Trump University was a massive fraud scheme that bilked thousands of students out of up to $35,000 each with false promises of learning Donald Trump's real estate secrets. The program, which operated from 2005 to 2010, was not an accredited university, did not grant degrees, and its instructors were not “hand-picked” by Trump as relentlessly advertised.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued Trump in 2013 for defrauding over 5,000 students out of $40 million. Internal documents revealed a 41-page “Private & Confidential” playbook that coached salespeople to use high-pressure tactics targeting vulnerable people, including single mothers and the elderly, and to push them toward maxing out credit cards to pay for increasingly expensive seminars. Students were promised personal mentorship from Trump, but he never taught a single class.
In 2016, Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits—two class actions in California and the New York AG suit. Judge Gonzalo Curiel, whom Trump had infamously attacked as biased due to his Mexican heritage, finalized the settlement in 2018. Approximately $21 million went to defrauded students (who received roughly 80 cents on the dollar) and $4 million went to the New York Attorney General's office. Trump had repeatedly vowed he would “never settle” and called the lawsuits “baseless,” then quietly settled after winning the 2016 election.
This wasn't a business that simply underperformed—it was a deliberate, systematic scam designed to extract maximum money from people who trusted the Trump name. The internal playbook proves it was fraud by design, not incompetence.
Correction (October 2, 2026): We removed a citation whose link no longer resolves to the cited article and could not be verified: NPR (“Trump Agrees To $25 Million Settlement In Trump University Fraud Cases”). The remaining sources are listed below.