Trump 47: The Covidiot's Traveling Circus Is Back On The Road

[GreyhoundFan]

Uh oh, epic meltdown ahead: "Trump cancels Jacksonville part of Republican National Convention"

Spoiler

President Trump made a surprise announcement Thursday that he has canceled the Republican national convention scheduled for next month in Jacksonville, Fla., saying he wanted to keep his supporters safe from the coronavirus pandemic and protesters.

Trump, who delivered the news at the beginning of a coronavirus news briefing, said he was presented with plans for the nominating event in the afternoon, but told his staff it wasn’t the right time to hold the event.

“But I looked at my team and I said the timing for this event is not right, just not right with what’s happened recently. The flare-up in Florida to have a big convention is not the right time,” Trump said. “It’s really something that for me, I have to protect the American people. That’s what I’ve always done. That’s what I always will do. That’s what I’m about.”

Trump said the formal nominating process scheduled to take place in Charlotte, will proceed, but the large convention with all its pomp and circumstance planned for Jacksonville is canceled.

The president said he would still give an acceptance speech in some form, but it would not be before the cheering crowds that attend in normal times.

Trump said thousands of people “desperately” wanted to attend and were already making travel arrangements.

“The pageantry, the signs, the excitement were really, really top of the line,” he said.

 

[onekidanddone]

25 minutes ago, Becky said:

“Suburban Housewives? ? Calling  June Cleaver in her dress and pearls!

I’m thinking more Stepford.  
Adding: All he is really saying is that he will keep the suburbs white an keep out the scary brown people 
 

Edited July 23, 2020 by onekidanddone

[formergothardite]

20 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Trump said thousands of people “desperately” wanted to attend and were already making travel arrangements.

Translation: Trump realized that people weren't going to come and he didn't want another humiliating rally with him standing in front of an empty room. If thousands of people were planning on coming Trump wouldn't care who the hell died, he would hold it just so he could stand in front of a large, cheering crowd. He really seems to be missing his adoration rallies. 

[GreyhoundFan]

As if he needs another reason to hate DC! "Trump attended a fundraiser without a mask. The city sent an investigator to inspect his hotel."

Spoiler

The president’s maskless appearance at the Trump International Hotel this week — in apparent defiance of D.C. coronavirus regulations — caught the attention of local authorities, who inspected the hotel on Wednesday to check for compliance with city rules.

The investigator found no violations at the time of the visit, but the agency pledged to continue monitoring the hotel.

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) this spring ordered people to cover their faces while in the lobbies and common areas of hotels and to maintain six feet of distance from others, in an effort to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.

But President Trump did not wear a mask while greeting GOP congressional candidate Madison Cawthorn on Monday at his downtown Washington hotel, according to video of their interaction. Nor did multiple guests standing near one another in the lobby, the video shows.

ABC News reported Tuesday that guests at Trump properties have repeatedly flouted face-covering mandates. A Facebook invitation for a birthday party scheduled for Saturday at the D.C. hotel featured a “NO MASKS ALLOWED” disclaimer, the network reported. The invitation did not appear to be visible on the social media site Wednesday.

An inspector from the D.C. Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration, which fines businesses with liquor licenses that don’t comply with city regulations, visited the hotel on Wednesday afternoon. Inspectors can issue fines or warnings only for violations that they see in person, and all hotel staff members and visitors during the inspection were wearing masks, ABRA said.

Representatives of the hotel and the Trump Organization did not return requests for comment.

A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee said organizers took precautionary steps before a GOP fundraiser at the hotel on Monday that the president attended, including requiring those present to pass coronavirus tests that day and undergo temperature screenings and wellness questionnaires.

The campaign of Cawthorn, the North Carolina congressional candidate who shared the clip of the president’s maskless appearance at the hotel, did not return requests for comment.

Despite overwhelming support from public health experts, masks have become a political litmus tests of sorts, with many Republicans eschewing them.

As virus cases have spiked in the South and the West, however, a growing number of Republican elected officials have taken to wearing face coverings and calling them necessary.

Trump has recently softened his long-standing resistance and hostility to the use of masks to reduce coronavirus transmission. On Monday, he tweeted a photo of himself wearing a mask and called it patriotic — hours before he showed up at his hotel without one.

He urged Americans to wear masks the next day, at his first daily virus briefing in months.

Bowser has worn a mask in public and urged Washingtonians to cover their faces for the past several months. She expanded her mask mandate Wednesday to include any time outdoors when people are likely to come into contact with others.

Penalties for violating social distancing rules remain rare in the capital, however, with four establishments fined in the past month.

The Trump International Hotel has posted dozens of images on social media with employees wearing masks in recent weeks. The hotel also attempted to open its outside sidewalk cafe, as other restaurants and hotels have done during the pandemic, but closed it again after guests were being bothered by passersby on the street.

The hotel’s compliance with the city’s mask regulations came under scrutiny after Cawthorn shared the video of him meeting Trump on social media.

The clip showed Trump, accompanied by his attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), greeting an enthusiastic Cawthorn. Among that group, only Giuliani wore a mask.

Other people visible in the video did cover their faces.

Greg Aselbekian, who was listed on the Facebook invitation as the host of the “NO MASKS ALLOWED” birthday party Saturday at the hotel, did not return requests for comment made through his social media channels.

 

[WiseGirl]

11 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump keeps boasting about passing a cognitive test — but it doesn’t mean what he thinks it does"

  Reveal hidden contents

As President Trump and his team began attacking former vice president Joe Biden’s mental and physical fitness this summer, Trump began pondering his own cognitive abilities.

As part of his annual physical two years earlier, the president had taken the Montreal Cognitive Assessment — a 10-minute test designed to detect mild cognitive impairment such as the onset of dementia — and he believed he could weaponize his performance against Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

During a private campaign meeting in the Cabinet Room in early June, Trump brought up the test unprompted. In an extended riff, he talked about how well he had done — boasting that he’d been able to remember five different words, in order — and suggested challenging Biden to take the assessment, saying he was certain the former vice president would not fare as well.

Since then, the president has been speaking about the test publicly, telling Fox News’s Sean Hannity in a July 9 phone interview that he’d “aced it,” and again on Sunday, when he told the network’s Chris Wallace that he doubts Biden could answer all of the questions. On Wednesday evening, in another Fox News interview, Trump couldn’t resist revisiting what he said was the hardest part of the test — repeating the five words, in order.

Trump said he was first asked to repeat a set of words — “person,” “woman,” “man,” “camera,” “TV,” he said, offering a hypothetical example — and then, later in the assessment after some time had elapsed, he was again asked whether he remembered those same words, in order.

“And they say… ‘Go back to that question, and repeat them. Can you do it?’ ” Trump said, mimicking the doctors administering the exam. “And you go, ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ They say, ‘That’s amazing. How did you do that?’ I do it because I have, like, a good memory, because I’m cognitively there.”

But medical and public health experts stress that the cognitive exam is not what Trump seems to think it is — an indicator of IQ or a cudgel to be wielded against a political opponent like a debate challenge.

Experts say the president’s fixation on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment — or MoCA, as it is sometimes called — is particularly puzzling because the test is normally administered only if someone is concerned that they or their loved ones may be experiencing dementia or other cognitive decline. Getting a perfect score — as Trump has repeatedly claimed he did — merely signifies that the test-taker probably does not have a cognitive impairment as measured by the exam.

“It’s not meant to measure IQ or intellectual skill in anyway,” said Ziad Nasreddine, the neurologist who created the test. “If someone performs well, what it means is they can be ruled out for cognitive impairment that comes with diseases like Alzheimer’s, stroke or multiple sclerosis. That’s it.”

Nasreddine continued: “The reason most people take the test is they or others start noticing mental decline. They forgot where they parked the car, can’t remember what groceries to buy by the time they get to the store. They keep forgetting to take their medication.”

The MoCA is often administered at memory clinics or by primary care physicians or geriatricians. Trump’s was administered at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in early 2018 by Navy Rear Adm. Ronny L. Jackson, then the White House’s top physician, who is now a Republican candidate for Congress in Texas.

At a news conference that year discussing Trump’s physical, Jackson described Trump as “mentally very, very sharp” and “very intact” and said he would not have given Trump the cognitive assessment but that the president himself requested it. At the time, Trump was reeling from the fallout of Michael Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury” — a best-selling account of life inside the White House that depicted a maelstrom of chaos and incompetence — and was eager to demonstrate that he was, as he had claimed on Twitter, “a very stable genius.”

Though Trump this month said he had taken the test “very recently,” it was unclear whether he was referring to his 2018 physical or has taken the MoCA a second time. The White House declined to comment.

The questions are designed to evaluate short-term memory, visuospatial abilities, executive functions, language and orientation. They often include being able to draw a clock with the hands set at a certain time, to recall a list of words and to repeat phrases such as, “The cat always hid under the couch when dogs were in the room,” according to one sample test.

Frequently, patients are asked to look at three drawings of animals and identify them — a lion, camel and rhinoceros, for instance. “We don’t use cats and dogs because they’re too common and easy,” Nasreddine said.

Patients receive a score of zero to 30 points. A score of 26 or higher is considered normal, and the average score is 27, Nasreddine said, with about 10 percent of patients receiving 30 out of 30 — as Trump has bragged he did.

But because many people who take the test are suspected to have mild dementia, the sample pool is dominated by people with cognitive problems, making a perfect score less likely, experts said.

Health experts also say that the MoCA focuses on cognitive impairment and is not a psychological exam, so scoring well on it does not automatically rule out other mental health problems, such depression, mania, narcissistic personality disorder, schizophrenia and other disorders.

In the “Fox News Sunday” interview, Wallace, who said he had taken the test online, was notably skeptical that Trump’s alleged top-notch performance on the MoCA was particularly meaningful.

“Well, it’s not the hardest test,” Wallace said. “They have a picture and it says, ‘What’s that?’ And it’s an elephant.”

But Trump was insistent. “Yes, the first few questions are easy, but I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions,” the president continued. “I’ll bet you couldn’t. They get very hard, the last five questions.”

“Well, one of them was count back from 100 by seven,” Wallace quipped, before deadpanning the answer: “Ninety-three.”

The exchange wound down when Trump declared: “I’ll guarantee you that Joe Biden could not answer those questions.”

Though Trump and his team have labored to raise questions about Biden’s fitness for office, in recent weeks those attacks have boomeranged on Trump. After he struggled with a glass of water — using two hands to lift it to his mouth — and walked haltingly down a ramp at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where delivered the commencement address in June, Trump’s own fitness became part of the cable news narrative.

The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, launched a 45-second ad echoing those themes. “The most powerful office in the world needs more than a weak, unfit, shaky president,” the ad’s narrator intones.

Recent surveys show that voters believe Biden’s mental acuity either matches or exceeds Trump’s. In a Fox News poll released Sunday, registered voters said by an eight-point margin that Biden has the mental soundness to serve effectively as president, while voters doubted Trump’s mental soundness by eight points. And a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted at the end of May found that 46 percent of voters thought Trump had the “mental sharpness” necessary to serve effectively as president, compared with 49 percent who thought Biden did.

T.J. Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesman, dismissed Trump’s challenge, saying, “The only testing Donald Trump should be focused on is the kind we need to get the covid-19 crisis under control.”

“The thousands of Americans who are contracting this virus each day don’t care whether or not the president can identify a photo of an elephant — they care their federal government is doing everything possible to keep them safe and right now, under this president, that is not happening,” Ducklo said in a statement.

Concerns about the health of America’s leaders are a long-standing phenomenon, said Jeffrey A. Engel, director of Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History and author of “When Life Strikes the President: Scandal, Death, and Illness in the White House.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, for instance, was physically impaired by polio, which he kept largely hidden from public view. In the final days of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger was so concerned about the president’s mental state that he told military commanders that if the president gave any nuclear orders, to first check with him or Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state, before executing them.

And during his last years in the White House, Ronald Reagan’s aides also grew concerned about his cognitive abilities. Reagan was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years after leaving office.

But a sitting president bragging about his test results for cognitive impairment, and taunting his political opponent to take a similar exam, is unprecedented, Engel said.

“Among presidential historians, we all trained in graduate school to never to use the word ‘unprecedented’ because we’re told that there’s always a precedent,” Engel said. “But the truth is Trump does any number of things every week that are unprecedented, including the boasting of things that have no basis in fact. This boast that a cognitive test somehow is a sign of his intelligence? You can chalk this up as one of them.”

He added that Trump’s entire obsession with the MoCA is “incredibly bizarre.”

“This is a basic cognition test that any reasonable adult should be able to pass,” Engel said. “I don’t understand why he’s bragging about it, but there are many things this president does that are hard to understand.”

 

Dear Fuckopotamus my father can pass that damn test and he has early onset Alzheimer's.  You've proven nothing unless you count what a big ass you are. Just leave already.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s company applied to trademark ‘telerally.’ Then, President Trump held a telerally."

Spoiler

President Trump’s private company filed a trademark application last week that suggested that it is starting a new line of business: organizing “telerallies” for political campaigns.

In an application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a subsidiary of the Trump Organization sought to trademark the word “telerally,” for use in “organizing events in the field of politics and political campaigning.”

That could mark a shift in the company’s business model. Since Trump took office, his business has been paid millions by political campaigns, including Trump’s reelection effort. But it always remained one step away from politics: The company rented out ballrooms and office space to campaigns but did not market itself as a political company or offer services related to rallies or reaching voters.

In early 2017, the president’s son Eric Trump — who now runs the business day-to-day — told ABC News that the company would stay out of politics, saying, “It’s important to keep separation of church and state.”

The trademark application suggests that has changed. By filing it, trademark experts said, the company is saying it intends to enter this business soon. But the application does not give much detail about the Trump Organization’s plans or which customers it wants to serve.

The Trump Organization did not respond to questions this week.

Only three days after Trump’s company filed the trademark application, Trump’s 2020 campaign held a new kind of event with a very similar name. The president called it “my first-ever TELE-rally.”

In it, Trump used Facebook’s video function to broadcast a 22-minute speech aimed at voters in Wisconsin. He said this was replacing his arena rallies, at least for now.

“Until [the coronavirus pandemic] gets solved, it’s going to be tough to have those big massive rallies,” Trump said at the outset. “But we’ll do it by telephone and we have a lot of people on the line.”

Trump has since held other telerallies aimed at voters in Michigan, North Carolina and Arizona. Some have been viewed more than 1 million times, according to Facebook.

All have followed the same format: viewers hear audio of Trump giving an extended monologue, jumping from topic to topic. The video feed cycles between two still photos of Trump talking on the phone. The telerallies are not interactive, so attendees cannot chime in, cheer or ask questions.

“This is a very vital election. If we don’t win it, our country will never be able to recover. It will be a disaster. Thank you very much to the great people of Wisconsin. Thank you. Bye,” Trump said, signing off to end the Wisconsin event.

It was not clear whether Trump’s company was involved in the organization of these events, or if the Trump campaign paid Trump’s company for any services related to them. A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign declined to comment. Campaign spending records for this month will not be available until August.

Trump still owns his business, although he has given day-to-day control over to his adult sons.

One of its subsidiaries is called DTTM Operations, which files for trademarks and collects royalties for their use.

Since Trump took office, it had sought trademarks for Trump’s never-built Scion hotel chain and Trump-branded storage racks. Trump’s political slogans, such as “Keep America Great,” were trademarked by his campaign, a separate legal entity.

DTTM Operations applied for its first trademark in nearly two years when it did so for “telerally.”

“The applicant has a bona fide intention, and is entitled, to use the mark in commerce,” according to the application, prepared by a San Francisco lawyer who has done past copyright work for the Trump Organization.

Trademark-law experts said a trademark isn’t necessary for the Trump Organization to make money in politics. If the company wanted to start charging campaigns for organizing telerallies, it could do so immediately.

But a trademark would be helpful in the future, if the company does establish a business holding telerallies. It could stop others from using the name, or allow Trump’s company to license the name for a fee.

“The first reason you want a trademark is you want to keep other people from using the name,” said Josh Gerben, a D.C.-based trademark lawyer who spotted the trademark last week. “Does the company believe there’s an opportunity to license this mark to Republicans around the country to use?”

In the meantime, Trump’s campaign has continued to pay Trump’s company for other services, in transactions that turn political donations into private revenue for the president. In all, Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party have paid $8.3 million to Trump’s company since he took office, including $45,000 last month alone, campaign records show.

 

[fraurosena]

Completely unsurprising, but incredibly shocking nonetheless.

 

[fraurosena]

This is disconcerting, to say the least.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

He's such a moron:

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

32 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

And then points to a camel.

[onekidanddone]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

And then points to a camel.

All he has to do is look in the mirror to identify an Ass

[fraurosena]

Trump erupted over Esper's de facto ban on Confederate flag

Quote

President Donald Trump erupted late last week after Defense Secretary Mark Esper issued a new military-wide directive that was a de facto ban on the display of the Confederate flag. 

According to two people familiar with his reaction, Trump was fuming over Esper's carefully worded memo that did not mention the flag by name, but effectively banned it from being flown on military installations by not naming it. 

Trump has declined to denounce the Confederate flag in recent weeks and has instead said those who see it as a source of pride should be able to continue flying it. 

Two separate people who have spoken with the President in the following days said they believe Esper's job remains safe for now, though the relationship between the two has significantly deteriorated in recent months. 

As CNN has previously reported, Esper is now one year into his job but finds himself walking a political tightrope during what is one of the most strained times in his tenure. Defense officials have told CNN that he has had to make time to focus on day-to-day crisis management alongside chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to try and prevent Trump from making any disastrous decisions that could damage national security or demoralize the military.

Several sources said this relationship could be strained further in the next few months, though Trump is hesitant to fire another defense secretary so close to the November election. 

Changing base names

Earlier this week, the House of Representatives approved a $740 billion national defense authorization bill that would require the military to remove the names of Confederate soldiers and leaders from military bases across the country. The Senate version of the bill incorporates similar provisions to rename the bases over three years. Trump has said he would veto the legislation if it strips the Confederate names from military bases. 

On Thursday, Trump took to Twitter to reiterate his support for keeping the names of those Confederate-commemorating military bases. The President said he spoke to Senate Armed Services Chairman Jim Inhofe who, according to Trump, told him that "he WILL NOT be changing the names of our great Military Bases." 

However, the National Defense Authorization Act passed with a veto-proof majority in the Senate with the support of Inhofe. Inhofe will be one of the four main negotiators in the conference committee to hammer out the final bill. A provision to change the names was in both the House and Senate bills, so it's unlikely to be removed during the negotiations despite Trump's claims.

Division with Esper

The areas of division between Trump and Esper are myriad. In addition to the de facto Confederate flag ban, Esper approved Lt. Col Alexander Vindman for promotion even after the White House tried to get his name stricken from the promotion list in retribution for his congressional testimony on Ukraine, a defense official with direct knowledge confirmed to CNN.

The last time Esper spoke to Pentagon reporters on June 3, he tersely noted he did not support invoking the Insurrection Act that might have put active duty troops on the streets during the civil unrest following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Trump had threatened to send in active duty troops and Esper's statement angered the White House. Nothing that has happened since has made either side feel better.

And Esper is still pushing for an overhaul of the Pentagon aimed at countering threats posed by China and Russia, which he calls "our top strategic competitors." But the White House shows no interest in taking on Russia, dismissing reports of Russian financial support for the Taliban to kill American forces, even as two US military commanders said they were still looking into it all.

There may be no bigger hint of the strains at play than what Esper is not saying. When he recorded a 10-minute video for troops largely touting his accomplishments and thanking the force, he didn't mention the commander in chief once.

 

[fraurosena]

The happiest day of his life was the day before he announced he was running.

 

"Somebody asked me, who's the toughest in the world to deal with? Is it Russia? Is it China? Could it be North Korea? I said no. The toughest is the United States..."

[47of74]

 

[SPHASH]

 

[47of74]

And the young woman who voiced Dora the Explorer is completely down with Fuckface von #BunkerBitch getting taken down a peg...

 

[fraurosena]

 

[WiseGirl]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Spin, deride, attack: How Trump’s handling of Trump University presaged his presidency"

Spoiler

The judge was out to get him, he said. So was that prosecutor in New York, whom he called a dopey loser on a witch hunt. So were his critics, who he said were all liars. Even some of his own underlings had failed him — bad people, it turned out. He said he didn’t know them.

Donald Trump was in trouble.

Now, he was trying to attack his way out, breaking all the unwritten rules about the way a man of his position should behave. The secret to his tactic: “I don’t care” about breaking the rules, Trump said at a news conference. “Why antagonize? Because I don’t care.”

That was 2016. He was talking about a real estate school called Trump University.

Trump University, which shut down in 2011 after multiple investigations and student complaints, was treated as a joke by many of Trump’s political opponents — much as they treated Trump Steaks or Trump Vodka. But to those who knew the school well, it wasn’t a joke.

It was a premonition.

The saga of Trump University showed how far Trump would go to deny, rather than fix, a problem, they said — a tactic they have now seen him reuse as president many times, including now, in the face of a worsening pandemic. For months, President Trump promised something wonderful but extremely unlikely — that the virus would soon disappear.

John Brown, a former Trump University student from New York, said he understands why some people believed him.

“This is how people get sucked [in]. Because they want it,” Brown said. “That’s what happened to me.” He wanted to succeed so badly that he paid $25,000 for a Trump University “mentorship” program, which left him deeply disappointed.

Another former student, Bob Guillo, said he felt a deep frustration at being unable to prevent Trump University’s saga from playing out again on a far larger stage.

“I tried to warn the American people that if Donald Trump was doing this to me, he’s going to do the same thing if he’s ever elected president,” Guillo said, referring to interviews and TV appearances he did during the 2016 election. “Unfortunately, people believed Trump. And they didn’t believe Bob.”

Now, many former students, instructors and lawyers who sued Trump wonder whether, as he faces a worsening pandemic, they see parallels to another chapter of Trump University’s story. Its end.

Eventually, they said, Trump’s attacks could not conceal the huge gap between Trump University’s promises and its results. He began to lash out, attacking his antagonists as conspirators and fools.

“It’s something I think about all the time,” said Tristan Snell, who was the lead attorney for the New York state attorney general’s office in a lawsuit against Trump University. Snell said the school “had a fulfillment problem”: It could not deliver on the enriching real estate secrets it promised.

“Maybe that’s a good metaphor for what’s happening in America is that we have a fulfillment problem,” he said. “You’ve sold X and Y and Z and you can’t actually fulfill the order.”

In this case, Snell said, what Trump promised but cannot provide is not real estate secrets. It is something even harder to deliver — victory against a deadly disease.

“The difference this time is the fact that he’s running his game on a virus,” Snell said. “And the virus doesn’t care.”

Trump settled three lawsuits against Trump University in 2016, after his election. Trump University paid a total of $25 million but did not admit fault on claims that customers were defrauded by the school. When The Washington Post asked about Trump University recently, the Trump Organization sent a statement that focused on the lawsuits.

“After several years of litigation, Trump University was amicably resolved and settled by the parties with no admission of any liability,” Kimberly Benza, a Trump Organization spokeswoman said in an email. “We remain confident that we would have absolutely prevailed had the case proceeded to trial.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The questionable tactics used by Trump University did not diminish some former students’ opinions of him, any more than political setbacks have upset his base. Some interviewed for this report said Trump’s political record was good enough to outweigh their bad experience at Trump University.

“Trump 2020!” said Michael Sheehan of New York state.

In 2009, Sheehan paid $1,495 to attend a three-day Trump University seminar at a Marriott in Albany, N.Y. — then discovered it was one long sales pitch for more-expensive programs. “Trump was a big sham,” Sheehan wrote in 2012, summing up his experience in a court affidavit.

Now, Sheehan said, he doesn’t blame Trump for Trump University. The instructors were probably at fault, he said: “I don’t think he sat there and said, ‘Hey, I want you to rip everybody off.’ ”

This year, he doesn’t blame Trump for the worsening of the coronavirus crisis. Trump’s enemies are probably at fault, he said. “You don’t think it’s very convenient,” he said, that the pandemic arrived in an election year?

But others said they felt the experience showed Trump was willing to use his reputation as a tough, heart-of-gold billionaire against them — and to ask them to believe him over their own instincts.

Stephen Gilpin was one of Trump University’s instructors. He recalled sitting in on another instructor’s class shortly after joining the school in 2007. It was nothing more than an up-sell, he said, laden with false promises.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re all going to be arrested,’ ” Gilpin said.

Now, he and others said, the Trump administration is trying a similar tactic again, by asking people to believe Trump’s rosy predictions about the pandemic — in the face of an increasingly grim reality.

“It’s the same thing he does today,” said Gilpin, who left the school in 2011. “His behavior has now become our norm.”

Trump University began in 2005, when Trump was at the height of his fame from television’s “The Apprentice.” Trump invested about $2 million and took near-complete control over the school, according to court filings by the New York attorney general’s office. One executive said in his deposition that Trump personally approved all the ads.

The basic sales pitch of Trump University was one that Trump would reuse in his 2016 campaign.

The billionaire had made enough money for himself.

Now, he would put his famous brain to work for the little guy.

“Come on America, pull yourself up!” Trump said in one newspaper ad, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In the ad, Trump said real estate was where millionaires were made, “and now I’m ready to teach you how to do it.”

But Trump, the billionaire, still wanted them to pay.

The costs ranged from $1,500 for a three-day seminar to $35,000 for a “Gold Elite” mentoring program. One instructor, James Harris, justified the charges this way, according to a 2008 transcript of a class held in Atlanta that was later filed as an exhibit in a lawsuit: The money wasn’t for Trump’s benefit. It was for the students’ benefit. They had to pay Trump, he said, to show they were investing in themselves.

“He is doing this so you assume personal responsibility for doing the work,” Harris said, according to the transcript.

Harris did not respond to questions sent via email for this report. In 2016, he told The Post that “I was told to do one thing” as a Trump University instructor: “Make sure everybody bought” more Trump University seminars. “That is it.”

At Trump University, saying yes didn’t stop the pressure. As Republican leaders would later learn when dealing with Trump himself, saying yes once wasn’t the end. It was the beginning.

“I’m like a sheep led to slaughter,” Dean said.

In Richmond, Dean said, she was told she should take another class, in Houston, on tax liens. It cost $9,997. She paid. In Houston, they told her Trump University had a great investment opportunity for her in Biloxi, Miss., which required a $23,980 payment. She paid again.

In the end, Dean said, she wound up with no property in Mississippi, no valid tax liens and not enough skills to become a real estate investor. She had paid more than $30,000, borrowing from her tax-sheltered annuity.

“It was a bitter thing for me. Here I am, I am a lowly schoolteacher, public school teacher. Donald Trump is, according to him, a very rich man,” Dean said. “Now here I am, having to pay money back for enriching someone that’s already rich.” She complained in a letter to the Justice Department that was submitted as evidence in the New York attorney general’s lawsuit.

Trump University attracted more than 5,000 paying customers, according to court papers, and took in more than $42 million in revenue. Trump himself got back his $2 million investment and got $5 million in profits on top of that, according to filings from the New York attorney general.

But there was a problem — disgruntled students.

At best, many former students said, their thousands of dollars in payments to Trump University bought them rudimentary knowledge of real estate, basic lessons they could learn anywhere. At worst, they said, they found their classes useless and their high-dollar personal “mentors” unhelpful and hard to reach.

Their complaints had begun to bring scrutiny from state regulators.

In Texas, Trump University pulled out of the state after an investigation by the office of then-Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) — now the state’s governor — concluded that the company was “engaging in false, misleading and deceptive practices” and had defrauded Texas out of $2.6 million. The school had disputed that its classes were deceptive, according to correspondence later obtained by the Dallas Morning News.

An estimated 267 Texans spent more than $425,000 on the three-day seminars, and 39 purchased the $35,000 packages, according to John Owens, who was the Texas attorney general’s deputy chief of consumer protection.

In public, Trump defended his school. “The vast majority of people love us,” Trump told the New York Daily News in May 2010. “Thousands and thousands of people have taken our courses, and very few have complained.”

But soon after, he shuttered Trump University. In its offices on the 32nd floor of a Trump-owned office building, employees were fired so fast that they left desks still covered in work papers, said one former Trump Organization employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships with the company.

“It was like a horror movie where everyone just died and their bodies disappeared,” the person said.

In California, former students filed two class-action suits against Trump University, in 2010 and 2013. In New York, then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) filed another in 2013, alleging Trump University had deceived its students.

What happened next will sound familiar.

Trump attacked.

In New York, Trump filed a formal ethics complaint against Schneiderman, saying the attorney general had pressured him for campaign donations. The state ethics board investigated but decided not to pursue the case, according to news reports.

Then there were the personal attacks on Schneiderman, whom Trump publicly called “dopey” and a “loser.” On Twitter, Trump also accused Schneiderman of wearing makeup.

“It’s Tuesday. @AGSchneiderman is wearing Revlon eyeliner today,” Trump wrote in 2014. Schneiderman, who resigned his office in 2018 after allegations he had abused women, declined to comment for this report. He has said his long eyelashes are a side effect of glaucoma medication.

As the class-action lawsuits proceeded in California in 2016, Trump used Twitter to criticize Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge hearing those cases, as un-American. Curiel was born in Indiana to parents who were Mexican immigrants. Trump called him “Mexican,” saying he was biased because of Trump’s hard line on illegal immigration.

Those attacks paralleled the bitterest moments of Trump’s political career — his attacks on GOP primary rival Ted Cruz’s father and wife, his insults aimed at special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and then at witnesses during Trump’s impeachment trial. All aimed to cast doubt on an authority — or authority figures — that might turn against Trump.

In the Trump University case, opposing lawyers said, they learned how to deal with Trump’s eruptions. Ignore them. Keep digging. Let Trump talk to himself.

“As difficult as it is, you can’t get distracted with the mudslinging or name-calling,” said Rachel Jensen, one of the attorneys in the California class-action cases. “You have to remain disciplined and focused on the substance. Over time, it pays off.”

In Texas, after a months-long investigation relying on undercover agents attending seminars, the attorney general’s office drafted a lawsuit in 2010 seeking $5.4 million in restitution and penalties. “We had the goods on them,” Owens said.

But Owens’s bosses did not file the suit. David Morales, then deputy attorney general, said that he spiked the suit without Abbott’s input. “I approved an investigation into this company in Fall 2009 and did not file suit in Spring 2010 due to lack of consumer complaints,” he said in a recent email.

In Florida, staffers for then-Attorney General Pamela Bondi (R) also pondered whether to pursue an investigation of Trump University. Bondi’s office chose not to. Around the same time, Bondi received a $25,000 political donation from Trump, made via Trump’s charitable foundation. Bondi’s staff said the donation did not affect its decision.

Since then, Bondi and Morales have risen to greater prominence. In 2018, Trump nominated Morales to be a federal judge. And Trump chose Bondi — now out of office — to be one of his attorneys during his impeachment trial earlier this year.

But it was hardly a moment of loss for Trump.

He had just been elected president, having beaten a slew of rivals who had tried to use Trump University’s problems against him.

“Donald Trump’s election benefited Trump University students around the country,” Jensen said. “For everyone else, all I could say was ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

Now, former students and staffers at Trump University say there is something familiar about the present moment.

Trump is again struggling to fulfill a promise and again facing a growing backlash. His presumptive opponent in the 2020 election, Democrat Joe Biden, seems to have learned the lawyers’ lesson, ignoring many of Trump’s attacks instead of amplifying them with tit-for-tat responses.

But some former Trump University students say it’s too early to believe that the covid-19 crisis will doom Trump’s presidency after one term. They say they learned in 2016 that there were enough people who believed in Trump the way they used to.

There might be enough in 2020, too.

“I think there are many people who are saying — they’ve pulled the curtain back, and they’re saying, ‘Who’s this person behind the curtain?’ ” said Brown, the former Trump University student who spent $25,000 on classes. “Others are still under the spell, this magical spell.”

“My father’s one of them,” Brown said. He told his father, a Trump supporter, about his experiences with Trump University. “He just said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ That was it.”

 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

Guess those sources haven't met Trump then.

 

[Audrey2]

11 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“I think there are many people who are saying — they’ve pulled the curtain back, and they’re saying, ‘Who’s this person behind the curtain?’ ” said Brown, the former Trump University student who spent $25,000 on classes. “Others are still under the spell, this magical spell.”

“My father’s one of them,” Brown said. He told his father, a Trump supporter, about his experiences with Trump University. “He just said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ That was it.”

Sadly, I don't think this is wrong. In my closest circle of six, including me, I know 3 will be voting for Trump. They still spew their love for him every time they get together. I've taken a couple of hikes recently (masks and all), and still see homemade Trump signs, lovingly crafted in the rural PNW.

[GreyhoundFan]

7 hours ago, fraurosena said:

 

I love Eric Swalwell's response:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Disgusting, but not a surprise:

 

More under spoiler (TW: child abuse and rape):

Spoiler