Trump had brought it on himself. He had sued a reporter, accusing him of being reckless and dishonest in a book that raised questions about Trump’s net worth. The reporter’s attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition.
For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.
The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements — and with his company’s internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable — cornered, out-prepared and under oath.
Thirty times, they caught him.
.. Trump had misstated sales at his condo buildings. Inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs. Overstated the depth of his past debts and the number of his employees.
.. That deposition — 170 transcribed pages — offers extraordinary insights into Trump’s relationship with the truth. Trump’s falsehoods were unstrategic — needless, highly specific, easy to disprove. When caught, Trump sometimes blamed others for the error or explained that the untrue thing really was true, in his mind, because he saw the situation more positively than others did.
.. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has awarded him four Pinocchios — the maximum a statement can receive — 39 times since he announced his bid last summer. In many cases, his statements echo those in the 2007 deposition: They are specific, checkable — and wrong.
Trump said he opposed the Iraq War at the start. He didn’t. He said he’d never mocked a disabled New York Times reporter. He had. Trump also said the National Football League had sent him a letter, objecting to a presidential debate that was scheduled for the same time as a football game. It hadn’t.
.. Last week, Trump claimed that he had seen footage — taken at a top-secret location and released by the Iranian government — showing a plane unloading a large amount of cash to Iran from the U.S. government. He hadn’t. Trump later conceded he’d been mistaken — he’d seen TV news video that showed a plane during a prisoner release.
.. O’Brien cited people who questioned a claim at the bedrock of Trump’s identity — that his net worth was more than $5 billion. O’Brien said he had spoken to three people who estimated that the figure was between $150 million and $250 million.
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The depth of that financial hole made it seem even more impressive that Trump had climbed out again. But the figure was wrong. His actual debts had been much less.
“I pointed it out to the person who wrote the book,” Trump said, meaning McIver.
“Right after she wrote the book?”
“That’s correct,” Trump said.
Then the lawyer showed Trump another book he’d written with McIver, three years later.
“In fact, I was $9 billion in debt,” Trump read aloud. A similar error, repeated. It was McIver’s fault again.
“She probably forgot,” Trump said.
“And when you read it, you didn’t correct it?”
“I didn’t see it,” Trump said.
“You didn’t see it.”
“I read it very quickly,” Trump said about a book he was credited with writing.
.. Trump’s answer here was that the truth about his wealth was — in essence — up to him to decide.
“My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings,” Trump said. “But I try.”
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In a brief statement this week, Trump said he felt the lawsuit was a success, despite his loss.
“O’Brien knows nothing about me,” Trump said. “His book was a total failure and ultimately I had great success doing what I wanted to do — costing this third rate reporter a lot of legal fees.”
One is Clinton’s 2008 claim that she landed in Bosnia in 1996 “under sniper fire” and “ran with our heads down” from the plane. The Washington Post dismantled that claim; video shows that Clinton was greeted not by gunshots but by a crowd of dignitaries that included an 8-year-old Bosnian girl.
But it’s also true that as the plane prepared to descend, security officials gave a spine-chilling briefing of the risks of sniper fire, and Clinton wore body armor in case of shooting.
.. In March, Politico chronicled a week of Trump remarks and found on average one misstatement every five minutes. The Huffington Post once chronicled 71 inaccuracies in an hourlong town hall session — more than one a minute.
.. He denied telling The New York Times’s editorial board that he would impose a 45 percent tariff on China; The Times then released the audio of him saying just that.
.. Then there was Trump’s claim that he had seen thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey after 9/11. That was preposterous, but he then claimed that an article from the time backed him up (it didn’t), mocked the disabled reporter who wrote it, and denied he had done so.
.. Equally brazen were Trump’s claims about his fund-raiser for veterans in Iowa: He said on video that he had raised $6 million for them, then when the money didn’t show up he denied ever saying that. He claims to have been “among the earliest” to oppose the Iraq war, even though interviews from 2002 and 2003 show he then supported the war.
We can start with the idea that athletes should not be the only ones held to account (in the sense of liability) for doping. In practice, this means changing WADA’s system of strict liability for the athlete. To do so, we first need a stakeholder analysis to understand who the relevant stakeholders are for each team, athlete or sport. WADA could require teams or individual athletes and their entourages to submit something akin to a classic organisational chart, showing who reports to whom, who pays whom, and who makes decisions for whom.
The next step would be to assign liability to the appropriate stakeholder(s). Here, we think that the individuals identified through the stakeholder analysis as possessing the most power or control over the ‘organisation’ should be held personally liable for the doping of the athlete(s) under their control. In some cases, the organisations themselves will have corporate responsibility.