The New York Times editorializes:
There were opportunities to stop [Trump], early on. Possessed of a crack team of researchers, the Republican Party did not turn its resources on investigating this man’s record of falsehoods and business failures. When struggling families worry that their children’s American dream will be obscured behind a mountain of college debt, even a passing reference to the scam that is Trump University would surely have resonated many months ago.
Yes, now that people are truly desperate, they can’t say enough about Trump University. (Here at University Diaries, we’ve been writing about that peculiar institution since 2010. ) People want that school to be the key to the scummy scammy Trump gestalt and therefore – once this resonates – a significant part of his downfall. Here’s why this is false reasoning.
For more than a decade a firestorm of fraud involving hundreds of taxpayer-supported for-profit universities has raged freely throughout this country. Since very few Americans seem to care, and since there’s huge money for politicians from the for-profit school industry (an industry in which Goldman Sachs has a huge investment), almost nothing of significance has been done to regulate or shut down the scam. Even the fact that accreditors for these schools are almost all former executives at the same schools gets a rise out of exactly no one.
This is an incomparably more destructive scandal than Trump’s little academic foray into sucker-scamming, but no one cares. If Americans are content to let the rigged, filthy, for-profit schools continue to bankrupt them and make Goldman rich, what makes you think they’re any less content to ignore Trump University? In a vast landscape of corruption, Americans maybe have time to notice, say, massive athletics organizations like the NFL (America’s FIFA); but even there they don’t care. They’re spectators, not social activists. There are games to be watched.
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All institutions, starting with all government institutions, are corrupt as far as many of Trump’s supporters are concerned (this is an attitude now known to all as Tea Party Nihilism), and at least Trump is defiantly, amusingly, attractively, even flamboyantly, corrupt. At least he is, in the words of Florida’s current governor, “fun to watch.”
We can say of Trump what John Ashbery said of avant-garde art:
Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing… [Take Pollock, and Rothko:] Does their work amount to anything? There’s a possibility that it doesn’t although I believe in it and want it to exist.
Trump gestures recklessly toward nihilism (“founded on nothing”) or toward a New Wave, or toward both. Millions of Americans find this beautiful.
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Like Chauncy Gardner, Americans like to watch. In particular, we like to watch us being us. You don’t get any more us than Donald Trump. Americans instinctively recognize that he is radically of their moment, radically of their time, and they feel comfortable with him as a candidate. Little Trump U will have no effect on that.
March 3rd, 2016 at 1:42AM
The irony is amazing. The NYT is possessed of a crack team of researchers yet somehow they can’t ever seem to find anything that might tarnish Hillary’s image. Trump U is small potatoes compared to the Clinton Foundation, the email scandals, Benghazi, the silencing of the bimbos, Travelgate, Whitewater, etc. etc.
March 3rd, 2016 at 11:43AM
Since accreditation is self-regulation, it’s always done by insiders, no?
March 3rd, 2016 at 12:26PM
Mr Punch: I’ve always been impressed by the way the diploma mills – not the new for-profit diploma mills; the traditional diploma mills – simply come up with names, any names – and designate these their accreditors. It’s so wonderfully brazen. We’re accredited by the Aunt Tillie Homecooked Pies Accreditation Agency of Deep Holler Mississippi. You can look it up.