Some of Trump’s supporters may have believed they were electing a pragmatic businessman who wouldn’t be restricted by obligations to either party or other powerful interest groups. But he is putting together a cabinet that looks almost exactly like the modern Republican Party: older, white, anti-government, and extremely conservative on virtually every issue. It could have been constructed by the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, or one of the other corporate-funded institutes that have helped drag the G.O.P. so far to the right on issues ranging from taxation to environmental regulation to charter schools.
.. Many have wondered recently why conservative leaders such as Ryan haven’t been more critical of Trump’s conduct since the election, and, in particular, his barrage of controversial tweets, including one in which he suggested that millions of people voted illegally on November 8th. But the answer is clear enough. So far, Ryan and his colleagues have had every reason to believe that Trump will allow them to pass large parts of a conservative agenda that they have been putting forward for years but that they have never been able to persuade a majority of Americans to support. As long as Trump goes along with this agenda, orthodox Republicans have every reason to downplay his outbursts on social media, as Ryan did earlier this week,
.. My own theory is that Trump is being pragmatic, but not in a policy sense. He’s pragmatically promoting his own interests, which, at this stage, are best served by throwing some large bones to the Republican Party.
.. The deal doesn’t need to be explicit to be clear. The G.O.P. gets its legislative “revolution.” Trump gets to keep his businesses and further enrich himself.
Ivan Trump’s Terrible Book Helps Explain the Trump-Family Ethos
till, she insists, she and her brothers didn’t attain their positions in their father’s company “by any kind of birthright or foregone conclusion.”
.. To answer this question, Ivanka employs an audacious strategy: all of her advantages have actually been handicaps, she says. When she was appointed to the board of directors at Trump Entertainment Resorts, at age twenty-five, the situation was “stacked all the way against me.” Her last name, her looks, her youth, her privilege have all colluded to make people underestimate her. And when she is overestimated—when people believe that she has an “inherent understanding of all things related to real estate and finance,” because her father is Donald Trump—this, too, “can be a big disadvantage.”
.. Ivanka compares herself to a runner positioned on the outside track, whose head start at the beginning is just an illusion.
.. “Did I have an edge, getting started in business?” she asks. “No question. But get over it. And read on.”
.. she has marketed herself as a cross between Gwyneth Paltrow and Sheryl Sandberg.
.. her jewelry company sent out a press release about the bracelet Ivanka wore on “60 Minutes” after her father’s election; she was photographed meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister the week after the election; and she sat in on a call with the Argentinian President. She will have, and presumably use, every opportunity to enrich the family company, of which she remains an executive vice-president. This is the definition of corruption, but as laundered through Ivanka—who’s been tweeting about banana bread and posting photos of her children—it won’t look so bad.
.. She offers a story about being forced, by her mother, to fly coach to the south of France as the moment she realized she needed to make her own money.
.. “My friend Andrew Cuomo, New York’s great attorney general, tells me that e-mail is the key to prosecuting just about everyone these days.”
Donald Trump’s Foundation Engaged in Self-Dealing, IRS Filing Shows
Foundation’s 2015 tax return reports payments to foundation insiders
President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation engaged in self-dealing in 2015 and prior years, the foundation said in an Internal Revenue Service filing.
.. Mr. Trump’s foundation has already admitted that it made an improper donation to a political group associated with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013, essentially making a payment that should have been from Mr. Trump’s pocket directly.
.. Mr. Trump’s companies donated to the foundation in 2015, giving more than $600,000 and breaking with his recent history of relying mostly on other people’s money for the foundation, the tax filing showed.
.. Recipients of the foundation’s money in 2015 included conservative groups such as the Media Research Center, the American Conservative Union Foundation and Project Veritas, the group founded by James O’Keefe that releases undercover videos. Other recipients included the Apollo Theater Foundation, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame.
Indians Rush Frantically to Launder Their ‘Black Money’
For decades, Indians have stuffed their mattresses with 500- and 1,000-rupee notes, the most widely circulated bills, worth the equivalent of a few dollars.
But Prime Minister Narendra Modi wanted to tax that money. His strategy was to force Indians to reveal what they had been hoarding. How? He banned the bills and told everyone that they had to exchange them for new ones.
.. Because more affluent Indians are allowed to exchange only 250,000 rupees, or about $3,700, without proof that they paid taxes, some are handing wads of cash to poor people, paying them a fee to hold the money in their accounts and return it later.
.. About a third of all business in India is carried out using black money. Whole industries, like real estate, trading, luxury retailing and wedding services, have been fueled by black money for decades.
.. In a country where government oversight is weak, it has been easy to transact business in cash and to avoid taxes
.. Cash had become so ingrained in the real estate industry that it was difficult to make a deal without paying some portion under the table. When Ramanan Laxminarayan, a Princeton University senior research scholar, tried to buy an apartment in the New Delhi area, he was told that he would have to provide 60 percent of the purchase price, about $420,000, in cash to close the deal.
.. India’s notoriously lavish weddings have taken a big hit. Families that had stashed large amounts of black money to spend in the coming wedding season
.. Several marriages planned for five-star hotels have been downscaled