Trump’s ‘Legitimacy Complex’ At Risk Over NYT Reporting On Financial Losses | Deadline | MSNBC

Trump in
many ways built his career by suggesting
that the life story of his political
nemesis Barack Obama was a fraud it was
the birther stuff it was Trump
suggesting Obama had gotten affirmative
action to get into Harvard I mean there
is a parallel here to Trump’s life story
is now thanks to your colleagues great
reporting known to have been a fraud and
I think that this is one thing that you
hear from people talking about the Trump
campaign and what it will look like they
say a lot of stuff with Donald Trump is
baked in his view the way he speaks
about women this it’s not gonna change
voters they know who he is and they
accept who his supporters accept it they
like what he’s done in the economy and
and they they’ll overlook it but stories
like this that delve deep into his
background mean that you know you think
you know who Donald Trump is and it
turns out that you don’t exactly know
who Donald Trump is that it’s different
and the question is will this actually
change that baked-in stuff so they say
maybe I don’t know who this is
in terms of not paying taxes for a out
of those ten years I don’t know I mean
I’ve heard in the past when we heard he
didn’t pay taxes there was supported his
said it makes him look smart that he got
to beat the system
another another version of this though
as a candidate is now he is the system
he is the establishment so that’s
another problem for him running as the
establishment candidate not the guy who
rails against the establishment that he
was able to beat as a
a businessman but we’ll see how it
affects how it affects voters views of
him of who they think they know and
interesting last one here I mean Donald
Trump’s force we can always tell when
he’s been caught doing something and
even he knows this true he’s pushed back
to your colleagues reporting wasn’t that
it was inaccurate it was I’m so smart
I’m so smart I wrote these off so you’re
right the story goes on

Donald Trump’s Phony America

There are several kinds of success stories. We emphasize the ones starring brilliant inventors and earnest toilers. We celebrate sweat and stamina. We downplay the schemers, the short cuts and the subterfuge. But for every ambitious person who has the goods and is prepared to pay his or her dues, there’s another who doesn’t and is content to play the con. In the Trump era and the Trump orbit, these ambassadors of a darker side of the American dream have come to the fore.

.. What a con Holmes played with Theranos. For those unfamiliar with the tale, which the journalist John Carreyrou told brilliantly in “Bad Blood,” she dropped out of Stanford at 19 to pursue her Silicon Valley dream, intent on becoming a billionaire and on claiming the same perch in our culture and popular imagination that Steve Jobs did. She modeled her work habits and management style after his. She dressed as he did, in black turtlenecks. She honed a phony voice, deeper than her real one.

She spoke, with immaculate assurance, of a day when it might be on everyone’s bathroom counter: a time saver, a money saver and quite possibly a lifesaver. She sent early, imperfect versions of it to Walgreens pharmacies, which used it and thus doled out erroneous diagnoses to patients. She blocked peer reviews of it and buried evidence of its failures.

This went on not for months but for years, as Holmes attracted more than $900 million of investment money and lured a breathtakingly distinguished board of directors including two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger; a former secretary of defense, William Perry; and a future secretary of defense, James Mattis. What they had before them wasn’t proof or even the sturdy promise of revolutionary technology. It was a self-appointed wunderkind who struck a persuasive pose and talked an amazing game.

She was eventually found out, and faces criminal charges that could put her in prison. But there’s no guarantee of that. Meantime she lives in luxury. God bless America.

Theranos was perhaps an outlier in the scope of its deceptions, but not in the deceptions themselves. In an article titled “The Ugly Unethical Underside of Silicon Valley” in Fortune magazine in December 2016, Erin Griffith tallied a list of aborted ventures with more shimmer and swagger than substance, asserting: “As the list of start-up scandals grows, it’s time to ask whether entrepreneurs are taking ‘fake it till you make it’ too far.”