Victims of the Trump University con were roped in by an initial free class endorsed by "the most celebrated entrepreneur on earth" that would, in Trump's words, "turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you."
The marketing materials said that Trump reviewed the curriculum and picked the instructors, but the president-elect didn't do either -- instead, he let other people do the homework and then he took the credit for it. The "instructors" were really ropers for a deeper con: their job was to evaluate attendees to figure out just how much money they could raise -- for example, by borrowing from family and maxing out their credit cards -- and then hard-selling them to attend "seminars" that would clean them out.
This was laid out in writing, in a document called the "Trump University Playbook" that told employees it was their job to push the victims to go into debt to pay for more courses. The tactics set out in the playbooks are a mix of a timeshare hustler's hard-sell and cult tactics that will be familiar to students of Scientology and similar ripoffs.
Ronald Schnackenberg, one of Trump University's salesmen, filed an affidavit in the case that revealed that he was reprimanded for refusing to pressure a disabled man into borrowing money to attend a $35,000 seminar, though he believed that the man couldn't afford it. This prompted him to quit.
Clinton's press secretary Brian Fallon nailed it when he wrote, Trump U is devastating because it's metaphor for his whole campaign: promising hardworking Americans way to get ahead, but all based on lies."
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