5% Off Everything — Except Trump University March 4, 2016March 3, 2016 Well, 5% off everything you buy on Amazon, if you have Amazon Prime — which for me is practically everything. Click here for details. No annual fee for the card. Just be sure to pay it off in full each month (I’ve set mine to debit my bank account automatically) — it carries a crazy interest rate. (And note the cautionary reviews — 54% five-star, but 23% one-star.) Meanwhile, it turns out Trump University is way worse than most of us knew. Check it out. Thank you, Vox. . . . Trump University wasn’t a university but a multilevel marketing scam Trump University — which was never licensed to call itself a “university” — shut down in 2010. But the legal fallout, including Schneiderman’s suit, has continued. The university, Schneiderman has charged, was a “bait and switch,” a classic multilevel marketing scheme: People are told that the real benefits they want are only available if they keep paying, essentially urging them to throw good money after bad. People were lured into a free workshop with marketing materials that promised they’d learn Trump’s real estate secrets from his “handpicked” instructors and maybe even from Trump himself. Instead, they were urged to sign up for a three-day seminar that cost nearly $1,500. And at that seminar, they were pushed to sign up for an elite mentorship program that could cost as much as $35,000 per year. Trump didn’t handpick the mentors. He didn’t write the curriculum. He didn’t even show up at the seminars. Instead, students got to take a photo with a cardboard cutout of him. Even the most expensive mentorship didn’t deliver, Schneiderman’s lawsuit charges. Some mentors simply vanished. Others had no background in real estate at all. The lawsuit accuses Trump University of other shady behavior, such as asking students to fill out information about their financial assets — so that Trump University could pick out the wealthiest participants to urge them to pay more for the next level. They also urged participants to seek a credit line increase with the promise that it would improve their credit score. That’s sometimes the case, but greater access to credit also made it easier for participants to pay more for the next level of Trump University “advice.” Trump fought back by claiming his university has a 98 percent satisfaction rate, and by suing Schneiderman, saying the attorney general used the lawsuit as a threat to force Trump’s attorneys and family members to contribute to Schneiderman’s campaign. But the state ethics commission dropped that complaint. . . . If the students were 98% satisfied, one wonders why the business isn’t thriving to this day. Oh, well. Have a great weekend.