Is Donald Trump an American Hugo Chávez?

The video, with Spanish subtitles, comes from the Democratic National Committee and is aimed at a particular group of Latino voters: those who fled Mr. Chávez’s Venezuela and other authoritarian countries, like Cuba. It has a particular resonance in Florida, a battleground state and home to an increasing numbers of Venezuelans, especially in Doral, west of Miami, where Senator Marco Rubio has an office.

.. The debate has spread to Mexico, where politicians are comparing Mr. Trump to the leftist presidential hopeful Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As Mr. Trump has suggested he might do, Mr. López Obrador rejected the results of Mexico’s last two presidential elections, claiming he was robbed by fraud, and leading protests.

.. “It is not an ideology,” he writes, “but a political logic.” It pitches the idea of a noble section of the people against the idea of an utterly corrupt elite. The populist political strategy centers on this conflict in an emotive way, adapting to fit different contexts — anti-immigrant in the United States, anti-American in Venezuela.

.. While they have wildly different backgrounds and advocate different policies, they are united in posing as the enemy of the entrenched, corrupt elite, who make possible whatever ails the people, be it Muslim refugees or global capital.

.. As the establishment is held as corrupt, today’s populists blame it and its institutions — government, the media — for anything that goes wrong, even when it’s the populists themselves who are to blame. When newspapers report accusations of sexual assault by Mr. Trump, he blames a media conspiracy. When Venezuelans march to complain they have no food, the government denounces a plot by oligarchs and the media. Mr. Trump assailed a judge overseeing a lawsuit against him as being biased. Mr. Chávez jailed a judge who made a ruling he disagreed with.

5 Reasons to Vote Trump

Deep in our heads, resting on the spinal cord, is what scientists sometimes call our “reptilian brain.” In evolutionary terms, this is the oldest part of our brains and it governs primal instincts such as hunger, sex and fear; it helps trigger the fight or flight response.

This reptilian brain has been updated with a cerebral cortex and other modern brain structures that are the seat of reason — but Trump is bypassing them. Neuroscientists have noted that he preaches directly to the lizard in our heads.

.. Trump activates these vigilant instincts, Pinker says, and channels them into the most primitive interpretive circuits of our cortex, the ones rooted in tribalism. And so he wants us to join him in making scapegoats of Muslims, refugees, Mexican “rapists” and black “thugs.”

.. This historic election thus presents a choice: To decide how to cast our ballots, do we rely upon our reptilian brains or our human brains? To put it another way: Are we fearful, instinctive reptiles? Or nuanced, reasoning humans?

Donald Trump’s Income Isn’t Always What He Says It Is, Records Suggest

On the financial disclosure forms that Donald J. Trump has pointed to as proof of his tremendous success, no venture looks more gold-plated than his golf resort in Doral, Fla., where he reported revenues of $50 million in 2014. That figure accounted for the biggest share of what he described as his income for the year.

..But this summer, a considerably different picture emerged in an austere government hearing room in Miami, where Mr. Trump’s company was challenging the resort’s property tax bill.

Mr. Trump’s lawyer handed the magistrate an income and expense statement showing that the gross revenue had indeed been $50 million. But after paying operating costs, the resort had actually lost $2.4 million.

.. The records demonstrate that large portions of those numbers represent cash coming into his businesses before covering costs like mortgage payments, payroll and maintenance. After expenses, some of his businesses make a small fraction of what he reported on his disclosure forms, or actually lose money.

.. “It shows income … in fact, the income — I just looked today — the income is filed at $694 million for this past year, $694 million,” Mr. Trump said. “If you would have told me I was going to make that 15 or 20 years ago, I would have been very surprised.”

.. “I make approximately $20 million a year in rentals from 40 Wall Street and the building is now worth $500 million,” Mr. Trump wrote in “Trump Never Give Up,” published in 2008.

.. But the income and expense statement that he filed with the New York City Tax Commission to appeal his property taxes shows that after mortgage payments and other costs, the building produced a cash flow of about $104,000 in 2014. Over the previous three years, it had generated a negative cash flow of $5.5 million, as the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis took a toll on downtown office buildings.

.. The recent negative cash flow at two of Mr. Trump’s premier properties raises possible motivations he may have for not releasing his tax returns
.. At the Trump International Hotel and Tower, on Columbus Circle in Manhattan, Mr. Trump owns a parking garage and the restaurant space occupied by Jean Georges. On his disclosure forms, Mr. Trump listed his income from the garage and the restaurant space as between $1 million and $5 million. On the income and expense statements he filed in a property tax appeal for 2015, he showed gross income of $1.6 million on the spaces. But after he paid operating expenses and mortgage payments, only $43,000 was left for the year.
.. On the disclosure form he filed this year, which apparently covered 2015 and part of 2016, more than half of Mr. Trump’s claimed income was generated by his golf resorts. As an industry, privately owned golf resorts lost 2 cents for every dollar in revenue for the year that ended in September, and that was the industry’s best year since the 2008 recession
.. Mr. Delgado stared at the income and expense report showing that Doral had lost $2.4 million in 2014, a number that did not even include millions of dollars in mortgage payments. Mr. Delgado began to chuckle and turned to the county property assessor, Murry Harris.

“So he spent $104 million to lose two and a half million dollars a year,” Mr. Delgado said. “I know how to lose that money without having to spend $104 million.

Worst-Case Trump: What if losing the election only makes him stronger?

As president, Trump—a con man who traffics in dark fantasy—would quickly find himself constrained by the realities of actual government. The Constitution makes it difficult to pull off the kind of Putinesque strong-arming that Trump admires. Instead, he would be forced to try, and ultimately fail, to be what he is not: a capable and measured leader, his power subject to the checks and balances of a democracy. Congress has its own political stories to tell. Supreme Court justices, unlike reality-show apprentices, can’t be fired.

.. But a narrow loss would hold no such pitfalls for Trump. Robbed by Crooked Hillary and a rigged election, undermined by politically correct wusses and Mexican rapists, Trump will don the mantle of martyrdom. Nothing is more central to Trump’s brand than a sense of grievance, and nothing will make him and his followers feel more righteously aggrieved than losing to Hillary Clinton in a close election. In defeat, his power and appeal will grow a thousandfold.

.. Trump has taken to describing the election in apocalyptic terms, as the final chance his followers have to hold on to their way of life. “This will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning,” he proclaimed at the Values Voter Summit in September. “You’re going to have people flowing across the border, you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in, and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote, and once that all happens you can forget it.”