If Donald Trump starts a “Patriot Party”, then how would its platform and policies be different from those of the Republican Party?
So let’s think about this seriously for a minute.
What could Trump get out of a new party?
Trump loves attention, chaos and suckers giving him money he doesn’t have to return or do anything for.
If he forms a party, a lot of his current followers will at minimum pay a lot of attention to him and show up at his rallies to get their infusion of emotional gratification by being with people who hate the same things and people that they hate. All the news networks will continue to report about him. Fox News, OANN and Breitbart won’t take the spotlight off of him. He’ll get the attention he needs like normal people need oxygen and water.
If he forms a party, he’ll take perhaps 10–15% of the electorate with him. His final job approval rating was 29%, but a lot of those people are tribal Republicans who loved Trump, not random people off the street. 10–15%, however, is enough to screw up political calculus in enormous numbers of states, which is of course sufficient to get lots of news and analyst attention (like this question and these answers, but writ large and glowing). Massive disruptions in electoral balance are chaos. He’ll have Republican families split down the middle and feuding. He’ll have Republicans fighting Republicans, with some joining him and some attacking him. He’ll revel in it. All that chaos, all his doing.
If he forms a party, he’ll be able to continue to spread his messages of chaos, disunity, hatred and white grievance. He’ll say that the Republican deep state kept him from meeting the needs of his flock, and while he’ll be pretty generic, the most extreme elements of the right such as the Proud Boys and the militias will think he’s talking directly to them. They’ll be even more emboldened, and buy into the notion that he’s their leader. There will be more right-wing extremism and insurrectionist acts inflamed by his rhetoric. More chaos.
And he’ll create a secular prosperity gospel movement, with him as the megachurch owner. He’ll invoke god, but it will mostly be the god of bling, the literal golden calf. He’ll undoubtedly continue to have all the evangelical leaders show up along with the pillow guy at his events and in his media drops, to give the illusion that he cares about Christians. And he’ll have all of those people send him money. He’ll get churches donating to him. He’ll get white Christian business owners donating to him. He’ll get a bunch of lottery-ticket scratching poor white people sending him their money. And he won’t have to give them a thing in return except feeding the howling void of biased ignorance inside them with things that make them feel good about themselves by pointing at all of the people they hate and supporting their loathing of them.
It will be a reality-tv political party, World Wrestling Entertainment-quality mental pablum, with all the histrionics and flamboyance, but none of the athletics. A lot of Americans will latch onto that and suck mightily at the teat of bile and disinformation. The Republicans have spent over 60 years creating and feeding those ignorant wedges, and Trump exploited them to take their party away from them in 2015. Now that he’s free of the inconvenience of actually having to do the job of President — however fitfully, poorly and incompetently — he’s free to exploit those wedges for the remainder of his life.
And he’ll have lots of help. Trump has no problem attracting venal, amoral people, leeches in human form, to his efforts. They arrogantly think that they’ll be able to get in, make their millions off the drippings from the table, and escape with their mostly non-existent souls and reputations intact.
As I said, arrogant, but not wrong in many cases about making millions. There are innumerable people who will line up to carve off as much of the proceedings of the long con into their coffers as possible. There’s been a steady conveyor line of them coming and going over the past 6 years, in and out of the Trump camp, in and out of Trump’s favor. Many of them will end up bankrupt because they’ll foolishly think that they can make deals and contracts with Trump and have them honored, greed blinding them to Trump’s entire history. He’ll con them too.
So how will this be different than the Republican Party?
Well, the RNC completely caved to Trump. Prior to the primaries last summer, they voted to be Trump’s lapdogs and support whatever he wanted, while continuing to block anything from the Democratic Party because partisan nonsense.
WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration, as well as those espoused by the Democratic National Committee today; therefore, be it
RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda;
RESOVLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;
The Republican Party Platform, 2020 – Ballotpedia
Yeah, covfefe-level typo and all. Truly an inspiring document, laying out their positive vision for America. (Sarcasm mode off). It’s remarkable how sycophantic it is, which is probably why the RNC no longer allows people to see it on their site, and people like me have to cite it from Ballotpedia and other independent sources now.
So what are their options?
The first choice is to out-Trump Trump.
That would be to have Tom Cotton or Matt Gaetz or Tucker Carlson be the new Donald Trump, attacking him, attempting to be even more Trump-like than Trump. More brazen, more ignorant, more crude, more jingoistic, more nationalistic, more fact-free, more hating. That’s an entirely possible and probable path for the GOP. They aren’t winning Red states with reasonable and thoughtful policies, after all.
The second choice is to pivot to being a 21st Century center-right party.
The GOP has an amazing history, which they started unravelling in 1956 with In God We Trust. They were the party that freed the slaves, voted 76% to give women the vote, supported a strong Fourth Estate, were strongly for separation of church and state, were good fiscal managers of government, started the EPA, fought polio to the ground and established the national parks.
They could return to their roots, but in a 21st Century context. They could rebuild themselves as a credible alternative to the Democratic Party. They could accept climate change and offer center-right policies that were seriously thought through and communicated. They could reject the anti-vaxxers, leaving them to Trump. They could maintain an ecumenical council to gain the thoughts of religious groups, but stop pandering 24/7 to evangelicals. They could reject educational policies which intentionally made things horrible for the bottom 40% of the socioeconomic classes. They could embrace universal health care, something every western democracy has successfully done, something which has better outcomes at much lower costs. They could embrace police reform and demilitarization, but with differentiation.
They could embrace the better angels of their nature, returning to Lincoln for inspiration and guidance. They could look to the Angela Merkels of the world, right-wing leaders who are fully present in this century, not pining for a mythically glorious 1950s. They could reject the identity politics of being the party of white, Christian male grievance and embrace the vast diversity of America.
If they did that, they could carve off some of the Democratic Party’s more conservative members such as Klobuchar, Manchin and Edwards. They could make inroads into the cities. They could turn some purple states Red again, reversing the tide of history that’s seen them losing ground for decades.
The clearest sign that they would actually do this is if they vote to both impeach Trump in the Senate, and further invoke the option of disqualifying him for ever running for office again. This wouldn’t prevent Trump from pretending he was running, but it would divorce him utterly from the Republicans and limit the damage he could do politically to them in the future. I’m sure that at least three Republicans are advocating for this path out of the hundreds in Washington. It should be hundreds of the hundreds.
I think the Republicans becoming a 21st Century center right party is as likely as Trump fading quietly and humbly into the background, but they could do it.
Their last choice is to re-embrace Trump.
Instead of leaving him to kill their party, they reach out and negotiate to keep him in the fold. They promise him riches and adulation. They surround him with their organization and they stick their probing noses even further up the deep, deep divide between his buttocks.
This is basically the first choice, but with Trump as the even more Trumpy leader, leaving Gaetz, Cotton and Carlson frustrated from coupus interruptus. And then the spectacle continues, with even more craven and abject sycophancy from Republican leaders.
They preserve their electoral chances. All they give up is everything.
And Mitt Romney, while he talks a good game, would undoubtedly stay in the party, continue to be a gadfly with no power or influence and continue to get elected in Utah. A few more Republican congress members and Senators would elect to not run again over the next six years, and be replaced by even more craven Trump acolytes.
The only good choice for the Republicans is option 2. But the history of the past 70 years tells us that when presented with choices, they’ve inevitably taken the worst one for the long-term, but the one that gives them another shot for the next election cycle.
It’s been seven decades of craven weakness and unwise choices, not moral strength and foresight. There’s no reason to believe that they will change now.
Trump’s economic record is one big con
President Trump came into office promising some fabulous yet unspecified health-care plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. No plan existed; every plan Republicans came up with managed to reduce the number of insured. Trump promised never to cut entitlements; his fiscal 2020 budget proposal would have done just that.
Trump said he’d bring back manufacturing. In fact, it slowed and now has slumped. (“Manufacturing has slowed amid global uncertainty,” NPR reported earlier this month. “That’s one of the reasons the Federal Reserve gave for cutting interest rates this week.”)
Trump said he’d
- get tough on drug companies. He hasn’t. He said his
- tax cut would be aimed at the middle class,
- deliver $4,000 a year to the average American family and
- permanently boost business investment, pushing growth above 3 percent. Nope, nope and nope.
‘Times’ Journalists Puncture Myth Of Trump As Self-Made Billionaire
Investigative reporters Susanne Craig and David Barstow say the president received today’s equivalent of $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, through what appears to be tax fraud.
CRAIG: That started in 1949. And it was one of the projects that had got – that Fred Trump had received government funding to build. It was a complex called Beach Haven. And what Fred Trump did – it was quite ingenious – is he bought the land underneath Beach Haven, the complex that he would go on to build, and he placed the land in a trust for the benefit of his five children. And then he started paying them rent. He makes them his landlord. And every year, they’d continue to get payments. So instead of paying some…
GROSS: Wait. Wait. Could we just stop a second?
CRAIG: Yep.
GROSS: I don’t really understand how 3-year-old Donald Trump can be his father’s landlord. Can you explain that?
CRAIG: Sure. It was his land to do what he wanted with. And he put it in a trust, in this instance, when they were very young for their benefit and began paying them rent. It’s completely legal. But that’s sort of one of the ways in which he early on – you know, he’s in – this point, it’s in the 1940s. His children are young. And he’s looking for ways, you would imagine at this point, to begin to take care of his children as they get older so that they – you know, when they grow up, they’ve got money. And it is a way to transfer what is – now he’s becoming a very richer man – is one way to begin to transfer wealth to them. This is the first one. It happened in 1949.
GROSS: So what are some of the ways that by the time Donald Trump was a teenager, he was already wealthy? What are some of the other ways his father gave him money?
BARSTOW: He began doing a number of things. So he started buying or building apartment complexes in Brooklyn and Queens and then gradually transferring ownership of those apartment complexes to his children. So, for example, Donald, when he was 17 years old, became co-owner with his family members of a 52-unit apartment building in Brooklyn that his father had acquired for them. And so they would – over time, Fred Trump assembled roughly eight apartment complexes – over a thousand units in all – that he transferred through a variety of mechanisms to his children. So those thousand units start churning out profits that flowed effortlessly into the pockets of his children.
We actually documented in our reporting 295 different revenue streams that Fred Trump ultimately created for Donald Trump over a 50-year period. I mean, Fred Trump was so ingenious at finding different ways of putting money into Donald Trump’s pockets. So he didn’t just put him on his payroll as a salary employee. He also paid him separately to be a consultant to him. He paid him separately to be a property manager for him. He paid him separately to be a purchasing agent for him. On and on it would go.
CRAIG: He was getting laundry revenue at one point from Fred Trump.
BARSTOW: Yes. And…
CRAIG: …From the buildings.
BARSTOW: You know, some of these revenue streams were relatively modest. Some of them were kind of one-hit wonders. But when you added it all up, it was this incredible stream of money that made Donald Trump – he was a millionaire, actually, by the time he was 8 or 9 years old. Before he ever entered and set foot into Manhattan, where he would make his name, Fred Trump had already transferred to him over $9 million in wealth.
GROSS: So you say by the time he was 29, in 1975, Donald Trump had collected nearly 9 million – the equivalent of $9 million in today’s dollars from his father. When he was 30, in 1976, the myth of Donald Trump really starts to expand. There’s a 1976 article in your newspaper, The New York Times, and you describe it as one of the first major Donald Trump profiles and a cornerstone of decades of mythmaking about his wealth. What did the article say? What were the main points of this 1976 article about Donald Trump?
BARSTOW: It was really one of the first big, big profiles that ran of Donald Trump. And Donald Trump did something in this particular profile that he would actually repeat and use to great effect in subsequent profiles, which was he took The New York Times reporter on a tour of what he called his jobs, his empire. And he starts driving around New York pointing out this building and that building and talking about how wonderful they were doing.
And effectively, what he was doing was he was appropriating his father’s empire as if it were his own empire. So these buildings that he’s pointing out as his jobs and part of his empire, they were, in fact, completely owned by his father. He had no ownership stake in any of those buildings. And so what he did, especially when it was critical to kind of the early mythmaking of Donald Trump, was he simply asserted that his father’s empire was his empire.
And those claims, unfortunately, largely went unchallenged for many, many years by the reporters who were kind of swept up in the glamor of this young, swaggering, handsome guy who was so full of confidence and so full of big plans for the city of New York. And so that story was the thing that, I think, helped give birth to the myth of Donald Trump, self-made billionaire.
CRAIG: One of the things that’s really remarkable about that story when you read it is, you know, he goes through job after job and says that things that are his father’s are his own. And he tells the reporter that he’s worth in excess of $200 million. And everything he pointed to in this story that would go to his net worth at that time was his father’s. He had a tax return a few years later where we see he declared – I think he made $25,000 a couple years later.
BARSTOW: That year, actually – that exact – that year…
CRAIG: It was actually that year.
BARSTOW: …1976.
CRAIG: Yeah.
BARSTOW: And yet, he was sitting there saying that he was worth $200 million. And that was a claim that he would – part of the claim that would put him on the very first list of wealthiest Americans published by Forbes magazine in 19 – I want to say – ’81, ’82 – ’81, somewhere in there.
CRAIG: And it was a spectacular con.
GROSS: And I guess Donald Trump got used to people taking him at his word, even when his word wasn’t true.
.. GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you’re just joining us, my guests are New York Times reporters Susanne Craig and David Barstow, two of the three writers who reported just a couple of weeks ago on how Donald Trump engaged in suspect tax schemes as he reaped riches from his father. And it deconstructs the whole Donald Trump myth about how he’s a self-made millionaire or billionaire. And it shows, like, how much money Fred Trump, Donald’s father, funneled to him and his other siblings and how they came up with schemes to avoid paying taxes, making Donald Trump a very, very wealthy man by the time he was a teenager.
OK. So in addition to some of the tax schemes we talked about, Fred Trump made a lot of loans to Donald Trump. Donald Trump has always said that he got a million-dollar loan from his father and helped parlay that into his own empire. So how much money would you estimate Fred Trump gave Donald Trump in loans?
BARSTOW: We were able to document in real dollars $60 million in loans, not one million. In today’s dollars, it equates to $140 million in loans, which is on top of the $413 million in direct wealth that we saw transferred to Donald. What we also saw – I think what is important also is that, in many cases, these were loans that were never repaid. You know, he would take out – we were looking at one particular year, and it was like every month. He’s going back to Dad, and he’s borrowing another couple hundred thousand bucks and then another 500,000 bucks and then a million dollars. It was just, like, a monthly run to Fred Trump to get more money.
And we saw especially that the flow of loans increased as Donald Trump took on big, new projects, or they increased when he was suddenly in trouble, he had run into another financial ditch. So it was a really steady stream that went well beyond, you know, the notion of a guy in his early 20s getting a million dollars from Dad and then being off to the races. These were loans that actually extended well into his 40s and 50s.
GROSS: So how did Donald Trump use the money that was loaned from his father?
CRAIG: Yeah. He used the money for many of his ventures. He had Trump Tower. Money that he got from Fred Trump was used to support that. It was used to support his ventures in Atlantic City and elsewhere. Many of them went under. I mean, especially, you look at Donald Trump’s history in Atlantic City, he’s got several bankruptcies. At one point, he was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. And this is a time he not only owed the banks hundreds of millions of dollars, he was in debt to his father and was going to his father at these very crucial times for more support.
GROSS: So he gets a lot of money from his father, tries to build his own empire and ends up in debt in a lot of instances, instead of making a fortune from his own investments.
BARSTOW: You also see that when he fell – you know, when he would fall down, the safety net was there. The Fred Trump safety net was there to catch him.
CRAIG: There was one just almost unbelievable moment in the story, and you see it in 1990. And this is a time in, you know, the back end of 1990. And Donald Trump is in incredible financial distress. A number of his companies are either in trouble or facing bankruptcy. And Fred Trump had been there for him at every turn, according to the documents. We can see he’s assisting him with money in one case. Donald Trump’s casinos, they’re facing a debt payment. And Fred Trump has a lawyer go into the casino and buy casino chips and walk out without placing a bet. It was simply a way to give Donald Trump money. And this period…
GROSS: And this was, like, $3 1/2 million worth of chips. Right?
CRAIG: It was $3 1/2 millon worth of casino chips. And at this period, his father is there for him at every turn in every document that we can see. And Donald Trump, at this period, has a lawyer – one of his lawyers – draft a codicil to his father’s will, essentially a new will. And this codicil to the will is taken to Fred Trump’s house in December 1990. And Fred Trump immediately sees this codicil as an attempt by Donald to take control of his empire and to potentially put it at risk.
And Fred Trump immediately says no. He freaks out. And he makes a call to his daughter, who is a federal judge and a lawyer. And a new codicil, within months, is drafted that removes Donald as the sole executor of Fred Trump’s will and puts Donald and Robert Trump and Maryanne Trump in charge of his affairs. And then ultimately, a new will is drafted.
But you see, in the depth of Donald Trump’s financial life, after all his father has done for him, that he makes this move that’s an incredibly dramatic move. And it’s scarring to the family, what he did.
GROSS: So what you’re saying, I think, is that at the end of Fred Trump’s life – or toward the end of Fred Trump’s life, Donald Trump tried to take advantage of him for Donald Trump’s own good, to help Donald Trump bail himself out. And Fred Trump, Donald’s father, became suspicious of the son that he had helped with so much money over so many years.
BARSTOW: What we know for sure is that Fred Trump perceived this as an attempt by his son to gain complete control over his estate and, potentially, to use the empire that Fred Trump had doggedly and patiently built over many decades – to use that empire, potentially, as collateral to help bail Donald Trump out of his own financial difficulties.
GROSS: My guests are New York Times reporters David Barstow and Susanne Craig. After a break, we’ll talk about another scheme used to transfer wealth from Fred Trump’s real estate empire to his children. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ERNESTO CERVINI’S “WOEBEGONE”)
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. Let’s get back to my interview with New York Times reporters Susanne Craig and David Barstow who, along with Russ Buettner, spent a year and a half investigating how Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, used various tax schemes to transfer about 413 million in today’s dollars from Fred’s real estate empire to Donald. The reporters say one of the family’s tax schemes involve fraud. This story offers a completely different narrative than the one Donald Trump has always presented of himself as a self-made billionaire.
.. And they had regular family meetings after Fred Trump died. They would hand out checks. You know, Fred Trump’s buildings were very profitable. And they would meet every few months to get an update on the status of the empire and to get a check. And then in 2003, at one of these meetings, Donald Trump announced that it was time to sell and quickly assembled a private sale to a developer in New York for almost all of it. And it was sold – you know, give or take a few buildings – in one sale for just under $800 million.
GROSS: So the buildings that were sold, were those buildings that Fred Trump had still owned at the time of his death? Or did it also include all the buildings that had been transferred from Fred Trump to the children?
CRAIG: They included both the buildings that had been transferred and the ones that he owned. It was pretty much his whole empire. And it sold – you know, the buildings that sold in 2004 were to a New York developer named Ruby Schron, and the price tag was just over $700 million. And what’s interesting about that is we learned through the documents that we went through that that sale price was roughly just under $200 million than what the banks would value it at, you know, in the months after the sale. So it’s incredible to see that that empire was sold for much less than they could’ve got for it very quietly and for much less.
GROSS: So it wasn’t, like, the deal of the century that Donald Trump made?
CRAIG: It definitely wasn’t.
.. GROSS: Susanne, I’m going to ask you to choose either “The Art Of The Deal,” “The Art Of The Comeback” or “The Apprentice” and tell us what was actually going on in Donald Trump’s financial life when these books or the show based on all his fabulous accomplishments and deals went public.
CRAIG: I’m thinking which one to choose.
GROSS: OK.
(LAUGHTER)
CRAIG: What are you thinking, David?
BARSTOW: “Art Of The Comeback.”
CRAIG: (Laughter) Go for it.
BARSTOW: Oh. Well, so he publishes “The Art Of The Comeback” in 1997. And it’s this story of his sort of, you know, pulling himself up out of the muck of his casino collapse and, through his grit and determination and wily negotiating skills, getting himself back on his feet. Well, within – a few weeks of the publication of this book so happens to coincide with the time when he actually took possession of one-quarter of his father’s real estate empire through one of these very elaborate tax schemes that we describe in the story. So at this moment when he’s boasting about, you know, his derring-do of getting himself off the mat, it actually coincides perfectly with the moment when he’s just taken possession of 25 percent of this enormous real estate empire. And somehow, someway, not a word of that made its way into the book “The Art Of The Comeback.”
CRAIG: I’m also thinking of, immediately, “The Apprentice” and the opening scene of “The Apprentice” and the song – money, money, money, money – that happened in 2004 right as the sale had gone through, the hundreds of millions of dollars that they had gotten from Fred Trump. And yet when you watch that opening scene, it’s all Donald Trump – Donald Trump’s plane is there, the gold tower in Midtown Manhattan – when, in fact, it was all the opening scene that Fred Trump built and paid for.
.. GROSS: I’m wondering how you feel knowing that you have just totally punctured the myth of how Donald Trump made his money and what he did with his money and his great negotiating, deal-making abilities. And so many people still believe the myth, and Donald Trump is still putting forward the myth.
CRAIG: It’s interesting. When I think about that, I think you have to sort of – I go back to that idea – you know, the lie repeated over and over and passed down into history becomes fact. And I think that we’ve reset that. I think it’s going to take time for this to move into the bloodstream of America. But I think that we’ve taken, I think, a good first stop in resetting exactly the origins of Donald Trump’s wealth. But I do think it’s going to take time, and I think there’s some people who are always going to believe what they want to believe.
But I think the the power of the story is, you know, I think, how careful we were and how documented it was and the Times’ decision to put so many of those documents up. I think it’s really hard to refute the story. It’s hard to refute because it’s absolutely true, and the documents are there. And a lot of them are the source documents of the Trump family themselves. But I think it will take time for this to sort of – you know, for people to digest it. And – but I think it’s going to happen.