



As it turns out, Trump won’t have to take the stand after all. As Politico One week from today, President-elect Donald Trump was scheduled to take the stand in a fraud case surrounding his scandal-plagued “Trump University,” which has been accused of ripping off students and making ridiculous claims about the value of its lessons. The Republican was poised to be the first president-elect to ever give sworn testimony in his own fraud case.As it turns out, Trump won’t have to take the stand after all. As Politico reported , the controversial businessman who vowed not to settle this case ended up settling this case.

President-elect Donald Trump, who once declared “I don’t settle lawsuits,” took to Twitter Saturday to justify his decision to pay $25 million to settle fraud lawsuits over his now-defunct Trump University real estate seminar program. He also hinted that had he not been so busy preparing to take office, he might not have settled.



“The ONLY bad thing about winning the Presidency is that I did not have the time to go through a long but winning trial on Trump U. Too bad!,” Trump tweeted.





Note, as recently as March, Trump



The assertion that doesn’t “get sued very often” also turned out to be



To the extent that reality still matters, it’s worth remembering that the case against Trump was quite strong. The Washington Post

The settlement resolves a class-action case and an investigation launched by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.Note, as recently as March, Trump boasted during a GOP debate, “This is a case I could have settled very easily, but I don’t settle cases very easily when I’m right.” After boasting that the Better Business Bureau gave Trump University an “A” rating – a claim that turned out to be a brazen lie – Trump added, “Again, I don’t settle cases. I don’t do it because that’s why I don’t get sued very often, because I don’t settle, unlike a lot of other people.”The assertion that doesn’t “get sued very often” also turned out to be a demonstrable falsehood , as was the boast about never settling.To the extent that reality still matters, it’s worth remembering that the case against Trump was quite strong. The Washington Post reported in September that the New York Republican was the namesake of a “university,” where students sometimes “max[ed] out their credit cards to pay tens of thousands of dollars for insider knowledge they believed could make them wealthy.”

Never licensed as a school, Trump University was in reality a series of real estate workshops in hotel ballrooms around the country, not unlike many other for-profit self-help or motivational seminars. Though short-lived, it remains a thorn in Trump’s side nearly five years after its operations ceased: In three pending lawsuits, including one in which the New York attorney general is seeking $40 million in restitution, former students allege that the enterprise bilked them out of their money with misleading advertisements.



Instead of a fast route to easy money, these Trump University students say they found generic seminars led by salesmen who pressured them to invest more cash in additional courses. The students say they didn’t learn Trump’s secrets and never received the one-on-one guidance they expected.