--- title: Donald Trump University: Six Facts That Haunt the Candidate description: What TIME's investigation into the real-estate seminars reveals canonical: https://time.com/4250772/donald-trump-university/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-03-08T15:55:37.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:56:07.221Z article:section: Politics og:title: Donald Trump University: Six Facts That Haunt the Candidate og:description: What TIME's investigation into the real-estate seminars reveals og:url: https://time.com/4250772/donald-trump-university/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcd955a25531cac2e/698880198e06017589464e0c/donald-trump-republican-presidential-candidate-trump-university1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2000 og:image:height: 1125 og:image:alt: Donald Trump, Michael Sexton og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Donald Trump University: Six Facts That Haunt the Candidate twitter:description: What TIME's investigation into the real-estate seminars reveals twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltcd955a25531cac2e/698880198e06017589464e0c/donald-trump-republican-presidential-candidate-trump-university1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 6 Facts That Could Haunt Donald Trump From Trump University > Sponsored content. 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It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, twice a week. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3/newsletters?i=a75aee46-ac91-4542-8ab1-b386c6284b3c&cr=time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Why It's So Hard to Attack Trump [Watch (HLS stream): Why It's So Hard to Attack Trump](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/X3BpgQ9x.m3u8) (3:13)  _Published 2016-03-02. Now, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are attempting to beat him at his own game—but will any attacks against Trump actually stick?_ by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) ## TIME Staff Mar 8, 2016 3:55 PM UTC  Donald Trump listens as Michael Sexton introduces him at a news conference in New York where he announced the establishment of Trump University on May 23, 2005. Donald Trump listens as Michael Sexton introduces him at a news conference in New York where he announced the establishment of Trump University on May 23, 2005. Bebeto Matthews—AP by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) ## TIME Staff Mar 8, 2016 3:55 PM UTC The fate and reputation of Trump University, the adult education courses that carried Donald Trump’s name from 2005 to 2010, have become the fight in the free-for-all that is the Republican primary contest. But the debate could have bigger consequences than previous arguments over whether Mexico will pay to build a bigger wall at its border or the size of a candidate’s manhood. At stake, is a potential lawsuit with more than 7,000 plaintiffs likely to be granted the right to sue the billionaire candidate who say they were misled into spending thousands of dollars on courses that were ultimately without value. The Better Business Bureau on Tuesday said that Trump University had a D- score that eventually rose to A+ only when it began to shut down and older complaints expired. In [a 2015 interview with Steven Brill](http://time.com/4101290/what-the-legal-battle-over-trump-university-reveals-about-its-founder/), Trump said the courses were “fantastic” and that he’s “dying to go to court” to defend them. Here are six key facts from [Brill’s investigation, published in the Nov. 16 issue of TIME](http://time.com/4101290/what-the-legal-battle-over-trump-university-reveals-about-its-founder/). **1\. Trump is misleading voters about the program’s approval ratings.** Donald Trump maintains that the program had a 98% approval rating. In a sworn affidavit with a San Diego court filed in 2013, Trump’s director of operations Mark Covais said the company had issued 2,144 refunds to 6,698 attendees of the $1,495 three-day program, or 32%. The refund rate for a $34,995 program, Brill reports, was 16% percent. **2\. Trump promised students he handpicked his teachers. He did not.** In a promotional video for the program, Trump said the program’s mentors would be “handpicked by me.” But, Brill writes, court documents tell a different story. Michael Sexton, who was hired to be president of Trump University, testified in a 2012 pretrial deposition that “none of our instructors…were handpicked by Donald Trump.” **3\. Teachers were instructed to pretend they knew Trump even when they didn’t.** Trump University administrators created scripts for teachers, instructing them on what to say to their students. According to those scripts, teachers were told to tell students that they had a close association with Trump, Brill writes. “I remember one time Mr. Trump had us over for dinner,” a script distributed to teachers read, after which a instructor was supposed to recount how Trump had confided some nugget of real estate wisdom to him. “No, I didn’t have dinner with him,” conceded one instructor, when questioned in a 2013 deposition about a recorded presentation in which he mouths the script’s dinner-with-Trump line. “I was just trying to be as close to the \[script\] as possible.” “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Trump told Brill when asked about the instructor’s dinner tale. “But I will tell you I met many of the professors, and I also studied just about all the résumés. I’m very much into academics. You know, I was a good student.” **4\. Teachers were told to use “buzzwords” that made the program appear “elitist.”** According to marketing materials created for Trump University, Brill writes, the teachers were always to be called “faculty.” A crest that looked like it was borrowed from Yale or Harvard was embedded in the logo. An “admissions department” was listed on the website. The marketing guidelines had sections called “catchphrases/buzzwords” and “tone” that encouraged the use of language such as “elitist,” “Ivy League” and “Think of Trump University as a real university with a real admissions process–i.e., not everyone who applies is accepted.” **5\. A $34,995 mentorship program was worth “nothing,” one participant said.** Boyce Chait, 84, and his wife Evelyn, 80, who live in New Jersey, demanded but were refused a refund after their $34,995 mentorship proved, Boyce told Brill, “to be worth nothing. When it came to the nitty-gritty, there was nothing there.” (Nonetheless, Boyce told Brill he and his wife would still “vote for Trump over Hillary Clinton,” because they said they are members of the Tea Party.) **6\. Another participant went into debt to take a $25,000 course at Trump University. Today he can’t afford his own home.** Kevin Scott, 46, told Brill that he sat in on a free 90-minute presentation at a hotel in Westchester County, New York, in 2008\. He then enrolled in the $1,495 course where he was persuaded to buy a $25,000 Elite package. “It all amounts,” Scott said, to a “whole lot of nothing. I ended up being one of those distressed properties; I now have to rent out my house and live in a small apartment.” Scott is now one of what are likely to be nearly 7,000 plaintiffs in the class actions. On Monday, Trump released a video where the candidate held up what he said was Scott’s positive evaluation of the courses. As Brill points out, federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kim Wardlaw has ruled that the fact that one of the named plaintiffs filled out a positive survey after the class is not persuasive of the class’s value because “the recent Ponzi-scheme scandals involving onetime financial luminaries like Bernard Madoff … demonstrate \[that\] victims of con artists often sing the praises of their victimizers until the moment they realize they have been fleeced.” [Read Brill’s story here.](http://time.com/4101290/what-the-legal-battle-over-trump-university-reveals-about-its-founder/) ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Everybody knows what they're getting in Donald Trump. You've seen him on TV and interviews, so it's hard to attack him like you would a conventional politician because everybody has heard of him already. And it's pretty hard to reset that with a single jibe. [ MUSIC ] Over the next couple of weeks we're going to see all of these candidates and outsiders launching massive last ditch effort to stop Donald Trump, before the March 15th winner take all primary's. It' really too soon to tell if this will work, but ultimately It's now or never. When Donald Trump first started running a lot of the other candidates didn't really take him seriously, and so they didn't bother attacking him. They were much more concerned with fighting each other for the particular spot, whether it be the establishment or the conservative spot. There it is, the memorized twenty five second speech. Donald Trump is the master of insults and it's hard to beat him at his own game. When Mexico sends it's people. They're bringing drugs. Their rapists and some I assume are good people. And he has a particular gift at figuring out what is the thing that is going to most bother you. Low energy individual. So if you are going up against Trump they have to figure out. How to insult him in an equally devastating way and I don't know that the attacks that we've heard so far are actually going to work. Let me ask for a full length mirror. Maybe to make sure his pants weren't wet. I don't know. Then He's not a politician so there's not a record of votes that he took or bills that he sponsored or actions that he took. So a lot of that just becomes like well, yeah, I said that one time and now I'm saying this. And so people don't mind. Would never do that. [ LAUGH ] Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have spoken up a lot more directly going after him. He's not faced some of these attacks. So some of them we just don't know whether they will work or not. Or it's possible that they may work but they could turn out to be more useful to Democrats down the road. I think you already see Clinton's campaign portraying Trump as the divider and Hillary is the Uniter . >> America never stopped being great we have to make America whole. I was told by the campaign that they felt that the republican field had tried to define Trump a little too late and if they would not make the same mistake I don't think you're going to see Hillary herself attacking Trump. I think you're gonna see Bill Clinton and her surrogate certainly, attacking Trump. She wants to remain a very positive messenger. Almost in a Ronald Reagan kind of sense, the optimism of morning in America. Today is more love and kindness. Whereas, they would portray Donald Trump as night in America. The thing though is that Trump is wining the Republican primaries based largely off of white support and when it comes to general election, given all the constituencies that he's offended, will he still have the same power. Will he still be able to win, and will any of these attacks start to stick? And I think the Clinton campaign is betting on that they will. 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