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Rubio Campaign Press Release - Trump's Mortgage Company Was a Disaster for Him AND His Customers

February 29, 2016

NEW YORK CITY - SEPTEMBER 28 2015: Businessman and presidential candidate Donald Trump held a press conference at Trump Tower to unveil his comprehensive tax reform plan.

February 29, 2016

When the housing market bubble was in the final stages before it popped, some mortgage lenders preyed on vulnerable Americans, helping them buy homes they couldn't afford with loans they shouldn't have gotten.

One of the firms taking advantage of those Americans: Trump Mortgage.

Trump's firm specifically targeted vulnerable borrowers:

Trump Mortgage was divided into two units. One side was an upscale residential and commercial mortgage business, which Scheck ran. The other side was known internally as the "boiler room," where employees often made cold calls to people seeking to refinance or originate loans, many of them "sub-prime," meaning the borrowers had poor credit histories.

And yet, Trump didn't even time the business correctly, starting it up just as the market was falling apart:

Within 18 months, as the experts' worst fears began to pan out and home prices began to dip, Trump Mortgage closed, leaving some bills unpaid and a spotty sales record that fell short of Trump's lofty predictions. Trump distanced himself from the firm's demise, saying at the time that he had not been involved in the company's management and that its executives had performed poorly.

When Trump Mortgage collapsed, like with other Trump businesses, clients and contractors got a raw deal:

Jennifer McGovern, who had been a mortgage seller, filed suit, saying she was fired before receiving $238,000 of promised compensation for a commercial real estate deal she negotiated.

McGovern, a mother of three, won a judgement in 2008 by a New York State Supreme Court judge, who ordered that she be paid $298,274. But the bill was not paid. "The company was set up in a way that we could never recover what we were owed," she said.

Despite Trump promising to always "hire the best people," the man he hired to run the company turns out to have "inflated his qualifications."

So, to recap: Donald Trump tried to get in on the housing bubble by swindling everyday Americans, hired a man who lied about his resume to do it, timed the business totally wrong, and then stiffed the people he was doing business with.

That's the definition of a con job.

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Marco Rubio, Rubio Campaign Press Release - Trump's Mortgage Company Was a Disaster for Him AND His Customers Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/315009

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