Three months ago, Marco Rubio tried to utilize story of Trump University to trim down down his primary rival. “He’s hoping to give to the American people what he did to those in this particular course,” Rubio said within a debate, setting about to turn how it is into your metaphor for the complete Trump candidacy. “He’s attempting to con people into giving him their vote identical to he conned these people into giving him their money.” But as you can possibly recall, it didn’t work — Trump kept rolling, right over Rubio and right to the Republican nomination.
However as you read this, there’s probably a focus group in progress somewhere, in which undecided voters are shown documents from the originial and Trump University lawsuit and prized their reaction while Democratic pollsters and media consultants watch eagerly from behind one-way glass, convinced this is the attack which Trump cannot recover. And they might not be wrong.
What changed? The vague and somewhat abstract became concrete, by using documents typically from class-action lawsuit against Trump, in which former marks — pardon me, students — of Trump U are suing the Republican standard-bearer for fraud. Now that your fax have been publicly released, instead of general characterizations of what happened there, we’ve former employees testifying on how these were instructed to encourage the students to reach the limit on their cards, how they ordered students’ desperation (“is it a single parent of three children that may need money for food?”) being a tool to manipulate them into making ever-larger purchases of a given supposedly life-changing seminars, or the way Trump U salesman was reprimanded after he failed to push a struggling couple to subscribe a $35,000 package because he knew they couldn’t afford it (unfortunately to them, another salesman stepped in and closed the sale).
Any political consultant can tell you that if you want to say your opponent lied or call him a hypocrite, it’s much more effective if by chance you have got his actual words — and it’s more appropriate if they’re on tape. The better concrete the evidence, the harder it is to pay no attention to or explain away. That’s what these Trump University documents do: not just recast this specific tale, but allow Democrats to make it a metaphor for Trump’s candidacy, really as Rubio tried without success to perform.
Trump’s wealth has represented numerous factors to voters until the now. To lots of people of his supporters, his plane and resorts and spectacularly gold-plated apartment (done within a method we might call Late Russian Mobster) represent success, proof of Trump’s competence and skill. To lots of people others, his wealth represents Trump’s shallow and classless venality. Except for the most part, until recently finally it was essentially harmless and amusing. That’s as opposed into the last person the Republicans nominated for president, who appeared to actually be apologizing for their wealth — the single last thing Trump will ever do.
Democrats successfully convinced voters that Mitt Romney was obviously a heartless corporate raider who may step over his own mother to help make another million. They had several grounds on which in order to make that case, but none was as powerful as the stories of people that were released using a company Romney’s Bain Capital had bought. In a single devastating super PAC ad, a worker in an Indiana factory told how he and his awesome coworkers were instructed to create stage within their plant; the stage was then mounted by executives who told the gathered workers which the plant was closing and they were all going to lose their jobs. “Seems that whenever we built that stage, it was actually like building my own coffin,” said a male in the ad.
But Trump’s wealth had never appeared to come at anyone’s expense. Sure, you might think Trump Tower serves as a monument to ’80s garishness, but no one’s pushed to purchase a place to rent there. Trump Steaks may well have been a joke, but at worst you are possibly one of the tiny number of people who bought some on a holiday to Sharper Image, ate them, and chose not to really become a repeat customer. Victims were few and far between.
That is actually, until Trump University. Now Democrats can say that just not only is Trump a fraud, he’s a con artist who destroys people’s lives as a way to buy himself a new hair weave. That recasts Trump’s wealth, that have always been his primary qualification for office. The absurd notion that is President Donald Trump rests on the notion that being a successful businessman, he is very good at get things done and create things work. It’s surprisingly hard to believe if you really associate him less with titans of industry and a lot more using the guys running three-card-monte games within the shadow of 1 of his buildings.
All that isn’t to claim that the emerging attack on Trump U is guaranteed to work. Even if Democrats decide to allow it to be the centerpiece of their own campaign against Trump, it’ll be only one piece of an incredibly complicated puzzle. But considering that they usually have a vivid, concrete method to make the case, its probabilities of success are very high.
The Dantzler Report! 