that the testimony of the former Trump University employees “was completely discredited” in depositions taken for the California lawsuit. Lawyers for Mr. Trump declined to release those depositions on Tuesday.
As he has in the past, Mr. Trump argued through representatives that the complaints emanated from a small number of former students and that the vast majority had offered positive reviews of their experience.
“Trump University looks forward to using this evidence, along with much more, to win when the case is brought before a jury,” said Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump.
The court records show the role that Mr. Trump — and his outsize reputation — played in trying to sell the real estate classes to thousands of students. Marketing materials bearing his signature encouraged prospective students to take advantage of a downturn in the housing market to earn quick profits. He offered the kind of assurances that financial advisers have long cautioned consumers to be wary of. “How would you like to market-proof your financial future,” Mr. Trump asked in one brochure.
I guess we know why Trump was attacking his judge, who allowed the release of these documents.
Those newly unsealed documents in the Trump University case don’t paint a pretty picture of either the “university” or Donald Trump himself:
Jason Nicholas, another witness for the plaintiffs who worked as a sales associate for five months in 2007, also said he was appalled by what went on at the university. “They were unqualified people posing as Donald Trump’s ‘right-hand men,'” he wrote. “They were teaching methods that were unethical, and they had had little to no experience flipping properties or doing real estate deals. It was a facade, a total lie.”
In his sworn declaration, Mr. Schnackenberg [said] he quit his job after refusing to pitch the seminars to a couple that he thought couldn’t afford them. “They had no money to pay for the program but would have had to pay for the program using disability and taking out a loan based upon equity in his apartment.” He said another sales manager “talked them into buying a $35,000 seminar.”
Donald Trump was personally involved in devising the marketing strategy for Trump University, even vetting potential ads, according to newly disclosed sworn testimony from the company’s top executive taken as part of an ongoing lawsuit…“Mr. Trump understandably is protective of his brand and very protective of his image and how he’s portrayed,” Michael Sexton, Trump University’s president, said in the 2012 deposition. “And he wanted to see how his brand and image were portrayed in Trump University marketing materials. And he had very good and substantive input as well.”
Corrine Sommer, an event manager, recounted how colleagues encouraged students to open up as many credit cards as possible to pay for classes that many of them could not afford. “It’s O.K., just max out your credit card,” Ms. Sommer recalled their saying.
…Ms. Sommer recalled that a member of the Trump University sales team, who had previously sold jewelry, was promoted to become an instructor. He had “no real estate experience,” she said. She added that many of the instructors had the quality that the school seemed to value most: “They were skilled at high-pressure sales,” she said.
In other words, Trump was eager to squeeze every cent he could out of his students but played no role in choosing instructors or creating the curriculum. He cared about his image, but that was it.
It gets worse.
It turns out that those who gave “positive reviews of their experience” did not exactly have a positive experience, and certainly not the full experience. The Daily Beast did some journalism:
Along with internal sales guides and scorching depositions from former Trump University employees, the released documents include exhibits in a 2014 motion by the defense to dismiss the class certification. In these exhibits, the defense provides the fifteen surveys from Trump University students who praise the program, as shining examples of the “overwhelmingly positive,” 10,000 evaluations Trump University collected from its students.
Trump University students—the very ones used by the presumptive Republican nominee’s legal team as evidence of that satisfaction—now tell The Daily Beast they were coerced into providing positive reviews and conned out of their life’s savings with little to show for their trouble besides a mountain of debt.
****
“Trump University is some [of] the best money I ever invested,” wrote Ryan Maddings inone of the evaluations for a 3-day Trump University retreat in 2008, one that Trump’s legal team points to in their motion as an example of “students [who] were very pleased with TU training.”
“It was a lie,” said Maddings, an ex-marine now 32, who told The Daily Beast that he racked up around $45,000 in credit card debt to buy Trump University seminars and products.
***
[T]he names and contact information for fifteen students were included on student evaluations entered in as evidence for the defense in one of the class action lawsuits against Trump University—documents newly available to the public as part of a trove of records recently unsealed by U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel.The Daily Beast reached out to each of the fifteen students, and spoke with five, four of whom reported they no longer felt positively about the program. Two, whose names have not been previously reported, said they had lost their lifes’ savings in the deal.
Representatives for the Trump organization and Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.
Maddings said he was told to max out his credit cards.
“It was a con. I’m 25-years-old, barely making $3,000 a month and they told me to increase my credit limit. I just maxed out three credit cards and I’m supposed to be able to qualify for loans to buy real estate? Those stupid principles have led me to borrow $700,000 of other people’s money and lose it all. I’m still paying off some of that debt to this day.”
David Lazarus at The Los Angeles Times:
What’s clear from the newly released documents in the federal cases is that even if Trump University students weren’t deliberately fleeced, one of Trump’s top priorities was to separate them from as much cash as possible – regardless of the amount they might actually have available. […]
I was one of the few reporters who actually attended a Trump University seminar and wrote about the experience. I’d seen the ad described above and decided, what the heck, I might as well spend a couple of hours at the Pasadena Hilton seeing what Trump (or his minions) had to say about scoring big bucks off foreclosures.
The seminar turned out to be nothing more than a two-hour sales pitch for a three-day workshop costing nearly $1,500. That priceless information on making millions from real estate could be boiled down to this: Buy low, sell high.
UPDATE: And even worse….
The campaign released a video in defense of Trump U. claiming the scam was informative, consensual, honest, and worth the cost. The only problem? As RedState’s Leon Wolf wrote yesterday, the video “features three people – none of whom have ever bought or sold real estate for a living.” Who are the three people in the ad? Michelle Gunn, a professional “testimonial giver,” Kent Moyer, who runs seminar-style events like Trump U. for a living, and Casey Hoban, whose “protein water” product is sold at Trump resorts.
Matt Shuham
#EndorseThis: Trump Used Professional ‘Testimonial Giver’ In Recent Defense Of Trump U.
June 2, 2016 1:22 pm / 0 Comments / Campaign 2016, Elections, Politics, Top News
#EndorseThis: Trump Used Professional ‘Testimonial Giver’ In Recent Defense Of Trump U.
Share this on Facebook0Tweet about this0Share this on Google+1Share this on Linkedin0Share this on Reddit0Email this pagePrint this page
TAGSDONALD TRUMP
SCAM
SCHEME
TRUMP U.
TRUMP UNIVERSITY
Republish
Reprint
Will Trump U. be the scandal to finally put some kind of dent in Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency? Only if voters are telling the truth when they say they like Trump because “he tells it like it is” and “he’s successful.”He’s neither of those things, and Donald’s reaction to media coverage of the multiple lawsuits surrounding Trump U. (he’s not allowed to call it “University”) are telling: Not only does Trump continue to lie about his scheme, he is very unsuccessfully lying about it.
Case in point: Trump says 98 percent of students “approved” of their experience — he put together a sloppy website about it — but that is so clearly a lie it’s difficult to know where to start.
Trump U. was forced to give refunds to 32 percent of students in its $1,495 program and 16 percent of its $34,995 program — and that’s not including students who wanted refunds but didn’t get them. And students who did make it long enough to fill out evaluation forms — the basis of Trump’s 98 percent claims — did so under pressure from instructors, who hovered over them as they filled out forms and called them after the fact to badger them into changing poor reviews.
But Trump’s most recent attempt to clear his image of this scandal is so incompetently dishonest that this whole campaign is starting to look like a long piece of satirical performance art.The campaign released a video in defense of Trump U. claiming the scam was informative, consensual, honest, and worth the cost. The only problem? As RedState’s Leon Wolf wrote yesterday, the video “features three people – none of whom have ever bought or sold real estate for a living.” Who are the three people in the ad? Michelle Gunn, a professional “testimonial giver,” Kent Moyer, who runs seminar-style events like Trump U. for a living, and Casey Hoban, whose “protein water” product is sold at Trump resorts.
In other words: Trump’s testimonial for a scam is itself, a scam.
Here’s the “testimonial” video:
University-related lawsuits will be dogging Trump for months to come. Will his supporters care? Probably not. But undecided voters are unlikely to be like “high-pressure tactics selling something useless based on lies?