2. His “Trump University” scam business. Last but not least in the showcase of Trump’s contempt for everyone else, there’s his “university”, a bottom-feeder business model straight out of late-night infomercials. He claimed he could teach people his investing secrets, but in reality, it was nothing but a get-rich-quick scam where salespeople used high-pressure tactics to extract enormous fees from the uneducated and vulnerable. All that the attendees got out of it was a worthless piece of paper and a photo of themselves with a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump.
Never licensed as a school, Trump University was in reality a series of real estate workshops in hotel ballrooms around the country, not unlike many other for-profit self-help or motivational seminars. Though short-lived, it remains a thorn in Trump’s side nearly five years after its operations ceased: In three pending lawsuits, including one in which the New York attorney general is seeking $40 million in restitution, former students allege that the enterprise bilked them out of their money with misleading advertisements.
…Schneiderman alleged that the program’s instructors had no particular expertise in real estate and that the seminars didn’t offer any special Trump strategies; he found that the curriculum was largely written by a third-party company that creates materials for motivational speakers and salesmen.
—Donald Trump billed his ‘University’ as a road to riches, but critics call it a fraud, Washington Post, 13 September 2015
(See also: Trump University and the art of the get-rich seminar, Ars Technica, 29 April 2016.)
1. His toddler-like lack of attention span. Tony Schwartz, who ghostwrote The Art of the Deal, now says he regrets it and calls Trump a narcissist and a sociopath who’s unfit for office. Most alarming of all, according to Schwartz, Trump is incapable of paying attention to anything for more than a few minutes at a time. He gets bored and irritable almost immediately:
For the book, though, Trump needed to provide him with sustained, thoughtful recollections. He asked Trump to describe his childhood in detail. After sitting for only a few minutes in his suit and tie, Trump became impatient and irritable. He looked fidgety, Schwartz recalls, “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Even when Schwartz pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his youth, and made it clear that he was bored. Far more quickly than Schwartz had expected, Trump ended the meeting.
… “Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit โ or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then…” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.
…Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source โ information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.
—Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All, The New Yorker, 25 July 2016
Image credit: Michael Vadon, via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license
