Donald Trump: Portrait of a Con Man

In his latest column, former Republican Andrew Sullivan has a hard hitting, but in my view very accurate portrait of Donald Trump for what he is - and has always been: a con man who things that laws apply to "little people" but not to him. Indeed, his entire real estate career has involved skirting the law wherever possible.  The pattern was learned from his father who had a business partner who was a front for Mafia interests.  Ethics and legality have never figured high on the Trump priority list.  The Donald merely took things to a whole new level.  His difficulty, especially in the White House is that the much more detail scrutiny is making it harder and harder to maintain the con, with the requisite number of lies mushrooming. With Michael Cohen's apparent intent to flip on Trump, they lies are moving into stratospheric levels.  Here are column highlights:

The leaked tape recording of Michael Cohen and Donald Trump discussing how to handle the payoff to silence yet another extracurricular paramour, Karen McDougal, is more important, it seems to me, than has been generally acknowledged.

It’s only a shade under three minutes long. But unlike the Billy Bush tape, Trump is not performing or bragging or trying to charm someone he doesn’t know that well. He’s at work, with an intimate, trusted wingman, every single guard down. It really feels like the actual Trump, the man behind the curtain. And this Trump is quite clearly in charge. He’s not some addled 70-something, delegating large swathes of responsibility for day-to-day operations to underlings. . . . He talks about how some issue will blow over: “I think this goes away quickly … in two weeks; it’s fine.” He then asks Cohen, “Can we use him anymore?” referring to an Evangelical pastor, and Cohen says absolutely.

Then they briefly discuss “the financing” for the National Enquirer’s capture and withholding of the McDougal story.

What this tiny glimpse into reality reveals is something quite simple. It’s not that it’s a shock that Trump has been lying about this incident from the very beginning. That has long been clear. But there’s something about listening to his voice acknowledging this in such a breezy, matter-of-fact tone that exposes the purity of the cynicism behind the lies. “We have no knowledge of any of this,” Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks, had, after all, originally told The Wall Street Journal when it broke the story days before the 2016 election. The idea that Trump had had an affair at all, let alone organized hush money to the National Enquirer, was “totally untrue.” And yet here, as the curtain is pulled back, we hear Trump himself figuring out how to finance its cover-up.

It’s a world-weary operator in sleaze and outright deception, dealing with an item of everyday business. The euphemisms — “info,” “financing,” “our friend David,” etc. — are those of people who know they’re doing something shady. He even talks of “using” a religious-right figure. It’s the tape of a con man, discussing the con with an underling in a kind of consigliere code. And this revelation is therefore dangerous. It demonstrates that Trump is, in fact, just another crooked pol — and does so in his own voice.

Con men usually know that a con has a life span, and not a long one. At some point, it will collapse because it is, in fact, bullshit. By then, the best con men have made the sale — think of “Trump University” — and moved on. They also know that keeping the suckers sealed off from other sources of contrary information is essential until the deal is done. You have to maintain a fiction relentlessly, dismiss or delegitimize external information that might get your marks to think differently, and constantly make the sale.

It has worked many times before. It’s at the root of his entire shady business career. His problem now, however, is that this is the biggest of all cons, if you’re playing at a presidential level, and is also the longest. It has to be sustainable for at least four years. And that’s an extremely long time to keep it alive.

This is why, it seems to me, Trump tweets so often and so aggressively. It’s his chief mechanism for keeping his dupes under his spell, for sustaining the narrative of the con while reality tugs at it. He’s making the sale every news cycle of every day because the alternative is the whole thing crashing to the ground. It’s also why he keeps holding rallies. You need that kind of mass crowd hysteria to sustain a con . . .

And it’s why he has to lie, and lie with greater and greater intensity and frequency.

And sure enough, the rate of Trump’s lies is accelerating, as the con ages. All six of the last six weeks rank in the top ten most dishonest of his presidency, as the indefatigable Daniel Dale has noted. Last Tuesday, Trump actually made the subtext text, in a speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention: “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening … It’s just a con man getting a little rattled, as his trade war is beginning to wreak havoc in the Midwest.

When you have brazenly declared that such wars are easy to win, and agriculture in the heartland is nonetheless reeling, and manufacturing is increasingly jittery about the cost of imported steel, what else are you going to do? Well, you can bribe the farmers with some $12 billion. Or ask companies and their workers to be patient. But some in the middle of the country will still start doubting — and his polling in three Midwest swing states that gave him the presidency is now slipping.

That VFW appeal — and his visit to Illinois and Dubuque, Iowa, yesterday — is a sign, it seems to me, of a little desperation.

Desperate is insisting that what is clearly the word would — from the tape and the tone and the sentence structure of his Helsinki press conference — is actually the word wouldn’t. Desperate is responding to the Carter Page FISA documents by insisting that they say the opposite of what they actually say.

Desperate is banning a CNN reporter from a press conference because she had previously asked difficult reality-based questions about Michael Cohen — and then quibbling over the term ban.

Desperate is the attempt by some House Republicans to impeach Rod Rosenstein, a move that has not even been cheered by the far-right media, and that is swiftly deflating.

Desperate is doubling down on the “witch-hunt hoax,” while the chief money guy for the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, gets a subpoena, and Michael Cohen’s lawyer says of his client, who knows far too much, “He has hit the reset button; he’s made a turn — to be on his own, speaking the truth.”

No, this is not an unraveling. But the con is definitely fraying badly. And it is not going to get easier to keep patching it up as time goes steadily by.

Sadly, Trump's marks - his base - are only too happy to continue to believe the con.  The only other option is to admit that they were played for fools and they happily assumed that role. Their egos make this an unacceptable option, at least for now.  But should Michael Cohen and Allen Weisselberg unload what they know, the con will fall apart to the point where denial is near impossible. May that day come very soon. 

Stop Giving Republicans and Trump the Benefit of the Doubt

One of the phenomenons that drives me to distraction is the false equivalency much of the news media gives to the Republican agenda and the contortions engaged in to give the GOP leadership and Donald Trump in particular the benefit of the doubt.  One need only look at the history of today's GOP and the career of Trump in New York City, replete with Mafia  connections and other sordid alliances to know that these are NOT nice or decent individuals who have a shred of concern for average citizens.  Sure, their talking points will claim that they are, but actions speak louder than words and in Trump's case, ties with despicable people speaks volumes. A column in the New York Times looks at this reality and the need for the media - and everyone else - to stop giving these individuals the benefit of the doubt.  Their motivations are not good or well intended and they are not honorable.  Here are column highlights:

After Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December, a number of companies gave their employees one-time bonuses, ostensibly sharing their new corporate windfall. As a PR stunt, these checks were a savvy investment; they allowed the companies to pander to the administration and made themselves look beneficent without incurring any long-term obligation to their workers.

Critics of the new law tried to point out that one-time bonuses are not the same as pay increases, and that the overwhelming majority of corporate savings from the tax cut was likely to go to shareholders. Nevertheless, in parts of the media, the idea that Republicans had been vindicated took hold.

Five months later, everything liberals said about the tax bill turned out to be true. Contrary to Republican claims, wage growth has been anemic. Instead of sharing the wealth with employees, companies have spent record amounts of money buying back their own stock. The tax cuts are creating larger deficits than Republicans predicted, and those deficits are now being cited as a pretext for cutting spending on the poor. They remain unpopular. Republicans in some districts have abandoned them as an election issue.

Watching this unfold should have helped inoculate commentators against Trumpist bamboozlement. It has not. In March, Trump spontaneously accepted an offer, conveyed to him by a South Korean envoy, to meet directly with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. North Korea has sought a one-on-one meeting with a sitting American president for years, believing it would legitimate it as a global power, but previous administrations have refused.

Nevertheless, credulous commentators praised Trump for bringing North Korea to the table, as if a seat at the table wasn’t what North Korea wanted all along. And pundits, including some who are broadly critical of the president, hectored us to give him credit.

Due to Trump’s ignorance and vanity, South Korea’s dovish leader, Moon Jae-in, has been able to manipulate him into a position where he might make concessions to North Korea that no other president would dare. Given the risk of war, Moon’s maneuvering has been admirable. “In South Korea, it’s basically an open secret that this whole thing is flattering Trump,” Kelly said. “It kind of amazes me that Trump’s staff hasn’t picked up on this.”

Now, three weeks away from a summit that may or may not actually happen, reports show [Trump] a president terrifyingly unprepared for high-stakes diplomacy.  . . . “Mr. Trump’s aides have grown concerned that the president — who has said that ‘everyone thinks’ he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts — has signaled that he wants the summit meeting too much,”. . . . it’s now the American president who craves legitimation from the North Korean dictator.

Even a casual newspaper reader — which, of course, Trump is not — knows that when North Korea talks about “denuclearization,” it doesn’t mean unilaterally giving up all its nuclear weapons. A hastily arranged meeting between two bellicose egomaniacs, premised on a basic misunderstanding, is unlikely to resolve one of the world’s most intractable geopolitical conflicts; a flimsy agreement that roughly preserves the status quo seems like a best-case scenario. Yet for weeks, the pull to give Trump pre-emptive credit for a hypothetical victory has felt like a cultural undertow; you had to plant your feet firmly to resist it. . . . . Trump, whose only real talent is the manipulation of reality, exploits this impulse.

Of course, we all have a motive in playing along with the fiction that Trump has achieved a Korean breakthrough — it might stop him from starting a war. But it’s one thing to humor our idiot president, and another to let the gravitational pull of presidential power, and the deep desire for a minimally competent leader, warp reality. We all want to be open-minded, but con men should never be given the benefit of the doubt.

Corruption Is Trump’s Greatest Political Liability

While all eyes remain on the Russiagate investigation, a lengthy piece in New York Magazine lays out why Trump's corruption and monetizing of his position in the White House may end up being what takes him down politically.  It also proposes a road map for Democrats to build a strong anti-Trump, anti-Republican narrative that looks at the rapaciousness of the Trump/Pence regime and the Republican majorities in Congress that have either looked the other way when corruption appears or who have outright enabled and abetted the corruption and transfers of wealth to the wealthiest Americans or huge corporations which are not reinvesting in America as Trump/the GOP promised.  Here are opening highlights (read the entire piece):

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy,” declared Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign. “I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. But now I want to be greedy for the United States.” To the extent that Trump’s candidacy offered any positive appeal, as opposed to simple loathing for his opponent, this was it.

Since Trump took office, his pledge to ignore his own interests has been almost forgotten, lost in a disorienting hurricane of endless news. It is not just a morbid joke but a legitimate problem for the opposition that all the bad news about Trump keeps getting obscured by other bad news about Trump. Perhaps the extraordinary civic unrest his presidency has provoked will be enough to give Democrats a historic win in the midterms this fall, but it is easy to be worried.

As the races pick up in earnest, some kind of narrative focus is going to be necessary to frame the case against Trump. Here, what appears to be an embarrassment of riches for Democrats may in fact be a collection of distractions. It is depressingly likely that several of Trump’s most outrageous characteristics will fail to move the needle in the states and districts where the needle needs moving. His racism and misogyny motivate the Democratic base, but both were perfectly apparent in 2016 and did not dissuade enough voters to abandon him.

Trump’s core proposition to the public was a business deal: If he became president, he would work to make them rich. Of course, the fact that Trump was able to reduce the presidency to such a crass exchange, forsaking such niceties as simple decency and respect for the rule of law, exposed terrifying weaknesses in the fabric of American democracy. But the shortest path to resolving this crisis is first to remove Trump’s party — and it is Trump’s party — from full control of the government in 2018, and then to remove Trump from the White House in 2020.

The clearest way to do that is to demonstrate that Trump is failing to uphold his end of the deal. After all, the students at Trump University once constituted some of the biggest Trump fans in America. Until they realized Trump had conned them. Then they sued to get their money back.

Historically, corruption — specifically, the use of power for personal gain — has played a central and even dominant role in American political discourse. In the 1870s, revelations that public officials were caught lining their pockets with millions of dollars from alcohol taxes (the Whiskey Ring) and inflated railroad costs (Crédit Mobilier) exploded into spectacular scandals. One of the triumphs of the Progressive Era was establishing rules and norms of professionalism in government so that public officials would not be tempted to sell their favors.

There is a reason Trump labeled his opponent “Crooked Hillary,” and it stems from a law of American politics Democrats would be wise to remember: To be out for yourself is probably the single most disqualifying flaw a politician can have.

The sheer breadth of direct self-enrichment Trump has unleashed in office defies the most cynical predictions. It may not be a surprise that he continues to hold on to his business empire and uses his power in office to direct profits its way, from overseas building deals down to printing the presidential seal on golf markers at the course near Mar-a-Lago. It is certainly not a surprise that Trump has refused to disclose his tax returns. What’s truly shocking is how much petty graft has sprung up across his administration. Trump’s Cabinet members and other senior officials have been living in style at taxpayer expense, . . . Not since the Harding administration, and probably the Gilded Age, has the presidency conducted itself in so venal a fashion.

It is hardly a coincidence that so many greedy people have filled the administration’s ranks. Trump’s ostentatious crudeness and misogyny are a kind of human-resources strategy. Radiating personal and professional sleaze lets him quickly and easily identify individuals who have any kind of public ethics and to sort them out. . . . . Trump is legitimately excellent at cultivating an inner circle unburdened by legal or moral scruples. These are the only kind of people who want to work for Trump, and the only kind Trump wants to work for him.

It should take very little work — and be a very big priority — for Democratic candidates to stitch all the administration’s misdeeds together into a tale of unchecked greed. . . . . Having burned enough American banks throughout his career that he could not obtain capital through conventional, legitimate channels, Trump turned to Russian sources, who typically have an ulterior political motive. Just what these various sources got in return for their investment in Trump is a matter for Robert Mueller’s investigators to determine. But Trump’s interest in them is perfectly obvious.

Trump’s campaign followed his patented human-resources strategy, filling its ranks with other rapacious and financially precarious men. Paul Manafort was deeply in debt to a Russian oligarch when he popped up on Trump’s doorstep. Michael Flynn was selling his credentials to Russian and Turkish dictators while advising Trump. Jared Kushner was flailing about in an effort to make good on a massive loan he took out on a white-elephant Manhattan building . . .

The virtue of bribery is a subject of genuine conviction for Trump, whose entrée to politics came via transactional relationships with New York politicians as well as Mafia figures. Trump once called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars American corporations from engaging in bribery, a “ridiculous” and “horrible” law. Enforcement of this law has plummeted under his administration.

[Trump] and his inner circle feel most comfortable in the company of the wealthy and corrupt. They have built closer ties to Russia, the Gulf States, and China, all of which are ruled by oligarchs who recognize in Trump a like-minded soul. They share the belief that — to revise a favorite Trump saying — if you don’t steal, you don’t have a country.

Trump’s behavior runs directly contrary to his most important promises. “Draining the swamp” was not supposed to mean simply kicking out Democrats and competent public officials. He made speeches promising good-government reforms: a ban on lobbying by former members of Congress and stricter rules on what lobbying meant; campaign-finance reform to prevent foreign companies from raising money for American candidates; a ban on lobbying by former senior government officials on behalf of foreign governments.

Not only has Trump made no effort to raise ethical standards but he and his administration have flamboyantly violated the existing guidelines. Lobbyists are seeded in every agency, “regulating” their former employers and designing rules that favor bosses over employees and business owners over consumers.

[I]n Trump’s case, the smaller and larger scandals reinforce each other. Why is Trump giving rich people and corporations a huge tax cut? Why has he been threatening to take away your health insurance? Why is he letting Wall Street and Big Oil write their own rules? Above all, if Trump supposedly believed that “if I become president, I couldn’t care less about my company — it’s peanuts,” why are his children still running it? For the same reason he has let his Cabinet secretaries run up large travel expenses, and why his son-in-law met with oligarchs in China and the Gulf States whose money he was trying to get his hands on.

Rather than sit back and allow Trump to take credit for a recovery he inherited, Democrats can press the point that he and his allies are doing little more than skimming off the top of it.

Somebody persuaded corporations, fattened by a trillion-dollar tax windfall, to publicize the same raises and bonuses they had been handing out for years as a special dividend of the Trump tax cuts. If Democrats win control of a chamber of Congress and thus the ability to hold hearings, they should investigate whatever coordination yielded this nexus of self-interest.

A Democratic House or Senate could also compel disclosure of Trump’s tax returns, and both the documents themselves and any drama surrounding them would attract more attention to the administration’s commitment to self-enrichment.

But that can happen only if the Democrats win the midterms, and the best way to do that is to tell a very simple story. Trump represented himself as a rich man feared by the business elite. He had spent much of his life buying off politicians and exploiting the system, so he knew how the system worked and could exploit that knowledge on behalf of the people. In fact, his experiences with bribery opened his eyes to what further extortion might be possible. Trump was never looking to blow up the system. He was simply casing the joint.

Lawsuit To Be Filed Accusing Trump of Illegal Acts

No one should be surprised over the fact that a lawsuit will be filed today accusing Donald Trump of illegal and unconstitutional activities, in particular, his violation of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution.  It goes without saying that I hope that the lawsuit is successful and that perhaps under the subpoena powers afforded by litigation, Trump's tax returns and other information he seeks to keep hidden will come to light.  The New York Times looks at this welcomed development.  Here are highlights:

A team of prominent constitutional scholars, Supreme Court litigators and former White House ethics lawyers intends to file a lawsuit Monday morning alleging that President Trump is violating the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other business operations to accept payments from foreign governments.

The lawsuit is among a barrage of legal actions against the Trump administration that have been initiated or are being planned by major liberal advocacy organizations. Such suits are among the few outlets they have to challenge the administration now that Republicans are in control of the government.

In the new case, the lawyers argue that a provision in the Constitution known as the Emoluments Clause amounts to a ban on payments from foreign powers like the ones to Mr. Trump’s companies. They cite fears by the framers of the Constitution that United States officials could be corrupted by gifts or payments.

The suit, which will not seek any monetary damages, will ask a federal court in New York to order Mr. Trump to stop taking payments from foreign government entities. Such payments, it says, include those from patrons at Trump hotels and golf courses, as well as loans for his office buildings from certain banks controlled by foreign governments, and leases with tenants like the Abu Dhabi tourism office, a government enterprise.

The legal team filing the lawsuit includes Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard constitutional scholar; Norman L. Eisen, an Obama administration ethics lawyer; and Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine. Among the others are Richard W. Painter, an ethics counsel in the administration of George W. Bush; Mr. Gupta, a Supreme Court litigator who has three cases pending before the court; and Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor and former congressional candidate who has been studying and writing about the Emoluments Clause for nearly a decade.

Ms. Teachout said the one place of potential concern is a nation like China, which rents space at Trump Tower in New York and is a major lender to an office building in New York that he controls in part.

Foreign governments, Ms. Teachout and other ethics expert warn, could rent out rooms in Trump hotels as a way to send a message to the Trump family. “If you think other countries are not going to try to leverage relationships with Trump’s companies to influence trade or military policy, that is naïve,” she said.

Mr. Eisen said the legal team intended to use the lawsuit to try to get a copy of Mr. Trump’s federal tax returns, which are needed to properly assess what income or other payments or loans Mr. Trump has received from foreign governments.

Why It is Important to Oppose Trumpism

With hate crimes and acts of intimidation escalating - all, of course with no denunciation of such conduct from Donald trump or Mike Pence - one can certainly feel overwhelmed, especially if one falls within one of the favored targets of Trump's frightening base of Christofascists and white supremacists.  But that doesn't mean that we can crawl into a fetal position and try to deny the reality that something terrible has happened to America.  Rather, if one is a true American patriot, it is now time to step up resistance and do all possible to stop the parade of horribles that Trump and the Congressional Republicans have planned for the nation.   A column in the New York Times underscores the need to rally and resist non-stop.  Here are highlights: 

This is a very dangerous man, our next president. Dangerous in his certitude about what he doesn’t know. Dangerous in his ignorance of history, his antipathy toward reading, his inability to sort fact from fiction. The last man to play things by the gut while in control of the world’s most powerful military left a mortal mess.

But welcome, for now, President-elect Donald Trump. It feels, in much of the nation, like the death of a loved one — the sudden, unexpected kind. I haven’t felt this way since the nuns told our second-grade class that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Still, grief is an emotion that has little power in politics.

A majority — well, not from the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won — chose radical change over reasoned predictability. They’re going to get plenty of change, much of it chaotic and cruel. Those who think Trump can be contained, or trained by seasoned K Street hacks to act reasonable, are deluding themselves. He’ll do it his way.

The Republicans will control everything, including the Supreme Court. Washington is theirs, with minimal checks and balances. And if the forgotten, the undereducated, the Rust Belt survivors think they are going to see a renaissance of their communities, consider this headline from Yahoo Finance on the day after the election: “Trump win is a ‘grand slam’ for Wall Street Bankers.” He will not betray his class.

But resistance is not futile. Within the durable strength of the Constitution are many options — peaceful, legal, effective countermoves, not the burn-it-all down schemes of the Trumpsters, had Clinton won. One question is existential: Can the world survive the 45th American president?

When he looks the other way while Russia takes a small country, we can remind him that the United States signed a treaty with war-broken European allies that cannot be dismissed by fiat. When he orders the generals to torture suspects, kill family members of suspected terrorists, they can cite Geneva Conventions — something the generals know much more about than Trump.

When Trump takes away people’s health care, when he tries to reinstate a system that was not, in fact, fabulous for those with pre-existing conditions, he will find a constituency of people who are one medical bill from bankruptcy. They will have to shout to be heard above the lobbyists, but they won’t go away quietly.

When Trump tries to ignore the provisions of a global accord to curb climate change, and charts a path for the United States as a rogue nation, the resistance will come from the millions of young Americans who found a voice in old Bernie Sanders. They will be similarly roused when he attempts to let the despoilers have their way on public land. Millennials will learn the hard way that failure to turn out in sufficient numbers at election time could cost their children a habitable planet.

The strongest resistance should come from the white working class; they will soon find out that Trump will treat them the same way he treated the suckers who signed up for his fraudulent university. When steel mills fail to return to Youngstown, or when new trade deals produce no more magic than the old ones, these economic exiles will wonder how they got betrayed. Look to the euphoria of soon-to-be deregulated Wall Street bankers for your explanation.

Finally, all of us in the American family should never trust anyone from the pollster industrial complex, including those at my own newspaper. 

Has Wikileaks Played Trump Supporters?

Today after much lead up and fanfare Wikileaks held a "major press conference" today where Donald Trump supporters hoped - some were in near orgasmic frenzy - would drop an "October surprise" and doom Hillary Clinton's presidential run.  What happened?  Basically, nothing.  Despite all the hype, Wikileaks failed to deliver.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at how Trump supporters seemingly were played for fools.  Here are excerpts:

The expectations were breathless.

For weeks, backers of Republican nominee Donald Trump hyped the tantalizing possibility that the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks was on the verge of publishing a set of documents that would doom Hillary Clinton’s chances in November.

“@HillaryClinton is done,” longtime Trump associate Roger Stone tweeted Saturday. “#Wikileaks.”

The group’s founder, Julian Assange, did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm, suggesting to Fox News hosts that his scoops could upend the race with documents “associated with the election campaign, some quite unexpected angles, some quite interesting.”

The announcement by WikiLeaks that it would host a major news conference Tuesday only seemed to confirm that the bombshell was ready to burst. The pro-Trump, anti-Clinton media world rippled with fevered speculation.

But if an October surprise about the Democratic nominee really is coming, it will have to wait a little longer.

Over the course of two hours on Tuesday — with the world’s media and bleary-eyed Trump die-hards across the United States tuning in — Assange and other WikiLeaks officials railed against “neo-McCarthyist hysteria,” blasted the mainstream media, appealed for donations and plugged their books (“40 percent off!”).

But what they didn’t do was provide any new information about Clinton — or about anything else, really.

The much-vaunted news conference, as it turned out, was little more than an extended infomercial for WikiLeaks on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of its founding.

That didn’t go over well with Trump backers who had stayed up through the night, thinking they’d be watching live the unveiling of the death blow to the Clinton campaign.

Assange, as it turns out, had taken a page from Trump’s own playbook by drawing an audience with a tease, only to leave those tuning in feeling that they’d been tricked.

Infowars, the pro-Trump and virulently anti-Clinton media vehicle launched by Texas radio host Alex Jones, had touted the WikiLeaks news conference as “historic” and promised that “the Clintons will be devastated.”

Before Assange took the stage, Jones — who broadcast through the wee hours of the American morning — told viewers and listeners that he was so excited he was worried his heart couldn't stand it.

But by the end, Jones realized he’d been played — or in his words, “#wikirolled.”

For those who have forgotten, Assange is an accused rapist - which is why he is hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy after fleeing his home country.

 

Donald Trump - A Con Man of Epic Proportions

On the drive home after working late (i.e., after 8:00 pm) I happened to listen to a snippet of Donald Trump at one of his  Neo-Nazi campaign rallies and it truly was enough to make me want to vomit. The lies and hypocrisy were off the charts, yet yahoos in his audience were cheering and going wild. It was as if the crowd either had had a group lobotomy or were at a KKK rally.  At times I do not know which speaks the worse about America, that Trump won the nomination of a major political party, or that her is even remotely in range of winning on November 8, 2016.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at Trump the con man and how he conned investors in the past to basically bail out his sinking ventures.  Now, he is doing it again and, as in the 1990's, many are willingly allowing themselves to be conned.  Here are highlights:

This story has been known in its outlines for many years. But with this weekend's Times revelation it takes on a new relevance. In short, it is the story of how Donald Trump ran his Atlantic City-based casino empire into the ground but managed to survive and rebound by finding other people to assume his debts. It's a highly revealing story about Trump the man and businessman because it's hard to believe the totality of what happened didn't involve committing some serious crimes. But it's also the critical backstory to that loss of almost $1 billion which appears to have allowed Trump to avoid paying income taxes almost ever since.

The Post has a good run-down of the details of what happened. Here's an overview. Trump ran into severe financial difficulties with his casinos in the early 90s, running up a massive amount of debt even as others were making a killing in the casino business. He avoided personal ruin in part by getting the banks who backed him to forgive a lot of the debt. But he also tricked members of the public into taking over his failed businesses.

[T]he gist is that Trump set up his first major public company Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. It was listed on the NYSE and members of the public, including quite a few individual investors, bought the stock. It was an IPO of a mature, indeed already failing company. But Trump used the allure of the Trump name to entice people in.

Over the next several years the businesses swirled down the drain and Trump was able to sell his other distressed casinos to the public company. In other words, he was both the buyer and the seller. So he sold the deeply indebted and already failing Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Castle to the company at a price of his choosing. While he was doing this he continued to pay himself tens of millions of dollars a year as the company's CEO in addition to using the company to help out his other businesses. By all these machinations he managed to have the company's major expenditures be paying off or at least servicing the debts he had racked up before the public company came into existence. At the end of the day basically everyone who invested in Trump company lost everything.

The company launched in 1995, the same year Trump claimed almost a $1 billion in losses on his tax return. Clearly these two things were related. Indeed, the Casino business was the essence of Trump's business empire at that point. We just don't know precisely how it all fits together because unlike the public company which had to make all the filings every public does, Trump's personal finances are private and remain that way because he's refused to release his tax returns.

[M]y question is whether those losses were 'real' losses he sustained as opposed to paper losses he did not. To put it more concretely, these loss carry forwards are supposed real losses - as in you invested a billion dollars of your own capital and lost it. There are other ways to legitimately generate losses - through depreciation and other ways. But the IRS and all major taxing authorities have ways of preventing you for benefitting from losses you didn't actually sustain. The options run the gamut from completely legitimate to obviously illegal. If it's true, as Trump claims, that he's been continually under audit, it seems likely that anything obviously illegal would have been caught. It's also possible that the on-going audits have been disputes over the losses and tax benefits Trump was claiming. We don't know.

At the risk of stating the obvious, we need to see Trump's tax returns. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that we've been more in need of seeing Trump's tax returns than any president in American history.

Is the Trump Tax Story Finally Swaying Voters?

Personally, I find it difficult to understand how any sane and decent person can be supporting Donald Trump who I view as little better than a con-man who has payed a rigged system to better himself, typically at the expense of others.  Thankfully, the release of a part of his tax return that suggests that he may not have paid federal taxes for years seems to be doing two things in the minds of some voters: (i) showing Trump to be a parasitic freeloader, and (ii) dispelling the myth that he is a consummate businessman.  Skilled businessmen do not lose $900 million in a good economy.  A piece from the Washington Post looks at some of the reverberations in Ohio, a swing state, and Pennsylvania.  Here are excerpts:

The revelations about the Republican nominee’s taxes gave Clinton a fresh opportunity. In conversations around Toledo, many voters said they were offended by Trump.

“It’s disgusting,” said Steve Crouse, 65, the owner of Toledo’s downtown Glass City Cafe and a separate printing business. “As a businessman, he’s got that right to do that. It’s the way the laws were set up. But it’s not right. I would feel guilty if I didn’t pay anything. It’s flat-out cheating the government. You’re using all the roads, the fire department, the police, so you should pay for that.”

On his way into church, at the suburban parish he shares with Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), Fred Glynn, 63, said that Clinton’s support of abortion rights made her impossible to accept. But the tax story, which he had just seen on CNN, added to the reasons he would have to reject Trump.

“How can he not pay income taxes?” he asked. “He talks about helping people, but he doesn’t pay income tax? That’s helping everybody. It’s like the situation in Florida, where he didn’t pay taxes on his golf course. The school suffered from that.”

Separating Trump from his rhetoric by casting him as a dishonest and bumbling tycoon had been key to Clinton’s fight back, but for months, it didn’t penetrate. A TV spot that showed David Letterman revealing the China labels on Trump’s branded clothing didn’t move poll numbers. Clinton got little lift from a rally at the failed Trump Taj Mahal casino at Atlantic City.

[T]he tax returns gave Clinton an argument that would not have worked against Romney: that Trump’s swagger covered up a record of business failure. In the 24 hours since the tax leak, the $916 million loss has proven the toughest aspect for Republicans to spin.

“He ain’t that good,” said Alex Pickett, 52, while waiting for a bus that would take him to a downtown church. “Can’t be that good if he lost that much money.”

On Sunday afternoon, at a bar near Toledo’s resilient Chrysler complex, the size of Trump’s loss was a punch line. As the Cleveland Browns blew a game against the Redskins, Ron Amborski, 57, marveled at what he had just seen on Sunday talk shows.

“Rudy Giuliani called Trump a genius at least 12 times,” Amborski said. “Talk about overcompensating. ‘He’s a genius businessman! He made a genius comeback!’ I thought, ‘Man, if this was a drinking game, I’d be hammered.’ ”

Kathleen Parker: Trump, A Con Man Among Heroes

I continue to find it telling that conservatives and Republicans who all too often turned a willing blind eye to the ugliness that motivated much of the party base and the self-prostitution that GOP elected officials regularly engaged in are now shocked that the selling of the GOP's soul has finally culminated in Donald Trump as the party standard bearer.  While Kathleen Parker has strayed from the GOP reservation ,more than other conservative pundits shocked by Trump's rise, had she and others criticized Democrats less and addressed the hideousness in their own party, perhaps the Trump nightmare could have been avoided.  Her latest piece  in the Washington Post looks at Trump's unqualified nature for the presidency.  Here are highlights:

At long last, Donald Trump has set himself free.

At a highly choreographed event Friday, the Republican nominee for president of the United States finally issued his verdict on the birthright of our two-term president, who, it turns out, is a real American!

“Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period,” Trump intoned to the great relief of no one.

Well, howdy-do. Welcome to planet Earth, son.
But Trump’s announcement was merely a curtain call on a theatrical production otherwise known as Free Publicity for Trump. For the preceding 24 hours, Trump gleefully baited and dragged the media through Con Man’s Swamp, first refusing to answer the question posed by The Post’s Robert Costaabout whether Trump still thought Obama wasn’t born in the United States, then building suspense Friday morning that he would make a “big announcement.”

Awaiting him on the dais was a gathering of war heroes, who spent 20 minutes extolling Trump’s virtues, many of which one has never before associated with the nominee — his intellectual curiosity, his great temperament and his raw intelligence.

Only Trump could believe such things about himself — and he obviously did. Nearly glistening from the mist of blown kisses, he beamed like a boy with a brand new toy.

Now, I don’t doubt that those on the stage sincerely support the Republican nominee. And nothing I say about Trump is intended to reflect on these extraordinary Americans, especially not on Michael Thornton, a retired Navy SEAL, whom I single out because he happens to be a friend. I commend his remarkable story to anyone seeking perspective and inspiration.

My heart sank just a little when I saw Thornton standing behind Trump, even though I’m aware that it’s difficult for many battlefield veterans, especially those from the Vietnam era, to find a Clinton acceptable as commander in chief.

Seeing Trump wedged among men who had served heroically, several of whom risked their own lives to save others, had an effect more minimizing than elevating. Trump avoided the draft, too, with a doctor’s excuse, often available to sons of the rich, and otherwise isn’t qualified to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Medal of Honor recipients.

“Selfish men, bullies, and braggarts don’t perform well in battle. And those believing in their own extraordinariness rarely if ever accomplish feats worthy of the MoH.”

Trump has finally owned up, if way too late to make any difference. But one should keep in mind that the birther movement was racist to its core. And the man who would be president led the charge. 

In case readers have not figured it out, Trump sickens me.  What sickens me even more is the number of Americans who are supporting a racist con man.  That speaks volumes about America and none of it good.  It certainly shows that claims of America's exceptionalism are untrue, especially in the day of Donald Trump.

Pope Francis Secretly Met with Kim Davis and Reveals His Duplicity

While Pope Francis seemingly tried to use his visit to America to present a kinder, gentler face on Catholicism and to score a PR triumph, news that Francis met with four times married, serial adulterer Kim Davis shows that nothing has changed in the Church leadership other than a matter of style.  Whatever good I thought of the man is gone and I again say that, in my view, gays who remain Catholics are delusional masochists.  As for Francis, if the Gospels are to be believed, while Christ met with prostitutes, he had little good to say about Pharisees who were selectively  (and falsely) pious - a description that well describes Davis and her professional Christian class supporters.  A column in Huffington Post reflects my views of con man Pope Francis.  Here are excerpts:

After first refusing to confirm nor deny it, the Vatican has confirmed that Pope Francis met with the Kentucky clerk Kim Davis at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, where Davis' attorney -- who made the news public after the pope's trip ended -- said Francis told her to "stay strong." And that simple encounter completely undermines all the goodwill the pope created in downplaying "the gay issue" on his U.S. trip. 

The pope played us for fools, trying to have it both ways. As I noted last week, he's an artful politician, telling different audiences what they want to hear on homosexuality. He did that in Argentina as a cardinal -- railing against gay marriage when the Vatican expected him to do so -- and he's done that since becoming pope, striking a softer tone on the issue after Benedict's harsh denunciations were a p.r. disaster for the Catholic Church in the West. But this news about Kim Davis portrays him as a more sinister kind of politician. That's the kind that secretly supports hate, ushering the bigots in the back door -- knowing they're an embarrassment -- while speaking publicly about about how none of us can judge one another. 

[B]y meeting with Davis secretly, and then at first having the Vatican neither confirm nor deny the encounter -- and now having the Vatican say it "won't deny" the meeting while it still won't offer any other details -- the pope comes off as a coward. 

He shows himself to be antithetical to much of what he preaches and teaches. He talks about dialogue and having the courage of one's convictions and the courage to speak out. But he swept this Davis meeting under the rug, seemingly ashamed and certainly not wanting to broach the subject. Even Davis's supporters should find that insulting to them.

[B]y telling Davis that she should "stay strong" -- if her attorney's account of the encounter is to be believed -- the pope is only encouraging the bigots, even if he's doing so quietly.  

Rather than moving us forward on LGBT rights ever so slightly, as many viewed the pope as doing, he now, with this meeting, emboldens the haters in the church who will be pushing to make sure church doctrine continues to call homosexuality "intrinsically disordered." And it sends a message to all those people who've experienced anti-gay discrimination . . . . that this pope is not going to end that discrimination any time soon. Rather than stopping that discrimination, he welcomed, with open arms in the Vatican's own embassy, the bigots who promote that discrimination but who've turned themselves into the victims.