Op Ed: Results May Vary: A Lesson from Trump University

Contributed

This framed image of Donald Trump was given to (then) employees of the failed, litigious venture of Trump University at a company holiday party. One former Erieite and employee of the debunked, for-profit educational venture recalls his experience.

It's  December 2005 and I'm wrapping up a pricey holiday party. Drinking with colleagues is always weird. Drinking with colleagues who don't normally wear suits that are wearing suits is even weirder. But there's something else on my mind. It was making me nervous, angry, and depressed. My girlfriend noticed and gave me a nickname: "Trump Grump."    

Nearly twenty years later, "Trump University" is a well-worn punchline. But the comedy of that self-absorbed name belies a reality that's deeply unpleasant. It bothered me when I was leaving my job as a "Trump U" content developer and it bothers me now. Like malignant narcissism itself, the whole operation felt predatory and cruel, indifferent to real financial and emotional harm it caused victims. I joined shortly before its 2005 launch, lasted through the holiday party, and left in 2006, when I saw where it was headed. 

As someone born and raised in Erie, who once lived with a single mother living paycheck-to-paycheck, the idea of an obscenely wealthy man exploiting single mothers and other financially vulnerable people never sat right with me. Never in my wildest dreams did I anticipate this man would become president of the United States. Given what he claims to represent politically, the inherent contradiction with his business practices is absurd. 

Cheryl Lankford's story is worth revisiting in this context. After her husband, Command Sgt. Major Jonathan M. Lankford died in Baghdad in 2007, she was looking for an opportunity to support herself and her two-year-old son by expanding her small real estate business. The Trump University sales team found her and eventually succeeded in talking her into paying them with money she received after her husband's death. They said she'd be working closely with a mentor hand-picked by the more famous, more successful Trump. They told her she'd recoup her initial investment. The mentors jerked her around and didn't provide a viable path for recouping her money. Like many others, she ended up losing it all. The amount wasn't trivial. She lost $35,000. 

This was just one of the stories that came out in the run-up to the $25 million settlement which resolved three* lawsuits against Trump's educational venture in 2018. The company's entire value proposition hinged on trust in its purportedly self-made leader. "This is not something we offer to just anyone. We don't want to work with just anyone," read one playbook script. "You know who my boss is right? Mr. Trump is on a mission to create the next wave of independently wealthy entrepreneurs in America. Is that YOU?" It was a masquerade. Trump didn't even write his own blog. 

His aggressive sales team did, however, encourage people to borrow money to pay them, extending credit limits or withdrawing from 401K accounts for example, in the name of a commission and the chance to make Donald Trump even richer. 

And lest people articulate reasonable concerns about spending money they didn't have, the Trump team's internal documents contained guidance for the sales team: "Money is never a reason for not enrolling in Trump University. If they really believe in you and your product, they will find the money."

When Trump was called out for his business's unethical practices, he never owned up to them. He lied and offered wildly misleading statements. He said he hand-picked all of his instructors (he didn't). He said he was being unfairly victimized by a biased "Mexican" judge (he wasn't). He defiantly claimed he'd open Trump University again. From a man who has amassed a sizable following portraying himself as a working-class hero, he can at least give an honest explanation of the operation that victimized the very kinds of people he claims to represent. 

My time at Trump University began in 2005, when I was a graduate student in Columbia University's creative nonfiction writing program. I was finishing my master's thesis, and trying to figure out a way to pay rent and university fees as I did. That's when I heard about a job writing online courses for a new online educational venture. The idea was to give small business owners and prospective real estate investors the kind of tactical information they'd need to launch and run their businesses – at a fraction of the cost of a traditional university education. 

With that initial vision in mind, I joined a team of content developers and instructional designers working to build out those early courses with faculty affiliated with Columbia and Dartmouth College. But it was always clear who was the star attraction. The office was decorated with larger-than-life sized Trump posters. What had been an unnamed business at the time of my hiring eventually became Trump University. Trump was to be the first person people saw when they clicked into course video content. 

At the office, we were instructed to refer to him only by the honorific "Mister Trump." The Apprentice star appeared in all promotional material, though he wasn't actively involved in day-to-day course creation. To me he was less of a person than an avatar, a pixelated character pasted onto the cheap-looking affiliate marketing pages. But he was the unique draw, the reason so many people were willing to part with tens of thousands of dollars. They trusted him to help them sharpen their own real estate investing skills.

Early Trump University commercials looked like the kind of late-night cable '90s TV ads that might run alongside ads for kitchen gear or new age music compilations. "We teach success," was a frequent refrain – though one early ad screened for us in the office featured the telling disclaimer "results may vary." Among the increasingly disenchanted staff, this became an inside joke. It wasn't a university, obviously, but that didn't prevent one man from driving down to the Wall Street office, somehow talking his way past security, and up to the floor where our modest office sat – the "first person who wanted to see the campus," as my co-worker put it. 

For me, a pervasive feeling of misery turned into a decision to quit after they pivoted away from the $300 courses people like me helped create and started selling higher-priced seminar and coaching programs. These were overseen by disreputable independent contractors who took a commission on Trump University sales – and acted like it. According to one former Trump University employee who was there in the years after I left, they gave pretty bad advice. 

Stephen Gilpin was one of the mentors who worked in-house at Trump University after I left. He told Business Insider stories of students who'd been advised to use techniques that were actually illegal in states where students intended to operate. The people selling the seminars were sharks. They cold-called and spam-emailed potential students. They'd lure people into free seminars where they up-sold them and encouraged them to pay for it with "other people's money." When one Trump University sales person wasn't delivering results expected of him, he was reportedly waterboarded.

Yes, you read that correctly.

I spent a year-and-a-half there at the beginning and never stopped thinking about it. I always had a bad feeling that a lot of well-meaning people would lose a lot of money because they trusted the Trump name. They did. In 2015, a reporter with Gizmodo did a public records request for Federal Trade Commission complaints about the organization. One excerpt is especially telling:

"I feel the Donald Trump school scammed good and honest people into believing the school would help them in the real estate business. For my $35,000+ all I got were books that I could have gotten from the library that could guide me better then Trump's class did. I just want my money back. I feel embarrassed and very dumb for falling for Donald Trump so call (sic) real estate classes."

As for that holiday party, one scene sticks with me. It was a game of white elephant. Management had told us not to bring a wrapped, unmarked gift, as is customary. Those would be provided.

As the game commenced, the slow reveal was itself an exercise in branding: an unwrapped bottle of Trump vodka, a Donald Trump necktie, a certificate to the Trump Grill. Each of us also got gifts straight from the company's celebrity chief: an autographed book and a faux-gold framed portrait, signed by Donald Trump in gold sharpie, artifacts that are ironically more valuable than a Trump University education. 

Jamie Pietras is a freelance writer who was born and raised in Erie, and has lived in New York City for the past 22 years.

*edited from original draft for clarity