It was an unusually warm day in the seaside town of Portoroz, and Leida Ruvina was growing suspicious. The doctoral program she had been enrolled in for weeks had all the signs of a sham—the campus was a small, shabby building rented out from a tourist school and the French translation for “Euro-Mediterranean” in the university’s seal was misspelled.
Ruvina raised her hand to ask the university’s president what was going on, and he assured her that everything was in order. He then complimented her on her fluent English and offered to advise her on her dissertation thesis. “If you want, I can be your mentor,” she recalled him telling her in an awkward exchange as he steered the conversation away from questions about the university’s legitimacy.
Shortly after Donald Trump was found guilty in the hush money case, his campaign website crashed from a surge of donations to his second presidential campaign.
