Indeed, based on the mountain of court records churned out over the span of Mr. Trump’s career, it is hard to find a project he touched that did not produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies or outright fraud.
.. the small-time contractors who say Mr. Trump concocted complaints about their work to avoid paying them;.. What also emerges is a nearly reflexive habit of telling his target audience precisely what he thinks it wants to hear — such as promising Trump University students they will learn all his real estate secrets from his “handpicked” instructors. And finally, there is the pattern already deeply familiar to his political opponents — making spurious claims against adversaries under Mr. Trump’s oft-stated theory that the best defense is a scorched-earth offense... In interviews, lawyers who have tangled with Mr. Trump in court cases are sometimes reduced to sputtering, astonished rage, calling him “borderline pathological” and “the Michelangelo of deception” as they attempt to describe the ease with which Mr. Trump weaves his own versions of reality... Mr. Trump was particularly proud of a stratagem he employed in 1982, when he was trying to entice Holiday Inn to invest in a casino he was building in Atlantic City. The board of directors decided to visit Atlantic City, which worried Mr. Trump because he had precious little actual construction to show off. So Mr. Trump ordered his construction supervisor to cram every bulldozer and dump truck he could find into the nearly vacant construction site... A week later, when Mr. Trump escorted the Holiday Inn executives to the site, one board member wanted to know why a worker was filling a hole he had just dug. “This was difficult for me to answer, but fortunately, this board member was more curious than he was skeptical,” Mr. Trump wrote, boasting that weeks later Holiday Inn agreed to invest in his casino... In court cases against Mr. Trump — USA Today counted 3,500 lawsuits involving Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump estimates he has testified more than 100 times.. in the now-infamous Trump University litigation, Mr. Trump was asked in a deposition about a script that had been prepared for Trump University instructors. According to the script, the instructors were supposed to tell their students the following: “I remember one time Mr. Trump said to us over dinner, he said, ‘Real estate is the only market that, when there’s a sale going on, people run from the store.’ You don’t want to run from the store.”No such dinners ever took place, Mr. Trump acknowledged. In fact, Mr. Trump struggled to identify a single one of the instructors he claimed to have handpicked, even after he was shown their photographs... “There is something very belligerent about the way he presents facts, as if he thinks nobody will have the balls to stand up to him,” Mr. Seltzer said in an interview. (In dismissing Mr. Trump’s suit against Ms. Corcoran, the judge said the only damages he could identify were to Mr. Trump’s “bruised ego.”).. But in case after case, Mr. Trump has displayed a special talent for turning what should be cold hard facts into semantic mush. Perhaps the most famous example of this skill came when Mr. Trump was asked under oath a seemingly straightforward question: Had he ever lied about his net worth? Mr. Trump responded, “My net worth fluctuates and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.”.. And when he told Larry King he was paid more than $1 million for a speech, it was not his fault if viewers failed to realize he was including not just his $400,000 speaking fee but also the hundreds of thousands of dollars he assumed must have been spent promoting his appearance... Part of what makes Mr. Trump such an elusive target is that his paper trail is often minimal... Mr. Trump is also the beneficiary of miraculously well-timed memory lapses. In suit after suit, the man who claims to possess one of world’s best memories suddenly seems to have chronic memory loss when asked about critical facts or events... Mr. Trump asserted that “TrumpNation” cost him a “deal made in heaven” with a group of Italian investors, men he had met and who were on the brink of signing a business partnership that would have made him hundreds of millions of dollars. Their names? He could not recall. “TrumpNation” also cost him a hotel deal with Russian investors, he said. He could not remember their names, either. He was certain the book also ruined a deal with Turkish investors. Again, he could not recall any names. Polish investors also got cold feet after they read Mr. O’Brien’s book. Their names escaped him, too. The book also scared off investors from Ukraine. Alas, he could not think of their names either.
Trump, 800-Pound Media Gorilla, Pounds His Chest at Reporters
The event, carried live on the major cable networks, showed how Mr. Trump uses his media omnipresence to control his message. By railing at the questions, he was able to send a headline to voters, repeated on the chyrons — that the candidate raised money for vets — while mostly pushing past questions of when he did it and whether his earlier claims had been truthful at the time he made them.
.. He’s collected, by a New York Times estimate, $2 billion in free media. And he attacks, mocks and threatens news outlets when they aren’t “nice,” building bona fides with a voter base that has been encouraged for decades to see Big Media as the enemy.
.. He can glad-hand journalists, then turn peevish and furious. The whole impetus for the news conference, remember, was an event he held when he was angry at Fox News. Now he has nothing but nice things to say about Fox News, because he’s sewn up the nomination, and the network has become very, very nice to him.
.. “There were moments with the gorilla, the way he held that child, it was almost like a mother with a baby. It looked so beautiful and calm. And then there were moments when it looked pretty dangerous.”
Look Out for the Trump Pivot!
The “pivot” is a timely example. It refers to the expectation that at some point a leading presidential candidate will transform himself into a more suitable version of a likely nominee. He will “pivot” his attention away from his hard-core base of loyalists in favor of the broader general electorate. He will, in Trump’s case, scale back his hell-raiser, insult-monger bit and become more “presidential.” No doubt Trump’s pivot will be beautiful and be instantly recognized as one of the great pivots of all time.
.. But there is also something openly absurd about the concept of a Trump pivot. Certainly he is capable of changing his views — often and with breathtaking speed. But really, how do you pivot away from saying that Mexicans are rapists? (Will he negotiate “great deals” with more moderate Mexican rapists?) If your campaign is a cult of personality, how can you modulate that personality and still have the cult?
.. “Nothing makes Trump more acceptable today than yesterday or last week – or six months ago,” the Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote this month. “He is still a boastful, volatile, misogynistic, race-baiting, willfully and strategically ignorant, exploitative fear-monger who is guided by profit over principle, and whose hair-trigger temperament has the world on edge.”
.. But Trump follows no such rules, cardinal, unwritten or otherwise. That’s part of the perverse beauty of him. He can be breathtakingly forthcoming about the scam he is attempting to put over. “At the right time, I will be so presidential that you’ll call me and you’ll say, ‘Donald, you have to stop that, it’s too much,’” Trump told Sean Hannity last week. “I can be presidential,” he concluded.