The GOP Owns Trump University’s Sleaze: Republicans Have Been Tolerant of Con Artists for Decades
This started way back before Reagan’s day - with Howard Ruff, Mel Tappan, and others preaching an imminent doom that has yet to come. The doom huckstering has floated several speculative bubbles, spawned survivalist movements and militias, gun hoarding, kookspiracies galore, and they’ve lost a lot of rubes a lot of money while the doom criers rode the wave to profit.
Amanda names many in the article below, but I’m sure you know of a few yourself. The sad part of this is that most of the huckstering used to be from the fringes, but now it seems to have consumed the GOP with mainstream politicians becoming the hucksters. In these times fund raising and snake oil sales have become much more important than any political purpose or will, so it’s a natural that a con man like Trump would rise to the top.
The Trump University scandal just keeps gaining media steam as new details about the scam keep getting released. Now the blowback is expanding beyond the Donald Trump campaign itself and affecting other Republicans.
And it’s not just the ones who embarrass themselves by standing by Trump as he is exposed as a fraud and a racist. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, and the state’s current attorney general, Ken Paxton, are now under fire for taking measures to protect Trump from paying legal or political penalties for perpetuating this fake university grift. The whole incident shows yet another way that, far from being some kind of anomaly, Trump is simply the logical extension of the way the Republicans have been doing business for decades now.
Last week, John Owens, a former deputy director of the attorney general’s consumer protection division, came forward with allegations that his division was all ready to file a lawsuit against Trump and Trump University, asking for $5.4 million in damages, penalties and fees for defrauding Texas consumers who signed up for the scam courses. But while Owens says the case was strong, the attorney general’s office, then controlled by now-governor Abbott, decided to quash the case instead.
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