The
New York Times reported that Donald Trump was involved in another
fleece-the-buyer scheme, aside from Trump University.
He also launched Trump Institute, which
promised to teach naive customers his real estate secrets so they could get
rich like him. As the Times article shows, some of its lessons were
plagiarized word-for-word from other sources.
As with Trump University, the Trump Institute promised falsely that its teachers would be handpicked by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump did little, interviews show, besides appear in an infomercial
— one that promised customers access to his vast accumulated knowledge. “I put
all of my concepts that have worked so well for me, new and old, into our
seminar,” he said in the 2005 video, adding, “I’m teaching what I’ve learned.”
Reality fell far short. In fact, the institute
was run by a couple who had run afoul of regulators in dozens of states and had
been dogged by accusations of deceptive business practices and fraud for
decades. Similar complaints soon emerged about the Trump Institute.
Yet there was an even more fundamental deceit to the business, unreported until now: Extensive portions of the materials that students received after paying their seminar fees, supposedly containing Mr. Trump’s special wisdom, had been plagiarized from an obscure real estate manual published a decade earlier….
Together, the exaggerated claims about his own role, the checkered
pasts of the people with whom he went into business and the theft of
intellectual property at the venture’s heart all illustrate the fiction
underpinning so many of Mr. Trump’s licensing businesses: Putting his name on
products and services — and collecting fees — was often where his actual
involvement began and ended.