A mishmash of informed snark, piquant opinions, refined nastiness, occasional schmaltz, & tawdry graphics, served up continuously since 2006 by COSMIC CONNIE, aka CONNIE L. SCHMIDT. Covering New-Age/New-Wage culture & crapitalism, pop spirituality & religion, pop psychology, self(ish)-help, alt-health hucksterism, conspiranoia, business babble, media silliness, Scamworld, politix, & related (or occasionally unrelated) matters of consequence.
Showing posts with label Trump University. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trump University. Show all posts
Though she is for all practical purposes
currently on the sidelines of the 2020 presidential race -- or at
least that's how it appears at the moment -- don't count McSpirituality guru Marianne Williamson out of the larger game. You can't keep a good New-Wage
crapitalist down.
On November 5, 2019, the Rolling Stone site ran a feature by
Tessa Stuart, "That Marianne Mind$et: Obeying the Law of Divine
Compensation." Stuart opens with a
mention of an early August 2019 email blast directed to those who
had signed up for Williamson's campaign mailing list earlier in
the year. The message featured a "soft-focus portrait of the
presidential candidate gazing placidly at the pages of a
hardcover tome beside a golden Buddha and an orchid."
That's so Marianne.
The email came from something called the Williamson Institute,
and the subject was, "Summer Sale Now On!"
“For one week only, indulge in any of
our on-demand courses and seminars for 45% off!” the email
read. “Whether you want to invoke the romantic mysteries,
create a career that matters, divinely align your body and
soul, or focus on another area of your life in a miraculous
way, now is the time to treat yourself. As always, we hope
this offering will enrich your life and nourish your soul.”
Interested parties were advised to use the code “SummerSale.”
There was one teeny-tiny little problem,
though. At the time the email was sent out, the Williamson
Institute did not yet technically exist, though a note on
Williamson's personal web site said that it would be launching
"soon." But skilled hucksters never let the unicorn
status of anything stop them from promoting that thing.
The email linked instead to
Marianne.com, where for a cool $249 one might enroll in a
four-part online course on “aging miraculously” or a
five-parter on “miraculous relationships.” The four-part
weight-loss seminar, five-parter on making money (or, rather,
obeying “the law of divine compensation”), and a
three-part “Aphrodite Training” were each comparative
steals at $149 a piece.
Heck of a bargain, right? Can you say,
"New-Wage sales funnel," boys and girls?
Stuart continues:
Williamson’s campaign blamed the
email on a “vendor error” and, perhaps because Williamson
isn’t a top-tier candidate, the use of a public campaign
for private profit barely registered as news.
Or maybe it didn’t register because, at this point, it’s
basically accepted that many (if not most) people who run for
president are ultimately running one grift or another. Herman
Cain used the email list he amassed during a failed bid for
the Republican nomination in 2012 to hawk dozens
of get-rich-quick schemes and dubious cures, including an erectile dysfunction drug called
“TestoMax 200.” Rick Perry parlayed his aborted campaign
into a turn on Dancing With the Stars. Mike Huckabee’s
failed White House run transformed him into a one-man media
empire, complete with a terrestrial radio time slot opposite
Rush Limbaugh and a hosting gig on Fox News. (Alas, the
long-promised Huckabee Post never materialized.)
Stuart doesn't mention Trump U in the Rolling Stone piece, but
she does remind us of a few other points.
Donald Trump — despite having boasted
in 2000 he could possibly be “the first presidential
candidate to run and make money on it” — lost money on
his run for president, but he has since turned his presidency
into a four-year-long paid advertisement for his hotel chain.
(He also, apparently, had a contingency plan: By election
night 2016, when most everyone was predicting him losing, the
candidate and his family had compiled a list of ideas to
capitalize on his newfound cachet, including a budget line
of Trump hotels and a TV network
to rival Fox News.)
Not to mention the apparently well-founded
rumors that Trump has been talking, at least casually, with Apprentice
creator Mark Burnett about another future "reality" show, a "White
House" edition of The Apprentice. Trump denied it, of course. But his lips were moving,
so that should give you an idea of how credible his denial is. In
any case, there's a very good case to be made that Trump has been running his entire presidency like a
reality show. Unfortunately, as Sean
Illing, the author of the Vox piece linked to in the previous
sentence, noted, it's "the show we can't turn off, the car
crash we can't look away from the news cycle we can't
escape."
And what about the Williamson Institute? I still can't seem to
find a separate web site for the thing. There is a Facebook page, plugging a ten-part online "course" called
"The New You: A Total Life Makeover," and currently Williamson's main web
site leads with basically that same
plug, and follows with an announcement that the Williamson
Institute will be "launching soon." Of course the site
contains various other links to ways you can fork over your
hard-earned lucre to Williamson.
Williamson insists she is not driven by the profit motive,
though. From Tessa Stuart's Rolling Stone piece again:
But ask Marianne Williamson if her
campaign has a profit motive, and a beatific expression will
shimmer across her face. “It’s quite the opposite,”
Williamson tells me, sitting at a sun-drenched rooftop bar a
few blocks from Manhattan’s Bryant Park in early fall. “I’m
not doing the things right now that you do in my career to
make a living — speaking fees, etc. I’m not off giving
seminars. A senator running for president is still getting a
Senate salary, right? This is the opposite of a lucrative
thing to do.”
Williamson continues, plugging her most recently released
book by name, “If you look at my Politics of Love that came
out, it is not a bestseller. It is way down on Amazon.” (It
was, at press time, ranked Number 25 in “Religious Studies:
Church & State,” Number 74 in “Spiritual Healing,”
and Number 79 in “History of Religion & Politics.”)
She fixes me with a bemused look. “If I want to, I kind of
know how to sell a book. It’s called a book tour.”
Condescension duly noted, Marianne. (By the
way, considering the many millions of new books that are
constantly being published, and zillions of older ones still
actively on the market, those press-time Amazon numbers aren't
really all that bad.)
Tessa Stuart writes that Williamson's campaign denies that she
planned from the beginning to capitalize on the exposure she'd
get from a presidential run with money-making schemes like the
Williamson Institute. In fact Williamson's campaign manager,
Patricia Ewing, expressed surprise that Stuart would even ask
such a question, and suggested that perhaps there was a bit of
sexism behind the inquiry. "Is the same question being asked
of businessmen in the race?" Ewing asked, adding that no one
seemed to be questioning the motives of Tom Steyer, Andrew Yang
et al. when their respective businesses continued to
"innovate" while they were on the campaign trail.
But the difference, Stuart points out in her article, is that
neither Steyer nor Yang is launching a new business predicated on
asking fans or supporters "to pay for the privilege of
hearing what they have to say."
Exactly. Furthermore, there has been plenty of criticism about
Donald Trump continuing to profit from his own businesses while in office. So it
isn't just a matter of giving "businessmen" a pass
while the poor put-upon "businesswoman" catches all of
the flak. This is not to deny that sexism and double standards riddle our political landscape. They most certainly do. But this is not that. Marianne Williamson has said that the only way we
can defeat the "outrageous lies" of Trumpism is by
telling "outrageous truth." She is clearly branding
herself as the standard-bearer of this truth, but anyone who
truly believes this is as misinformed or deluded in his or her
own way as any of the MAGA-cap wearing Trump devotees who cheer
at his fascist rallies. And while I am emphatically not
suggesting that Williamson's fans are hate-filled bigots like so
many (not all, but so many) of Trump's fans, nor am I insinuating that Williamson's
crapitalism is on a scale with Trump's, or that her narcissism is
even remotely as dangerous at this point as Trump's, the devotion
of her base is not necessarily a harmless thing.
Lest you accuse me of Williamson-bashing, I am not categorically
declaring Marianne Williamson to be devoid of truth. As I've
noted here in previous posts about her -- and as was noted in this excellent August 2019 piece in The Intercept -- there is validity in some of her core messages,
despite the wackadoodle new-agey veneer in which so many of them
are wrapped. But it's gonna take a whole lot more than abstract
declarations of moral and spiritual truths to defeat the orange
blob and fix our egregiously broken system, which was broken for
many years before Trump but has been immeasurably damaged even
more since he's been in power. Marianne Williamson is simply not
the person to accomplish this. And I am pretty sure that at some
level, she knows it.
But don't cry for her, because one way or the other, with or
without the "Williamson Institute," she'll be laughing
-- beatifically, of course, and with a shimmering expression of
thinly veiled condescension on her lovely face -- all the way to
the bank.
5 July 2019:So wrong, Marianne -- Musings on Williamson's first debate
performance in late June, on her history as a New-Wage
icon, on the new-agey "love and light" mindset,
and on why Marianne is the wrong choice to go up against
Trump.
31 July 2019: Marianne Williamson: still so wrong -- Williamson got to talk more during her
second performance at the Democrats' "debate,"
and some of what she said made sense, but as the title of
the post noted... still so wrong.
It's only fair to note, before we go any further, that the use of
outside contractors to go after delinquent taxpayers is not new and has been tried before (and has failed). As well, it has received support on both sides of the
aisle -- and shame on every lawmaker, Republican or Democrat, who
ever voted in favor of such a scheme. The point here is that the
revival last year of this method of collecting delinquent taxes,
which was part of the Trump administration's push to privatize
tax collection, would seem to fly in the face of Trump's own
man-of-the-people shtick, particularly regarding his previously
expressed concerns for the tribulations of the over-taxed middle
class.
The use of private for-profit thumbscrew operators
is all in the service of that right-wing mantra, "smaller
government," of course, and is also in keeping with the
practice of awarding lucrative contracts to private companies.
Win-win, if you're an oligarch or a friend of one. From the
Salon.com article:
Under the terms of their contract with
the IRS, the debt-collection outfits receive a 25 percent
commission on whatever they collect. The four companies are
CBE Group, ConServe [aptly named ~ CC], Performant
Recovery and Pioneer. The IRS is owed hundreds of billions in
past-due taxes.
Outsourcing debt collection also allows for
sleazier collection tactics than IRS agents have traditionally
been allowed to employ. For one thing, the privateers are allowed
carte blanche to contact delinquent taxpayers by phone. While the
IRS is busily warning consumers about tax-collection phone scams,
the private debt collectors are employing tactics that
are very similar to those of the scammers the IRS warns about.
This of course leaves the door wide open to actual scammers who
are working only for themselves. To help you distinguish between legal and
illegal collection scams, the IRS offers this advice, which may or may
not be helpful in determining if that caller or in-person visitor
is legit or not.
In any case, what really struck my attention as fodder for this
Whirled was this bit regarding the private debt collectors' m.o.:
The call scripts suggested that
taxpayers should raid their 401(k) retirement funds, ask
their employer for a loan, or put their tax debt on a credit
card. In the case of an early withdrawal from a 401(k), the
taxpayer could actually incur an additional federal tax
liability in an effort to resolve back taxes.
That reads just like it's taken straight from the Scamworld playbook, doesn't it? Donnie John's Trump U hucksters used these
ploys, as did, for that matter, the aggressive pushers of
imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau's Global Information
Network (GIN) MLM scheme, and its offshoots, back in the day. As
have numerous other fraudsters... Of course I understand that there is a fundamental
difference between running a scam and making an attempt to
collect a debt that is legitimately owed. If you're under legal
obligation to pay a tax and you don't, there are consequences.
But the point here is that private debt collectors, hired by a
government agency, are being given free rein to mislead and
harass people, in many cases making an already bad situation much
worse, and that some of the strategies these collectors use are
not only unethical, but may be only marginally legal -- and
that these coercive-persuasion strategies are the same ones used
by scammers to manipulate their marks into emptying their bank
accounts.
One of my heroes, Senator Elizabeth Warren
(D-Mass.), has (along with several other Democratic notables)
been on the private tax collection issue for over a year now,
having written to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about those
phone scripts. I applaud Senator Warren. She is actually looking
out for the well being of American taxpayers while the "man
of the people," the Mad King, continues to smear her with
his "Pocahontas" taunts, as he did yet again during the
word salad with Russian dressing that he served up in Montana just the other evening.
Elizabeth Warren's DNA is truly a non-issue in the larger scheme of things; there's no
evidence that she ever exploited her possible Indian heritage in
any substantial way, and even a DNA test would most likely be
inconclusive. Not that this will make any difference at all to
the mindlessly cheering redcaps who attend Trump's
all-too-frequent pep rallies/worship services.
Nina Olson, the IRS' national taxpayer advocate, said that the
private contractors have targeted lower-income taxpayers into
getting locked into repayment plans that they won't be able to
maintain. As a consequence, the most financially vulnerable
taxpayers are unable to pay for things they need; they can't meet
their basic living expenses.
If Trump truly wanted to do something good for the average
American taxpayer, he would have pushed for true tax reform that
included substantially smaller tax cuts for the wealthy than that train wreck he pushed and
signed off on last year, substantially larger tax cuts for the
rest of us, and while he was at it, one-time amnesty for the
millions of middle-class and marginally middle-class who are
currently struggling to pay their delinquent taxes. But don't
look for any of that any time soon. Instead I think we can expect
more of the same from the Scammer In Chief. It may be only a
matter of time before we see the revival of actual debtors'
prisons -- private ones, ones, of course.
* * * * *
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The past few weeks have been pretty crazy, and
as summer (in the Northern Hemisphere) and the political season both heat up, it is almost
certainly going to get even crazier. But just for the sake of
putting in my two-cents' worth on some of the craziness, here are
a few tidbits and aggregated links.
Salty Droid and Daily Kos dig into Drumpf U's Prosper
connections In case you were worried about the little fake
robot's prolonged absence, there's no cause for concern. Salty
Droid returned earlier this month with a teaser about the yuuuuge
scam formerly known as Trump University, which he had exposed years ago
for the massive fraud that it was/is. In the teaser he took a
potshot at Donald Trump's obnoxious, tone-deaf self-congratulations in the immediate wake of the mass shooting in Orlando,
Florida on June 12. Salty also put together a short video that
competently demonstrated the cynical lie that was Trump U.
That was just the appetizer. A few days later Salty came back with the main course, a post focusing on the intimate connection between
Cheat-o Jesus' phony institution of liar education and notorious
Utah boiler-room company Prosper Inc.
As many of you may know, Salty has been on Prosper's and Utah's case for
years, being one of the very first to call out that "rotting
vortex of fraud," as he put it. Salty's postings inspired me
more than once to add my own voice to the
(still-too-small) chorus too. One reason I found the matter of
such interest was that Joe "Mr. Fire" Vitale,
a frequent snarget on this Whirled, "partnered" with
Prosper years ago for his extravagantly overpriced "Miracles
Coaching" scheme. Over the years,
others such as In the Limelight blogger Jonathan Timar, as well as The Verge, have also nabbed
Joe for Miracles Coaching and its dependence upon the
Prosper-generated hard sell. There have been consumer complaints
about Prosper's "business coaching" as well -- see here and here and here, for instance.
At any rate, Trump U is far from the only scam in which Prosper
has been involved. But it seems clear that Trump U got a lot of
help and enabling from the Willis boys -- not just Ethan but his
brother Damon -- back in the day when Prosper was still Prosper.
The bottom line, according to Salty:
It’s not enough to call this fraud.
It’s intentional manipulation :: a full degree darker than
deception … and it works like a motherfucker. These guys
are so good at it :: scary good … which is why they
generally contract to take more than half the money in these
deals.
Trump University didn’t slide gradually into scam after
being confronted with the reality of the web’s unprofitable
profit model … as happens to so many companies. Trump came
to this game partnered with Prosper … because he was always
going straight for the jugular.
That sounds pretty accurate.
By the way, Salty isn't the only one on the Prosper/Drumpf U
connection. Lenny Grover put some good info together and
published it on The NewsHub and on Daily Kos. Here's the Kos link.
But as I noted on my own very long post about the Drumpf U playbooks -- a post that totally overlooked the Prosper
connection, I'm sorry to say (and really, there was no excuse for
that, since Prosper was mentioned in the playbook PDF to which I
linked) -- I don't think that knowing that Donald Trump is a
scammer will make any difference to the hatriots and scammer
wannabes who are pushing for a Drumpf presidency. For the scammer
wannabes, in fact, it will just be a selling point.
LoonyC gets out of Facebook jail,
and he's loonier than ever Another frequent snarget on this blog, Not-Doktor Leonard Coldwell,
was recently sprung from Facebook jail. I wrote about his most recent 30-day suspension in late May, detailing his whines about being "banned"
because, according to him, he was writing posts in support of
Donald Trump. More than likely, however, he was suspended for
hate speech -- not that it stopped him from posting on Facebook.
The only account that was actually suspended was his main
English-language page, but he continued to post on his main
German page, as well as several other pages he maintains, and he
even created a new fake account under the name "Eyn
Rand."
Well, Lenny has been back on Facebook in full force now for a few
days, and he hit the ground whining that he is probably going to
be blocked again. Even more amusingly, he is boasting that he has
a huge fortune of 100 billion dollars... or maybe euros; he
doesn't seem to be sure which it is. And he is going to use that
fortune to create his own sovereign nation. Now, where/when have
we heard that before? Oh, yeah, here -- back in April 2013 when he was boasting about having purchased 130-plus
acres in South Carolina, near the Georgia border.
As I noted on my comment on Bernie's blog post, in all of the
posts that Lenny wrote immediately after getting out of Facebook
jail, he hasn't made one mention of having been “banned”
because of his pro-Trump posts. Yet his Trump advocacy was the
excuse he gave at the beginning of his 30-day suspension.
Post-suspension, he is only blaming the New World Order, or NWO.
Maybe, I suggested, he just doesn’t remember the lie he told
previously. Then again, that was 30 days ago, and
probably (at least 30) bottles of bourbon ago as well.
And it seems that Lenny hasn't learned his lesson
about hate speech, or perhaps he is simply trying to bait
Facebook so he'll get suspended again, and can whine about it and
gather more names and email addresses for his
"exclusive" newsletter. On his German page, under the
name "Dr." Leonard Coldwell, there's this, from June
23, 2016.
A translation of the caption under the Hitler pic:
And then there's this: a clip from Lenny's June 28, 2016 interview with one of his long-time buddies, conspiracy nut and hate-monger Jeff Rense. This isn't the entire segment but it's enough to clearly call Lenny out for a particularly vicious form of anti-Semitism, marked by Holocaust denial and expressions of admiration for Adolf Hitler, whom he and Rense both portray as the egregiously misunderstood hero of history. Vocational suicide, indeed. Lenny's rants are the words of a maniac who has no real vocation left to destroy.
In light of the above, I'm all for Leonard Coldwell forming his own
sovereign nation, but I hope it's far, far away from the United
States. Actually, I'm thinking that the location for Loonyland
might be somewhere in Russia, since Lenny has such a mad
man-crush on Vladimir Putin and is supposedly going to be talking
to him soon about how to save our world.
The more I think about it, the more I think
that Russia would be a perfect place for Lenny, because overall
people there are even more gullible than they are in the US, as I noted in this September 2009 snarkfest.
In any case I had been wondering about Lenny's letter to Putin. I
didn't have to wonder long; on June 26 he posted this on his German page:
If I'm reading his garbled garbage correctly,
it appears that Lenny did not personally reach out to Putin; he
merely signed an online letter. So are we to believe Putin is
singling Lenny out of the 93,000-plus other souls all over the
world who supposedly signed the same online letter, and that Vlad is going to be meeting personally with Lenny?
Perhaps Lenny
fantasizes about himself and Vlad prancing shirtlessly on horseback
together, parading around the new sovereign nation of Loonyland, supervising drills of Lenny's Pinkshirt troops, overseeing the
Lenions toiling in the organic gardens or attending the animals. Possibly he envisions Vlad and him hunting and shooting shirtlessly together like the man's men that they
are.
Now that I've spoiled your appetite for dinner, let's get back to that sovereign nation notion. Like his idol Donald Trump, Lenny has been a
big and mostly ignorant advocate of #Brexit. Lenny has also gotten behind #Amexit
(the US leaving the United Nations) and #Texit (Texas seceding
from the United States). Well, I'm here to get behind what I hope
will be a #Lexit.
Goodbye, Lenny, and good riddance.
Burning soles redux: it's not the
firewalk that's the main problem Nearly four years ago, the Emperor of Scamworld
Tony Robbins' firewalking shtick made the news because some folks
at a California event got their tootsies burned. I blogged about it here. Well,
it has happened again, this time in Dallas, Texas. (My pal Steve Salerno at SHAMblog was invoked by ABC News to provide insight, but they apparently did a piss-poor job of it; they ran a mere snippet of a prolonged comment he'd made after the 2012 incident.)
bad things that scale + the internets =
very scary
6000 people walking down 10+ lanes of hot coals for 90
minutes :: seems like a big bad … but it’s not the big
number we should be worried about. Each one of the those 6000
people represents approximately 100 other people who were
offered the opportunity to Unleash the Power Within in San
Jose July 2012 and declined. Hundreds of thousands of sales
messages constantly spammed across all mediums :: to the
whole world … generating the contrivance of attention.
Tony Robbins will never stop telling you that the way to move
forward with your life is to keep giving ever larger amounts
of yourself and your life to Tony Robbins :: but he’ll
never give it back … because he is a nothing and a nobody
so he can’t. As shallow a god as ever there was.
But he is a shallow god who is still able to
collect millions from the hopeful and the vulnerable.
Update 27 June: Salty Droid weighed in on the
latest Tony's toasted toes episode, and as usual nailed it.
The media doesn’t do stories about
the huge harms done by Tony Robbins. But they love the shit
out of the #footburn #ambulance thing.
Yep. But the problem goes deeper...
People want solutions for their
unsolvable problems … and scammers are allowed to use
deception and manipulation to take advantage of that.
It wouldn’t be possible without buy-in from liars at every level
of our completely corrupted :: propaganda based … power
structure.
The problem isn't just with Tony Robbins and
Donald Trump. When someone as influential as former President
Bill Clinton (whom I have supported, as I now support his wife) calls
Tony Robbins a "very good friend," you know the malaise goes all the way up.
Sez Salty:
We best Awaken the Revolutionary Within
… before there’s nothing left of our great democratic
experiment but lies and burnt feet.
Update 30 June: And here is Steve Salerno, who also gets the big picture
in relation to Robbins, Trump et al. and America's "Positive
Mental Attitude-mania" -- a mania that has eroded common
sense.
My friend Julie Daniel has shared this redacted
screen shot of one person's huge refund.
Judging by its news releases, the FTC seems to be patting itself on the back for this one.
Small victories, I suppose. It's nothing, though, compared to the
millions that Trudeau scammed out of members of his mega-scam,the Global Information Network (GIN).
It's not often that I allow guest
posts on this blog, and as you may know I hadn't been a Trump supporter, but in the interests of being fair and
balanced I am publishing this piece. I have to admit that the writer
has a powerful message about restoring sanity to the American
judicial system as well as the political system, and truly
making this country great again. Dr. Coldspell is a certified naturohomeochiropathic practitioner,
anti-vaccination health activist, and a member of the advocacy
group Americans for a More American America. She holds an honorary PhD from Baptist University of Lower Louisiana. Dr. Coldspell asked that I not
edit her post in any way, shape or form, so I am honoring her
wishes and presenting it here exactly as submitted to me.* Please
give her words careful consideration, as she says that she
represents a significant portion of the American electorate.
Watch out, Hillary!
~ CC
I am a proud Donald Trump supporter and frankly I
am really sick of being called racist and a bigot and a hater
because of that. I am about as far from a hater as anyone could
be because I love America and so does Mr. Trump and thats that.
And although I am fed up with being called a racist I am even
more I am fed up with hearing my candidate being called a racist
just because he isnt afraid to tell the truth about Mexicans and
about a certain Mexican "Judge" (possible NWO
operative?) named Gonzalo Curiel, who has singled Mr. Trump out
for persecution because Mr. Trump wants to build a wall to make
America great again and take our country back. The truth is that
judge Curiel is part of a conspiracy of activist Mexican judges
that are working from within to tear our country apart and weaken
us and depopulate us and take our guns away to get us ready for
FEMA camps and mandatory vaccinations and conversion to the
Moslemic religion.
The media has been beating up on Mr. Trump for telling the truth
while it has been applauding Judge Curiel for being some kind of
hero. But the truth has finally come out. Not only does Judge Curiel have deep connections to
radical violent Mexican groups, but he is also a Hillary Clinton
contributor! It looks like Mr Trump was right all along that the
Judge had a personal vendetta against him.
And lets talk about Trump University for a few minutes since it is the focus of those unjust lawsuits. The
lamestream media has jumped on this as if it was the biggest
crime of the century but it was nothing more nor less than a real
estate course and a very successful one for many people according
to the investigative article I linked to above. It was only
complained about by a tiny percentage of whiners who were
probably lazy anyway or didnt do what the course told them to do
or maybe they were unhappy because they didn't make a million
dollars immediately. Very few if any people really lost money but
too many people want something for nothing and there are so many
loosers in this world, and thats not Mr. Trump's fault.
Besides many of those classes were free in the first place! A man that goes to my Church told me that his brother-in-law's boss has a next door neighbor who went to the free course and liked it so much that he signed up for another more advanced class. Someone wouldn't do that if they thought they were being screwed.
What you need to know is that there is a Mexican radical connection and a
Clinton connection where judge Curiel is concerned and Donald
Trump was right all along that the judge really does have a
personal grudge against Mr. Trump. You can call me a racist if
you want but facts are facts and I am tired of political
correctness because it is destroying our country from within.
And judge Curiel is only one piece in a scandalous and dangerous
puzzle. The Mexican plot against Donald Trump is ongoing and they
are not even trying to hide it anymore. They even have Donald Trump pinatas now
because they are so mad about the wall and the truths Mr. Trump
has told about so many of the ones they are sending over here
being rapists and diseased robbers and illegals and not the best
people. The writing on the wall (the wall that my candidate is
going to build, ha-ha) couldn't be any clearer: THE MEXICANS MEAN
TO HARM MR. TRUMP.
Now I am confident that once he is President Mr. Trump will ban
the manufacture and import of all of these pinatas because they are
disrespectful but even more important becuase they encourage
violence and also the "candy" in them is reportedly
laced with drugs or with chemtrail poison that studies have shown
disrupts hormones and causes people to be homosexuals or even
trannies who pray on innocent children in public restrooms. But
that is a whole other subject. Anyway unfortunately Mr. Trump
cant do much about the pinata scourge until he is President so
until then beware of all pinatas not just the Trump ones.
By the way. The picture on this post was taken of that so called
"Judge" who is persecuting Mr. Trump. It was shot
during a (taxpayer-funded) junket to Mexico that the judge went on
early in 2016 with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obummer after they
murdered Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by putting a pillow
on his head. (Does anybody really believe Justice Scalia died of natural causes?) The trip to Mexico was supposedly a "fact-finding
mission" (ha) but it was really to meet with the judge's la raza
buddies according to the source
that leaked the picture. While in
Mexico the judge bought a Donald Trump pinata and proudly posed
with it. Somebody posted it on their Facebook page and it went
viral before judge Curiel could have it removed. It's too late
now Judge Curiel your secret is out. What an insult to the high
position you hold. People say Mr. Trump isn't Presidential but
what about judges who aren't judgelike? People who live in glass
courthouses shouldnt throw stones as they say.
But there is more. It isn't just Mr. Trump that the Mexican judge
cartel hates. And yes it is a cartel, judge Curiel is not the
only Mexican judge in this country unfortunately. Together the
mexican judges are working to make sure that illegals get to vote
and get food stamps and welfare and all of our good jobs. They
are ruining the moral fabric of our society. But what you really
need to know is that they are involved in a elaborate plot
against patriotic Americans who are not affraid to tell the
truth.
Did you think Donald Trump was the only person they have gone
after? Well hold on this may shock you. Many of you know about
heroic consumer advocate Kevin Trudeau whose Natural Cures books
ripped the lid off of the government and big food companies and
big Pharma and many other things that they don't want you to know
about. Mr. Trudeau was also not afraid to tell the truth about
Mexicans and how Mexican illegal immigration is destroying
America as we know it. Here is a link to one of his radio shows a few years ago where he talks about that and other important things
(like how the government doesn't want you to be successful which
is why they persecuted motivational speaker James A. Ray according to mr Trudeau.).
And now Kevin Trudeau is in jail! In case you dont know it he is
serving a ten-year sentence on trumped-up charges. All he did was
exercise his free speech and and say that a diet was easy. And
for that they threw him in prison. How could this happen in
America you say. Well remember we are living in Obamas America --
where there is a homosexual Kenyan islamic terrorist with a wife
that was born as a man and two children they are pretending are
their biological kids, living in the Whitehouse! And Kevin was
put in jail during the Obama administration. Coincidence? I think
not. Anyway one of my associates has a cousin whos friend's
mother in law went on the Kevin Trudeau diet and lost nearly 100
pounds and she said it really was easy! Yet Kevin got thrown in
prison for saying the same thing.
So do you know the name of the judge who put Mr. Trudeau in jail
for ten years? No it wasnt Judge Curiel because it wasn't his
jurisdiction but it was Judge Ronald Guzman, another Mexican.
Judge Guzman is definitely not an American he was born in Puerto
Rico where they also speak mexican! And he was nominated to his current high position by
President Bill Clinton so theres another criminal Clinton
connection right there. Are you seeing a pattern here? If not you
haven't done your research or you may be just another sheeple.
But there is still hope for you. We still have a few months until
the election. More and more people are waking up and come
November, we will be casting our votes for Donald Trump the man
who will keep America safe from illegal Mexicans and muslin
terrorists and hopefully from the Rothschilds who really run
everything. (By the way do you think that it is coincidence that
the two judges who oversaw Mr. Trudeau's cases, Robert Gettleman
(probably a jewish zionist name!) and Ronald Guzman,
have the same initials, "RG"? And that those
are the same initials as "Rothschild Goons?"
The New World Order is speaking to us in code and again the
writing is on the wall!)
So forget your political correctness and stop calling the people
racists who are only trying to help save our country. A vote for
anyone but Donald Trump is a vote against America and all that we
hold most dear. He will restore sanity to this country not only
to the courts but to the whole political system because he is not
a politician and cant be bought. He will also be able to finally
rain in the lying lamestream media by strengthening libel laws
and forcing the media to tell the truth or go out of business.
Donald Trump tells it like it is and not like the way the
politically correct crowd and the social justice warriors wish it
was.
Some people say to me how could you support Trump
if your a woman. Well there are millions of us women who proudly
support him. And not just because he has hired many women for his
businesses and gave them all a chance to succeed in a so called
mans world. It's also because he will save us from the
alternative under Killary (which Hussein Obama-nation has paved
the way for), which is an America where we are forced to speak
Arabian and have to live under Sharai laws where women are
treated worse than dogs and they have to keep their heads covered
or they get raped in Mosques by diseased imans. And those will be
the lucky ones because at least they will still have heads to
cover. If people (women or men or children) try to stand up for
their Christian faith there heads will be cut off on TV to make
an example of them. Mr Trump will save us from that. He is the
only one who can.
So a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for American
greatness. God bless America and God bless Donald Trump. In the
name of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savor, amen.
* Specifically, this post is presented exactly as the voices in my head submitted it to me, since -- I confess! -- I totally made up Dr. Coldspell and this piece is satirical. But I can't really claim to have made up the sentiments, which are loudly trumpeted (so to speak) all over the Internet by Donald fans and conspiracy nuts -- including some of those who have been snargets on this blog (e.g., "Dr." Leonard Coldwell, longtime Kevin Trudeau buddy Fred van Liew, et al.). The spelling and grammatical errors were deliberate but actually I was being charitable, as I've seen much worse by some of the Trumpians (e.g., the aforementioned "Dr." C). ~CC
Note: I've added A LOT of content and
links since first publishing this post on May 31. At this point it's still best to just consider this post a work in progress.
~CC
It's unclear whether Curiel knew of
Trump's latest volley of attacks when the judge issued the
order Friday afternoon, but it seems possible. Curiously, the
Republican candidate laid into Curiel at about the same time
the judge was holding a hearing less than a mile away on a
motion by The Washington Post seeking unsealing of the Trump
University-related files. The judge's order was released a
couple of hours after the hearing.
Trump has made noise about moving to recuse
Curiel from the suits, but as of the day of the Politico writeup
from which the above quotation was pulled, his lawyers had not yet brought such a motion.
Even though some of his allies, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, have winced at the remarks about Curiel, Trump has not backed down, not only sticking by but escalating his rhetoric against the judge, and continuing to call for his recusal. It's all about the Rule of Trump versus the Rule of Law. The possible consequences of Trump having his way on this matter are pretty scary to contemplate. Trump's insistence is absurd on its surface anyway. Should female judges not be allowed to preside over cases involving alleged male rapists? Should African-American judges not be allowed to preside over cases against white racists? It seems to me (and to others who know much more about the law than I do) that the judge would be within his rights to slap Trump with contempt, but he probably won't, and in fact he has postponed the trial on the case that he had cleared for trial until after the election.
And in case you are wondering, the reason Judge Curiel has not yet spoken out in his own defense is that he is bound by the judicial code of ethics, which precludes a judge making public comment about the merits, or lack thereof, of a pending case.
The case of the disappearing plaintiff Trump has actually been bitching about Curiel for a couple of years now, since long before the judge's latest actions. Currently Trump bases his public anti-Curiel rants mostly on the judge's Mexican heritage (because of that whole Wall thing, y'know). One complaint he has made, most recently on CBS's Face the Nation on June 5, is that the case (though he didn't specify which one, it is the Low (formerly Makaeff) case) should have been dismissed when the plaintiff's lawyers asked that the originally top-named plaintiff be removed, and the judge agreed. That should have been the end of it, insisted Trump... but the judge is "Mexican!" And Trump wants to build that Wall. It's so unfair, don't you know. Trump did not mention that the woman who had been removed in the referenced case -- he didn't name her but she is Tarla Makaeff -- had only been removed recently, by her own request, because she said she was sick of being publicly harassed by Trump. Obviously there were plenty of other plaintiffs in the case, and sufficient contested points to move it forward. But Trump tells a different story. On Face the Nation he said that the plaintiffs' lawyers had decided that this woman was a "terrible witness" and that she had fallen apart during her deposition, and that any judge who wasn't a Donald Trump hater would consequently have seen that the whole case was invalid and would have thrown it out.
Trump also insisted that Ms. Makaeff had previously written glowing reviews of Trump U, as had thousands and thousands of other folks, according to him. What he didn’t mention, perhaps because he doesn’t know, is that people at Scamworld events such as these, particularly pricey events, often write those reviews while in the throes of event afterglow, and often it’s because they’re strongly encouraged (manipulated/coerced) into doing so, and also because they are trying desperately to convince themselves that they didn’t just throw hundreds or thousands of their hard-earned dollars down the toilet.
More to the point here, the article about Tarla Makaeff that I linked to above (here is that link again) addresses the matter of her formerly positive reviews.
One of the key Trump attacks against Makaeff center on videos of her praising Trump University when she was a student.
But her lawyers argued that she didn't realize at the time that she and other students had been deceived by false promises from Trump University, and because the school had promised students it would continue to provide contacts and other assistance on future real estate deals.
The court agreed with that argument when dismissing Trump's counterclaim against Makaeff. It ruled two years ago that "as the recent Ponzi-scheme scandals involving onetime financial luminaries like Bernard Madoff and Allen Stanford demonstrate, victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimizers until the moment they realize they have been fleeced."
Closing the barn door after the horses have escaped
In light of the content of those documents, it is no surprise that the Trump attorneys had been fighting to keep them sealed, citing "trade secrets," the release of which
they claim could harm new incarnations of the scam that may be
launched once the court cases have been resolved. But Judge
Curiel poo-pooed the notion of a new and improved Trump U, and said that besides, much of that proprietary information is already public anyway.
The book told employees to collect financial information
from those who attended and rank them by their liquid assets
to see who could afford more coursework. And staffers kept
hotel ballrooms at a precise temperature — no more than 68
degrees — at the expensive real estate seminars.
These details and scores of others are embedded in thousands
of pages of documents that comprise the lawsuits attacking a
set of education courses GOP presidential front-runner Donald
Trump has boasted about.
The link to the PDF of the 2010 playbook is
embedded in the quotation above, but here it is again in case that link doesn't work. As appalling as it may seem if you're not somewhat familiar with these types of schemes, this is in many ways a typical Scamworld playbook, with every detail
covered: from the temperature of the room, to the positioning
of the chairs, to the grilling about participants' assets, and it was all orchestrated to ensure maximum coercion and money extraction.
Among many other things the playbook outlined methods of suckering attendees of free
sessions into buying a $1,495 ticket to a three-day workshop. That
workshop was promoted at the free sessions as providing
everything participants needed to start getting rich. It will come as no
surprise to anyone who is familiar with Scamworld tactics that
the $1,495 classes were not all-inclusive after all, but were
merely conduits for upselling. The playbooks urged the sales team
to aggressively promote classes with a "mentor," which
could cost between $9,995 and $34,995, presumably depending upon how much the marks had in liquid a$$ets.
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.
According to a separate deposition
Trump did not personally select instructors and
"faculty" members for his "university," even though the promotions for Trump U had clearly stated that they had been "handpicked" by him, with Trump himself saying as much in some of the ads. He
was certainly involved in crafting the ads, and clearly the scam company
eagerly leveraged Trump's celebrity status, with his approval. It was all about the Trump brand.
Even though Trump University is facing
two multi-million dollar fraud lawsuits, Donald Trump
continues to defend his educational efforts, calling Trump
University “a terrific school that did a fantastic job.”
But if Trump had read his school’s own playbook, he might
have foreseen the likely outcome of running a university with
comically lax standards. At one point, the playbook advises
Trump staffers: “If a district attorney arrives on the
scene, contact the appropriate media spokesperson
immediately.”
But Attorneys General should be okay, as long
as they're from Texas or Florida. More on that in a moment.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Drumpf Apart from being a scam, Trump U was yet another example of Donald Trump's hypocrisy. On June 2, David Corn at Mother Jones wrote about the big con behind Trump's phony university, citing several instances in which Trump clearly said that success in business and in life owes more to intrinsic factors than to anything else. In other words, Trump doesn't really believe that success can be "taught." From the article:
Trump, who has campaigned as a champion of the little guy, has often stated his belief that only certain humans have the potential to be achievers. In a video for a 2006 book he co-wrote, Why We Want You to Be Rich, Trump was asked, "Do you think anybody can be rich?" His answer was no, and, in explaining this, he dumped on the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence:
No, I don’t think anybody can get rich. I think unfortunately the world is not a fair place. I think you have to be born with a certain intelligence. And it doesn't have to be a super intelligence, it has to be a certain intelligence. You can't take somebody that's not a smart person and say, "By the way, this is what you do, and here's your little card, and you're gonna follow these rules and regulations and you're gonna become a rich person." The world is not fair. You know they come with this statement "all men are created equal."
Well, it sounds beautiful, and it was written by some very wonderful people and brilliant people, but it's not true because all people and all men [laughter] aren't created—now today they'd say all men and women, of course, they would have changed that statement that was made many years ago. But the fact is you have to be born and blessed with something up here [pointing to his head]. On the assumption you are, you can become very rich.
Trump's all-folks-are-not-created-equal view was nothing new. In a 1990 Playboy interview, he noted that when it came to success, "I'm a strong believer in genes." Years later, in a CNN interview, Trump noted, "I think I was born with a drive for success. I had a father who was successful. He was a builder in Brooklyn and Queens. And he was successful and, you know, I have a certain gene. I'm a gene believer. Hey, when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse. And I really was, you know, I had a good gene pool from the standpoint of that." And at a Trump rally earlier this year in Biloxi, Mississippi, the mogul proclaimed, "I have Ivy League education, smart guy, good genes. I have great genes and all that stuff which I'm a believer in."
But...
That was not the message of Trump University. Its ads promised
that its students—who paid up to $35,000 for courses—would learn
Trump's "secrets" for amassing wealth and be taught how to apply them
right away. "Above all," Trump said in the promotional video for this
business, "it's about how to become successful." The pitch essentially
said this: Anyone can do it. Yet Trump has frequently indicated that he
doesn't really buy that. Instead, you need good genes, Trump-type genes,
to succeed and score big in this not-everyone-is-created-equal world.
In that case, there's not much point in trying to teach inferior Trump
wannabes to be like the superior Trump, unless your aim is to
redistribute wealth—from them to you. But, in keeping with Trump's
elitist belief in the power of genes, this setup might be called
financial Darwinism. (To the guys with the good genes go the spoils—and
the cash!) And soon the courts will determine if it's also fraud.
Just another day in Scamworld The same day the Drumpf U documents were unsealed, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman slammed Trump U as being "phony" and "shameless." Schneiderman subsequently appeared on Morning Joe on June 2 to discuss his ongoing lawsuit against Trump U, which is a separate one from the California case that spurred the release of the potentially damning documents. Writing for the Washington Post, Greg Sargent noted that Trump had been caught in yet another fib.
The quote from Schneiderman that drove some
buzz today is the one in which he claimed that Trump University
was “fraud,” and added that Trump had privately offered to
“settle” the lawsuit with New York’s Attorney General. If
true, this contradicts Trump’s previous claim that
he has not sought to settle the lawsuit “out of principle.”
After all, only a big loser would settle a lawsuit, while winners
like Trump win them, right?
But I think another quote from Schneiderman deserves some
attention: He noted that a lot of the victims of Trump’s
alleged scam were people who had come to the school amid a dark
period in the aftermath of the financial crisis, when they were
desperate to find a way to make money.
Gosh. If only the New York AG had been as cooperative (or cheap whore-ish, perhaps) as those in Florida and Texas, both of whom chose not to pursue action against Trump U, and both of whom received political donations from Trump -- $25,000 to the Florida AG and $35,000 to the Texas AG who was running, and won, the gubernatorial seat. Texas' current AG, Ken Paxton, is actively trying to shush the conversation about the decision by the office of former AG and now-Gub'ner Greg Abbott not to pursue the case. And more information has resurfaced about Florida AG Pam Bondi, who apparently asked Trump for a donation before she stopped the fraud case. And to keep the circle jerk unbroken, both Bondi and Abbott have endorsed Trump. So there's that. And there's also the fact that even though the former Trump University LLC, now known as the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative LLC -- was shut down years ago, Drumpf is still earning a little pocket change from it.
But...yawn. I don't expect that this blatant proof of Donald Trump's Scamworld creds
will faze most of his shouting, cheering, red-hat-wearing
worshipers and hatriots. Many are already shrugging it off with
the rationalization that the techniques in the playbooks are just
par for the course with sales training in any industry.
"What's the big deal?" they say. "Hillary's the
real criminal! Make America great again!" It is actually a big deal, but most of Trump's supporters probably won't think it is.
The point is that these types of scams go on and on and on and
on and on, and for the most part very little is done about them. The fallout from the scams is good for an occasional feature piece or
"expose," especially if there's a high-profile player
and/or a lawsuit involved... and then it's back to business as
usual, with the media often playing their own parts in
perpetuating the scams (e.g., by running scammers' infomercials and other more cleverly disguised paid content, and by playing softball on "investigative" pieces).
So I think that Steve Benen, speculating on the Rachel Maddow blog that the Trump U brouhaha has turned into a full-fledged scandal for which there is no defense, may be exaggerating the case. And Benen, like most of the other reporters and commentators covering this matter, doesn't seem to realize that the real story isn't that one of a front-running presidential candidate's companies is a scam. The real story -- and the real outrage -- is that this type of scam isn't all that unusual. It's horrible, it's disgusting, and good people get screwed, so Trump should not be given a pass by any means... but it happens all the time.
Furthermore the media seem to have turned their attention away from another big Trump boondoggle: the Trump Network multi-level marketing (MLM) scams, which received a spate of attention for a while earlier this year, but since then seem to have slipped back into the shadows. And few of those covering the scams correlated them to the much larger MLM scourge in this country. As usual, Salty Droid got it, years ago.
If there is a single, overriding question in
the unfolding Trump University scandal, however, it is this: Why
in god's name is anyone surprised?
Of course, the fact that He, Trump was behind this scam is prima
facie evidence of some thoroughgoing shenanigans, but that's
not what I mean. He, Trump is an apex bunco artist, but he also
is a high-profile American corporate businessman of the late 20th
century.
But I repeat myself.
Bernie Sanders gets roasted in some quarters for saying this, but
it's true—for going on 40 years now, the primary business model
for the American corporate class has been fraud. What we're
getting a peek at now with the Trump University is indeed garish
in its contempt for the suckers, but what it's not is surprising.
Corporate America is held aloft by scams and scammers, and it goes far beyond the selfish-help/New-Wage/McSpirituality/alt-health industries that are the normal beat of this blog. Again, Salty Droid got that too (and hopefully will be writing more about it in future posts on his new and improved site). Here he is in November 2015:
Scamworld isn’t creeping upward toward the real world in an effort to
increase its reach/credibility. Scamworld is just the trickle down of
the devastating devotion to lies and corruption that form the basis of
the real world.
And here's Pierce again on the June 2 Esquire piece:
This isn't cynicism. This is the universe of
our politics today, and it has been for almost four decades now.
There are those In The Know and there are the suckers. There's
nobody in between any more, and it's certainly not the
government. Too often, the government is on one side while
pretending to be on the other.
So, yeah, it's a goddamn shame what Trump University did to those
poor people and I hope they sue him for everything, including his
socks and underwear. But please, don't ask me to be shocked.
This is the world we live in. The American democracy is becoming
the longest con of all.
All things considered, though, I doubt that the newly revealed docs will do "irreparable harm" to Trump's campaign, though I would seriously love to be proven wrong on this one. Many folks probably see nothing wrong with the Trump U "business" model I acknowledge that my candidate of choice, Hillary Clinton, does not escape the pen of Esquire's Charles Pierce, who cites those infamous Goldman Sachs gigs. Many loyal Trump subjects who are outraged about Hillary's high-dollar speeches to Goldman Sachs, the shenanigans of Bush and Cheney, and the several other examples listed in the Esquire piece linked to above, simply don't see their king as being part of the crony-capitalist political system.
And I think that is largely because they identify with Trump on some level. When attempting to project the real damage (or lack thereof) that the Trump U mess will do to his presidential campaign, we have to take into consideration the "like attracts like" phenomenon that I wrote
about late last month. Not only does
Donald Trump attract haters and a variety of narcissists and psychopaths (like not-Doctor Leonard Coldwell on both the "hater" and "narcissist/psychopath" counts), but he also attracts one-percenter wannabes and scammers who admire his success (again, the notorious not-doc Lenny fits into these categories), and for whom
rationalization about the Trump U documents most likely won't
even be necessary. "Mr. Las Vegas" himself, Wayne
Newton, showed that he understood the wannabe principle when he voiced his support for Trump last October on Fox
& Friends.
“I love Donald, and he would make a
great president,” Newton told hosts Elisabeth Hasselbeck,
Steve Doocy, and Brian Kilmeade.
“Number one, he tells the truth,” said Newton. “Number
two, he’s been where most of these guys want to be, in
terms of riding on his own plane. He doesn’t have to worry
about what hotels he stays in, he doesn’t have to worry
about how his family gets to Hawaii, so on and so forth.”
But mainly Mr. "Danke Schoen" loves
The Donald because "he tells it like it is."
So again, I think that for the most part the Trump
U flap won't make a bit of difference to the Trumpians, who will defend their idol no matter what happens. Depending upon how the lawsuits go, the "scandal" might possibly put a slight damper on some Scamworld schemes, since Trump is such a high-profile example. Possibly it will lead to reforms in the industry... oh, who am I kidding?
Certainly I
am glad that the fraud that was Trump U, and that may possibly be a slightly more subtle version of Trump U in the future, is getting some mainstream attention again, and that Trump in general is garnering more critical media attention now. But at this point I think that Paul Waldman's Washington Post opinion piece is a little overly optimistic in its projection that journalists' efforts to (finally) crack down on Trump will significantly harm the Trump campaign. After all, Trump is a powerful demagogue, and as the media light becomes ever harsher and Trump hollers more loudly about the unfairness of it all, it is far more likely that he will be able to turn his ardent admirers against the media (even more so than they are already) than that the media coverage will turn them against him.
And here is a link to another page, which includes information about the Cohen lawsuit in which civil RICO has been invoked. This page has a link to a portal that will lead you to numerous important court documents in both of the cases in which Judge Gonzalo Curiel is involved. (Also read their FAQ page.) For those who have jumped on the "Trump is
going to prison over RICO charges" bandwagon, hold on to
your horses. It probably isn't going to happen. Civil RICO is, as
my friend Max noted on a Facebook conversation, easy to invoke
but very hard to prove. Besides, technically speaking, the word
"charges" only applies to criminal cases, not civil,
and at this point it seems unlikely that either one of these
civil cases will become criminal ones, and highly unlikely that
Trump will be imprisoned for anything. (Here's Ken White at
Popehat lawsplaining about the ridiculous overuse of RICO accusations.) Frankly, I don't want to see Donald Trump in prison.
But I damn sure don't want to see him in the Oval Office.
PS added on 8 June 2016: In another comical development, Drumpf is now denying that he ever attacked Judge Curiel's ethnicity, and he has vowed to shut up about Trump U and the judge. We'll see how long that lasts. * The lawsuits over which Judge Gonzalo Curiel
is presiding are known as Cohen vs. Donald J. Trump, Case No.
3:13-cv-02519 (the Nationwide Action) and Low, et al. vs. Trump
University, LLC, et al., Case No. 3:10-cv-00940
(California/Florida/New York Action). In May 2016, the name of
the Makaeff Action was changed from Makaeff, et al. vs. Trump
University, LLC., et al. to Low, et al. vs. Trump University,
LLC., et al. ~ Source: Trumpuniversitylitigation.com
