Three decades ago, Donald J. Trump waged a public battle with the talk show host Merv Griffin to take control of what would become Mr. Trump’s third Atlantic City casino. Executives at Mr. Trump’s company warned that the casino would siphon revenue from the others. Analysts predicted the associated debt would crush him.
The naysayers would be proved right, but throughout the turmoil Mr. Trump fixated on just one outcome: declaring himself a winner and Mr. Griffin a loser.
As president, Mr. Trump has displayed a similar fixation in his standoff with Congress over leveraging a government shutdown to gain funding for a wall on the Mexican border. As he did during decades in business, Mr. Trump has
- insulted adversaries,
- undermined his aides,
- repeatedly changed course,
- extolled his primacy as a negotiator and
- induced chaos.
“He hasn’t changed at all,” said Jack O’Donnell, who ran a casino for Mr. Trump in the 1980s and wrote a book about it. “And it’s only people who have been around him through the years who realize that.”
..Mr. Trump was expected to sign off on the deal, but then came the suggestion from conservative critics that he had caved in to Democrats — that he was a loser. It was a perception Mr. Trump could not bear, and he quickly reversed course.
He also reverted to lifelong patterns in business. People who worked with him during those years say they see multiple parallels between Mr. Trump the businessman and Mr. Trump the steward of the country’s longest government shutdown.
His lack of public empathy for unpaid federal workers echoes his treatment of some construction workers, contractors and lawyers whom he refused to pay for their work on his real estate projects. The plight of the farmers and small-business owners wilting without the financial support pledged by his administration harks back to the multiple lenders and investors who financed Mr. Trump’s business ventures only to come up shortchanged.
And his ever-changing positions (I’ll own the shutdown; you own the shutdown; the wall could be steel; it must be concrete; then again, it could be steel) have left heads in both parties spinning. Even after his televised proposal on Saturday to break the deadlock, Mr. Trump has no progress to show.
That book, published in 1987, was intended to be an autobiography of Mr. Trump, who was 41 at the time. Mr. Schwartz said that he created the idea of Mr. Trump as a great deal maker as a literary device to give the book a unifying theme. He said he came to regret the contribution as he watched Mr. Trump seize on the label to sell himself as something he was not — a solver of complicated problems.
Rather, Mr. Schwartz said, Mr. Trump’s “virtue” in negotiating was his relentlessness and lack of concern for anything but claiming victory.
“If you don’t care what the collateral damage you create is, then you have a potential advantage,” he said. “He used
- a hammer,
- deceit,
- relentlessness and
- an absence of conscience
as a formula for getting what he wanted.”
In a brief telephone interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump was not specific in defending his tactics, but he described himself as successful in his chosen fields of real estate, entertainment and finally politics. “I ran for office once and I won,” Mr. Trump said.
The president’s supporters say he gets an unfair rap as a poor negotiator, saying that his style and unusual approach — and unwillingness to accept defeat even in the worst situations — have often had positive results. And in a Washington that doesn’t like outsiders, he has clearly forced his adversaries out of their comfort zones.
“President Trump’s success in business has translated into success as president,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said. “He’s
- ignited a booming economy with
- rising wages and
- historically low unemployment,
- negotiated better trade deals,
- persuaded our allies to contribute their fair share to NATO, and
- secured the release of American hostages around the world.”
.. The bank eventually settled with Mr. Trump, saving him from having to pay the $40 million. Mr. Trump expressed his gratitude to the lawyer who fought on his behalf by not fully paying his bill. “He left me with some costs,” said the lawyer, Steven Schlesinger.
From the time he built his first Manhattan apartment building, Mr. Trump left a string of unpaid tabs for the people who worked for him.
The undocumented Polish workers who did the demolition work for that first building, Trump Tower, eventually won a $1.375 million settlement. Since then, scores of lawyers, contractors, engineers and waiters have sued Mr. Trump for unpaid bills or pay. Typically, he responds by asserting that their work did not meet his standard.
That might sound familiar to furloughed federal workers. Mr. Trump recently retweeted an article, attributed to an anonymous senior official in his administration, arguing that 80 percent of federal workers do “nothing of external value” and that “furloughed employees should find other work, never return and not be paid.”
Mr. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that “maybe most” federal workers going without pay are “the biggest fan” of his use of the shutdown to fund a border wall. In ordering thousands back to work without pay, he has put the pain for the shutdown on them.
Mr. Trump has also embraced his business practice of giving the most latitude and trust to family members, no matter their prior experience.
He put his first wife, Ivana, a model, in charge of an Atlantic City casino and the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. He put his younger brother, Robert, who had some background in corporate finance, in senior positions at the casinos. Not long after three of his children graduated from college, he vested authority in them over golf courses, hotels and licensing deals.
.. In the White House, Mr. Trump has increasingly leaned on his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for guidance on dealing with Congress amid the current stalemate. Mr. Kushner, who like Mr. Trump is the son of a wealthy real estate developer, has not always impressed old hands on Capitol Hill.
.. With Democrats now in charge of the House of Representatives, Mr. Trump also has a new set of adversaries, and other old habits from his years in business have re-emerged.
Through his Twitter feed, he has verbally pummeled Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, and tried to drive a wedge between Mr. Schumer and his fellow Democrat, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
.. Barbara Res, who said she enjoyed much about working for Mr. Trump as a construction executive in the 1980s and 1990s, sees in Ms. Pelosi a new challenge to Mr. Trump’s lifelong tactics. One blind spot she observed was that Mr. Trump “believes he’s better than anyone who ever lived” and saw even the most capable of women as easy to run over.
“But there was never a woman with power that he ran up against, until Pelosi,” she said. “And he doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s totally in a corner.”
In the interview, Mr. Trump described Ms. Res, Mr. O’Donnell and Mr. Schwartz as disgruntled workers whom he had shunted aside, who had experience with him for relatively brief periods and who were simply using his name for attention.
During his years in business, Mr. Trump rarely displayed an interest in details or expert opinions that might have informed whether his plans would actually work. That pattern has also emerged in the shutdown dispute.
Thirty years ago, his claimed defeat of Mr. Griffin turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory.
Within months of completing construction on his third casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, he could not pay interest to the bondholders who had financed the project. Having overpaid and overleveraged himself on other deals, banks forced him to turnover or sell almost everything.
His wealthy father helped bail him out. But Mr. Trump blamed everyone else. He fired nearly all his top executives and stopped paying contractors who had built the casino.
In describing the border wall, Mr. Trump has expressed unending confidence in its efficacy. Others, including Representative Will Hurd, a Republican whose Texas district includes part of the border with Mexico, have described it as a tall speed bump, nearly useless without technology to spot illegal crossings immediately and dispatch border agents to quickly respond.
Mr. O’Donnell, the casino manager, said long-term consequences never concerned Mr. Trump. He was always willing to pay too much in order to get a deal signed so he could declare victory, he said.
“He just wants to get the deal,” Mr. O’Donnell said.
New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss slammed for questioning whether sexual assault should disqualify Kavanaugh from Supreme Court
In an appearance on MSNBC, Weiss argued that the fundamental “ethical question” at issue is whether someone should be disqualified from sitting on the court because of a crime they committed as a teenager.
Weiss added that Ford’s allegations, which Kavanaugh has “unequivocally” denied, don’t fit a pattern — as many other instances of men who commit sexual misconduct do — and that the accusations can’t be proved.
“Brett Kavanaugh has a reputation as being a prince of a man, frankly, other than this,” she said. “Now, I believe her. I believe what she’s saying. I’m just saying, in the end of the day, it is one word against another.”
.. MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle pushed back, arguing that the standards should be higher for someone nominated for a lifetime position on the highest court in the country.“We’re not talking about should he be disqualified to be a dogcatcher,” Ruhle said. “We’re talking about to be a Supreme Court justice.”
.. Weiss then seemed to back away from her assertion, but lamented that Kavanaugh’s “worst instance” was being “paraded” in public.
.. Mark Joseph Stern, a lawyer and writer for Slate, called Weiss’ question a “useless and irrelevant red herring” and argued that the question is not whether an adult should be held accountable for something they did as a teenager, but whether Kavanaugh lied about the allegations. If Weiss’ intuition is correct and Ford is telling the truth about the incident, then Kavanaugh has wrongly undermined a victim, he said.
.. “It is perfectly consistent to believe that nobody’s life should be ruined for committing a crime at age 17 — and that any adult who lies about that crime should not be elevated to the Supreme Court,”he wrote.
Rick Gates Delivers a Public Lesson on Money Laundering and Political Corruption
.. his time on the witness stand provided an invaluable public lesson in how tax evasion, money laundering, and political corruption work.
.. The ability of rich people such as Manafort and his oligarchic clients to shuffle money across borders, beyond the purview of tax collectors and law-enforcement authorities, is a huge and intractable problem. In many places, these practices are
- denuding tax bases,
- corrupting a large class of professional enablers, and
- undermining public confidence in the political and financial systems.
.. roughly $7.6 trillion, or eight per cent of the world’s financial wealth, was held in offshore tax havens. In some countries, the proportion is much higher; in the case of Russia, it is more than half.
.. . In the United States, he has estimated, the annual tax loss is about thirty-five billion dollars.
.. It is only when there is a prominent court case or a leak—such as the 2016 Panama Papers, which exposed the dealings of the law firm Mossack Fonseca—that a light is shined on this system’s hidden mechanics. What Gates provided this week was a firsthand account of how the illicit game is played.
.. Manafort’s consulting firm was paid by Ukrainian businessmen close to Viktor Yanukovych, who was elected President in 2010. Many of these figures already had bank accounts in Cyprus
.. Gates described how he and Manafort used a Cypriot law firm to establish bank accounts in the name of shell companies that they controlled but weren’t publicly associated with.
“Did these companies sell a product?” Andres asked Gates.
“No,” he replied.
“Did they have any employees?” Andres asked.
“No,” Gates repeated. “The purpose of the companies was to accept payments and to make payments.”
.. The Cypriot law firm Chrysostomides “handled everything,” Gates said, including listing the names of locals, rather than the two Americans, as the directors of the shell firms into which the fees from Ukraine flowed.
.. he arranged to have money wired from the Cypriot accounts to vendors in the United States from whom Manafort had bought expensive clothes
.. problems arose, Gates said. So, again using the Cypriot law firm, he and Manafort transferred some money to bank accounts in the Grenadines, a chain of small islands in the Lesser Antilles. But, when the banks in the Grenadines were asked to transfer money to companies in the United States, they demanded invoices for the payments—something that the Cypriot banks hadn’t bothered with. At Manafort’s direction, Gates said, he created “modified invoices” and gave them to the banks.
.. “About 50% of the wealth held in tax havens belongs to households with more than $50m in net wealth,” Zucman, of Berkeley, noted in an article last year. “These ultra-rich represent about 0.01% of the population of advanced economies.”These were the type of people whom Manafort was working for in Ukraine, and it’s pretty clear from the life style he adopted that he wanted to join their ranks... he allegedly resorted to bank fraud rather than modify his spending patterns.Gates described how, in 2015, together with Manafort’s accountants, he helped put together bogus financial documents that Manafort then used to obtain bank loans... toward the end of Andres’s questioning of Gates, the prosecutor showed the witness an e-mail that Manafort wrote to Gates in November, 2016, shortly after Trump was elected. By that stage, Gates was working for Trump’s Presidential transition team. “We need to discuss Steve Calk for Sec of the Army,” Manafort’s e-mail said. “I hear the list is being considered this weekend.”
.. When he joined the Trump campaign, he’d long been known as the ultimate swamp creature. Thanks to Mueller and Gates, we now know more about how that swamp operates.
‘Facts develop’: The Trump team’s new ‘alternative facts’-esque ways to explain its falsehoods
As president, Donald Trump has uttered more than 4,000 falsehoods or misleading statements. And the spokespeople and advisers tasked with squaring Trump’s version of reality with actual reality must often contort themselves accordingly.
.. On Sunday, they tried a couple of new tacks: asserting that “facts develop” and saying that the president “misspoke” — while saying something he has said dozens of times.
.. George Stephanopoulos challenged the president’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow on two past, disproven assurances that Trump hadn’t authored the initial, misleading statement about it. (That statement said the meeting was “primarily” about the adoption of Russian children.)
.. Facts might have “developed” from Sekulow’s perspective, but the actual events never changed. Either Trump didn’t tell him the truth about his role in drafting that statement, or Sekulow and Sanders offered assurances that were basically made-up. That “bad information” came from somewhere — either Trump or thin air.
.. John Bolton offered another extremely hard-to-stomach explanation for Trump’s soft stance toward Vladimir Putin on Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election, saying Trump merely “misspoke”:
.. why not stand there right alongside Putin, with the whole world watching and say, we are not going to stand for any more meddling?
BOLTON: Well, as the president said, he misspoke.
.. Trump has also said that he misspoke at the news conference with Putin — but not at this juncture. He said that when he said “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia, he meant to say wouldn’t instead.
..
As the video clip Wallace played shows, that was hardly the only moment in the joint news conference with Putin in which Trump played down the idea that Russia interfered. Bolton was responding not to Trump saying “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia but to his insistence that “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” Trump has never said he misspoke about that.
.. And that really gives lie to this whole thing. Trump has downplayed Putin’s interference so many times over the past 18 months that he would have had to be misspeaking almost constantly. It’s clear what he truly believes or at least wants to convey — even if aides can occasionally reel him back in slightly.
.. each and every one of them also has the side effect of undermining the credibility of the spokespeople who, in neither of these cases, must truly believe the things they are saying.