Jonathan Chait writes:

Trump has … exposed [a] deep insecurity among right-wing intellectuals: the fear that their movement appeals to rubes. The conservative movement’s tightening grip over the Republican Party has coincided with its elevation of leaders incapable of explaining their policies cogently. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin all drew the disdain of liberal elites for their reliance on simplistic aphorisms and poor grasp of detail, humiliating conservative intellectuals, who defended the keen minds of their heroes. Whether or not Donald Trump the human being is intelligent, there’s no question that “Donald Trump,” presidential candidate, is not. His entire campaign operates well below the level of rational thought — it’s all boasting, absurd promises, repetitive sloganeering, and abuse. Just as email scammers intentionally salt their messages with typos in order to weed out anyone educated enough to see through their swindle, allowing them to focus on the most gullible, Trump seems to consciously repel anyone possessed of a brain.

It has indeed been strange, over the years, for UD to read impassioned defenses of people like Sarah Palin from people like Joseph Epstein:

Here is a woman raising five children who is able not only to have an active hand in the life of her community but actually win the highest political office in her state. As the governor of Alaska, moreover, she took on the corrupt elements in her own party, which requires courage …

Once a Northwestern University literature professor, once editor of American Scholar, Epstein of all contemporary essayists has prided himself on his own high literacy and his championing of only the most cogent and brilliant of writers (Henry James in particular). It was remarkable to UD — who knew Epstein when she attended Northwestern and found him as scrupulous a speaker, writer, and cultural critic as most of his published work suggests — it was remarkable to find him, in 2008, employing his pellucid writing in service to Palin.

If the founder of Trump University becomes the Republican nominee, as seems likely, it will be interesting to see which Epsteins step up to spend their intellectual capital on him.

Could Republican voters be the next awakened fleecees?

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In other Trump/university news: A foreign university has already revoked a Trump honorary degree. Now an American university – Lehigh – has begun talking about the whole honoring Trump thing.

The professor initiating discussion about the Trump degree at Lehigh University specializes in draining away gunk in order to stabilize environments.

… fraud.

So UD is sure he’ll make a compelling case against Cruz.

Predatory, odious, our next president, and currently dealing with his namesake university being dragged through the mud, first by the New York Attorney General, and now by a judge:

This week, a judge found Donald Trump liable for operating a get-rich-quick school, the erstwhile Trump University, without a license. The case was originally brought against Trump by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office, which, according to the Daily News, alleged that Trump University had “ripped off 5,000 students nationwide by promising to make them rich when instead they were steered into costly and mostly useless seminars.”

While he’s already been held liable for the university’s operation, Trump will now go to trial to see if he’s also liable for defrauding the students.

Can’t wait for the trial.

The saga of Trump tromps on. The American for-profit university par excellence.

As the New York attorney general’s suit against Trump University proceeds, University Diaries revisits the history of this storied campus.

[T]he New York State Department of Education sent letters to both Trump and [an associate] notifying them that Trump University was in violation of state law by calling itself a “university” when “it was not chartered as such” and because it had not been properly “licensed” by the state.

… Trump University could avoid the “licensure” provision of the state law if it were to re-incorporate outside of New York State and if it ran no physical seminars in the state. But “Trump University failed to abide by any of these conditions,” the attorney general wrote.

[Eric] Schneiderman claims the “university” continued to use 40 Wall Street … as its principal corporate address, including in numerous advertisements. It furthermore conducted “at least fifty live programs in New York between 2006 and 2011.” Schneiderman noted that “Trump University LLC” was finally renamed, on May 20, 2010, “The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative LLC.”

In his deposition [a Trump associate] admitted that the failure to comply with the stipulations was “an oversight” and something he and Trump “forgot” about.

In 2005, the year of its founding, UD took their Trump Success Test (all links have expired) and did very poorly, especially on Money Motivation. Still, when she read this article by Alex Beam, she felt nostalgic for her brief time as a student there… And now you’re telling me the whole thing was some sort of real estate scam?

All sorts of direct witnesses apparently told then-assistant OSU wrestling coach Jordan that the team doctor was raping student wrestlers. Yeah, we know; it is what it is, he is reported to have said to the complainants. If you can shrug at a doctor masturbating in front of one of your referees in the locker room shower, you can shrug at anything.

… appointment, WSU will want to hire as his replacement Montana’s Bruce Knerr — who just happens to be looking for a job!

The Livingston Public Schools Board of Trustees voted 9-0 to relieve second-year Park High football coach Bruce Knerr of his duties, according to the Billings Gazette.

Videos obtained by the Gazette show students sparring in lightweight boxing gloves under Knerr’s watch at the center of the gymnasium floor at nearby St. Mary’s Catholic School, where Park High’s football program was hosting a leadership camp.

Park junior Austin Peterson suffered five fractures to his eye socket and nasal cavity during a boxing match and required reconstructive surgery at a hospital in Spokane, Wash., the 17-year-old’s father told the local paper. Making matters worse, Knerr was aware Peterson had suffered two previous concussions, the boy’s father added.

“His skull was smashed in a depth of nine millimeters, putting pressure on the brain,” Austin’s father Tim Peterson told the Billings Gazette.

Atta boy! Far more scope for your coaching philosophy in college! Go for it.

I know – it’s cheap to use the exclamation mark, but with this sort of scoop…

I have in my hand the actual IRS document of Donald J. Trump’s returns (background to the controversy here). I reproduce it below.

To Whom My Concern:

I have been the personal [tax] physician of Mr. Donald J. Trump since 1980. His previous [tax] physician was my father, Dr. Jacob Bornstein. Over the past 39 years, I am pleased to report that Mr. Trump has had no significant [tax] problems. Mr. Trump has had a recent [tax] examination that showed only positive results. Actually, all of his results were astonishingly excellent.

If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest [taxpayer] [well, haha, not really taxpayer] ever elected to the presidency.

… but the one who comes closest to the original is Washington State University’s Mike Leach, a man who arrives at each new job trailing a longer and longer shitstream.

Variant doesn’t quite say it, actually. Leach

keeps a framed, autographed picture of Trump on the wall in his office in Pullman, Wash.

Leach has learned everything he knows from Trump: hit back hard; sue the shit out of everyone; discover conspiracies everywhere.

Leach’s latest is a perennial favorite: a media conspiracy. Some of his lads were allegedly involved in a fight at a recent party, and there are reports that one of them broke a fellow student’s jaw. Badly. He did it by kicking him repeatedly in said jaw while the student was unconscious on the floor.

Asked about it, Leach said it was all lies, all a media conspiracy.

When given the chance to correct any facts about the situation that he alleges the media got wrong, Leach said there were “too many to address…”

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See, this is what UD loves about Trump and Trump wannabes like Leach. They really don’t give a shit. They’ll just go out there and say anything… make a hail mary pass… kick the ball down the field see where that sucker ends up… The President was born in Kenya. I won’t tell you the facts about a situation whose facts I don’t know because there are too many facts that I know. Just go there. Just do it. Just brazen that fucker out. It’s an amazing spectacle, and Donald Trump is here to prove that it can take you far.

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Trump has done fairly well with high-profile, unconventional college coaches. But his past two big endorsements — Bobby Knight and … Leach, were fired for, respectively, putting their hands on a student, and making a player stand in a shed.

Run by mad substitute football coach Norries Wilson [“Wilson … proceeded to go around the [press conference] room calling on individual reporters one at a time like a school teacher. The first person he called on worked for Penn State athletics and was simply at the press conference to record quotes, so he didn’t have a question. Later, [Norries] called on a photographer who was only filming, so she also didn’t have a question…. [A] reporter referred to the Rutgers head coach as ‘Flood.’ Wilson interrupted the question and demanded the reporter call him ‘Coach Flood.'”], Rutgers University now does little more than express for the nation the institution-wide surreality of big-time university sports (“The New Brunswick jail can probably field a terrific football team.”), exactly the way Donald Trump expresses for us the surreality of presidential campaigns.

Rutgers’ putative president wants nothing to do with an athletics program that has anyway, like so many such programs, almost fully spun off from whatever leftovers in New Brunswick people are calling a “university” (see details on the total divorce between universities and their big sports programs here), and the fall of the Rutgers second-in-command (really first, but let’s go with the fiction that presidents run sports factories) COACH Flood, leaves us with the Alexander Haig-like (“I’m in control here.”) figure of third-in-command Norries. All sportsdom this morning talks of his wacko press conference, and there’s no one left at Rutgers to send in the vaudeville hook.

******************

One difference between Trump and Rutgers: Trump is really rich…

Oh but Rutgers is well on its way, given all those big-time football bucks…

The program is a financial disgrace. Since 2003-04, it has racked up $287 million in deficits. The university’s financial plan for sports calls for $183 million in additional deficits through 2022 — despite new revenue from the Big Ten Conference.

These deficits have been funded with subsidies from student fees (students have no say about that, of course) and university general funds.

“The smart people will never be on our side,” announced Rick Santorum in his last run for the presidency; he attacked Obama’s hope to see all Americans attend university as “snobbery.” Obama, Santorum’s side said again and again, was an “intellectual snob.”

Sarah Palin led the charge, but several candidates followed in relentlessly calling Obama “professor.” Another high-profile Republican, Scott Brown, “consistently addressed [Elizabeth] Warren as ‘professor’” in their debates and in his speeches. Palin, in her first speech after being named a candidate for vice-president, said “we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”

Apparently a lot of voters (not enough – all of the people I’ve just cited lost) despise universities because that’s where the liberals and the atheists roam. The very words “professor” and “university” are red meat to them.

That’s why Donald Trump has some splainin to do. He not only taught at a university; he founded a university. He put his name on a university: Trump University. Here’s his Chairman’s Welcome – complete with a British voice-over (Trump’s uber-snobby Anglo thing reappears in the symbol of Trump University – a lion rampant, drawn from British heraldry) which praises him as an “educator,” a graduate of “prestigious schools,” and the “author of many books.” Trump says, “I like academic life.”

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On the positive side of the ledger, Trump has been sued for having opened Trump U. This allows him to tell his constituency that it was all a big mistake.

… has responded to the lawsuit against Trump University…

Meanwhile, David Halperin points out that TU is just one of many for-profit schools for scandal in the United States.

While none of the major predatory for-profit college companies — University of Phoenix, EDMC, Corinthian, Kaplan, CEC, etc. — have a frontman as publicly odious as Donald Trump, their abuses and harms go much deeper than those of Trump University.

That’s because they’ve entrapped far more people, and because our taxes continue to pay for them.

The retrial is about to be scheduled! Our guy! We’ve long followed the worst Medicare-Medicaid criminal/most insanely pious Orthodox Jew (In prison, he prayed nine hours a day, “spending so much time praying on his knees that his legs were swollen and purple.”) in the country’s history, through conviction, Trump pardon, and now retrial. And, as world-historical hypocrisy mavens, we are loving every minute. The only spectacle as amusing is the Caged Wisdom sequence in the comedy Arrested Development, which is in fact largely indistinguishable from the ongoing Philip Esformes sequence.

In 2016, prosecutors charged Esformes in what they called the largest-ever scheme targeting Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for the elderly and the poor. Esformes was accused of bribing medical professionals to admit patients to his network of assisted-living facilities and nursing homes for services that were never provided or were unnecessary.

During the two-month trial, prosecutors asserted that Esformes personally received more than $37 million in the scheme. They told the jury he used his proceeds to finance a lavish lifestyle and pay $300,000 in bribes to the head coach of the University of Pennsylvania basketball team to recruit his son…

In April 2019, a jury convicted Esformes on 20 criminal counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, paying and receiving kickbacks, bribery, money laundering and obstruction of justice…

Esformes worries constantly about a new trial and the threat of incarceration…

Poor baby! I tell you it’s doing nothing for the guy’s mental health that he might, even after Trump pardoned him, serve his prison term for stealing billions of dollars from the American health system and degrading the lives of millions of poor old people. What’s the world coming to when one of the most disgusting crooks America ever produced actually has to serve jail time? Put Esformes in my search engine for even more lurid criminal details!