It has long been my contention, and in recent weeks backed by focus groups and polling data, that Donald Trump’s support starts to erode when it becomes evident just how often and how severely Trump has hurt ordinary Americans in the course of his various “enterprises” (or flim-flam marketing ploys, depending on how one looks at them). One story that almost everybody in the media has heard about, but which the general public knows almost nothing about (which means, despite the media’s self-regarding hall of mirrors, that it is decidely not old news), is the highly dubious “sales funnel” called Trump University — actually, a series of short seminars supposedly transmitting to its “students” the super-duper secrets of Trump’s real-estate success. Three different lawsuits now accuse the whole enterprise of various illegal shenanigans, and Trump himself acknowledged in a deposition that things he said in advertisements for the seminars — about his supposedly personal involvement in choosing instructors, among other things — were not even close to being fulfilled.
Even though several outlets have done some decent reporting on the issue, a lot of the mind-boggling details have not been reported, or at least not effectively laid out — including details that are certainly, to this reader, extremely damning of Trump and of the whole outfit.
Now comes my old friend and colleague Eddie Curran, investigative reporter par excellence known particularly for the reporting that more than anything else led to a prison term for former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, to lay out those details in highly readable fashion, while focusing on an Iowa consumer/victim of the scheme.
It is a story well worth reading — and well worth sharing to any Iowans planning to attend caucuses tonight.