Trump busted for reusing his old fraud playbook to deflect criticism of his COVID-19 failures: report

On Saturday, The Washington Postdrew a parallel between President Donald Trump's failure to respond adequately to the coronavirus pandemic, and his efforts to defend the fraud scheme he set up with "Trump University."

"The judge was out to get him, he said. So was that prosecutor in New York, whom he called a dopey loser on a witch hunt," wrote David Fahrenthold, Joshua Partlow, and Jonathan O'Connell. "So were his critics, who he said were all liars. Even some of his own underlings had failed him — bad people, it turned out. He said he didn’t know them. Donald Trump was in trouble. Now, he was trying to attack his way out, breaking all the unwritten rules about the way a man of his position should behave. The secret to his tactic: 'I don’t care' about breaking the rules, Trump said at a news conference. 'Why antagonize? Because I don’t care.'"

This response, as the media scrutinized the president's fake university that charged people tens of thousands of dollars for worthless seminars that claimed to reveal his real estate investment secrets, is similar to Trump's claim that "I don't take responsibility at all" for the deaths under the coronavirus pandemic.

“I tried to warn the American people that if Donald Trump was doing this to me, he’s going to do the same thing if he’s ever elected president,” said Bob Guillo, a former Trump University student who warned people the president was a con man in interviews in 2016. “Unfortunately, people believed Trump.”

“It’s something I think about all the time,” said former New York prosecutor Tristan Snell, who worked on the Trump University case. He said that Trump University “had a fulfillment problem ... Maybe that’s a good metaphor for what’s happening in America is that we have a fulfillment problem,” he said. “You’ve sold X and Y and Z and you can’t actually fulfill the order.” He added that Trump is trying to do the same thing now, but “The difference this time is the fact that he’s running his game on a virus,” Snell said. “And the virus doesn’t care.”

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