At this point, anyone not proceeding from the absolute certainty that Trump is a fraud and a con artist has to have his or her credibility questioned. The attempt by the Republican establishment and then the mainstream media to "normalize" Trump and Trumpism is breathtaking and frightening on an Orwellian level of social dysfunction. Last month, when Trump and his spawn were caught red-handed breaking the law by blatantly soliciting funds from foreigners, the FEC winked and odded and refused to proceed with charges against them. It turned out that Trump took that as a green light to continue pushing the boundaries of what he could get away with in terms of raking in money from non-Americans. Sara Sirota spilled the beans Friday at WhoWhatWhy.org, showing that "Trump continues to solicit donations from foreigners in defiance of US law-- two weeks after he was publicly called out for this"-- and after formal complaints were filed with the FEC. Trump was still asking for money from foreigners as recently as last week.
WhoWhatWhy has been in contact with five foreign lawmakers, who have received at least seven different solicitations for contributions since the complaint was filed.“If they continue to do it after being informed, that would be an even more egregious violation,” Brendan Fischer, associate counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, told WhoWhatWhy. He noted that continued solicitations are further evidence of the Trump campaign’s recklessness and raises the likelihood that it knowingly violated the law.
The new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released yesterday shows Trump leading with just one educational demographic: people who didn't go beyond high school. Trump has a marked tendency to project his own flaws onto his opponents. When he refers to Cruz or Elizabeth Warren or Hillary as "crooked," he's hoping to deflect something that is obvious and inarguable, namely that he's the most dishonest person to ever run for public office. PolitiFact did a chart comparison between Trump's truthfulness and "Crooked" Hillary's. Perhaps it's too abstract for many high school drop outs, but I doubt any DWT readers of whatever educational attainments will have any trouble seeing the differences between a typical dishonest politician (Clinton) and a psychopathic liar:Writing in the NYTimes over the weekend, David Barstow went further in exploring Trump's patterns of deception that have defined every single aspect of his entire life.
There was the time Donald J. Trump told Larry King that he had been paid more than $1 million to give a speech about his business acumen when in fact he was paid $400,000. Or the time he sought a bank loan claiming a net worth of $3.5 billion in 2004, four times as much as what the bank found when it checked his math. Or the time he boasted that membership to Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., cost $300,000 when the actual initiation fee was $200,000. Or the time he bragged on CNBC about his new Trump International Hotel and Tower in Las Vegas, claiming, “We have 1,282 units, and they sold out in less than a week.” As Mr. Trump knew, more than 300 units had not been sold.Confronted in a court case about this last untruth, Mr. Trump was anything but chagrined. “I’m talking to a television station,” he said. “We do want to put the best spin on the property.”...[A] survey of Mr. Trump’s four decades of wheeling and dealing also reveals an equally operatic record of dissembling and deception, some of it unabashedly confirmed by Mr. Trump himself, who nearly 30 years ago first extolled the business advantages of “truthful hyperbole.” 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.Under the intense scrutiny of a presidential election, many of those allegations have already become familiar campaign fodder: the Trump University students and Trump condo buyers who say they were fleeced; the public servants from New Jersey to Scotland who now say they rue the zoning approvals, licenses or tax breaks they gave based on Mr. Trump’s promises; the small-time contractors who say Mr. Trump concocted complaints about their work to avoid paying them; the infuriated business partners who say Mr. Trump concealed profits or ignored contractual obligations; the business journalists and stock analysts who say Mr. Trump smeared them for critical coverage.Taken as a whole, though, an examination of Mr. Trump’s business career reveals persistent patterns in the way Mr. Trump bends or breaks the truth-- patterns that may already feel familiar to those watching his campaign.First and foremost is Mr. Trump’s tendency toward the self-aggrandizing fib-- as if it were not impressive enough to be paid $400,000 for a speech. 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.Equally striking is his Houdiniesque ability to wiggle away from all but the most skilled and determined efforts to corner him in an apparent lie. 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.“He’s a bully, and bullies aren’t known for their veracity,” said Richard C. Seltzer, a retired senior partner at the law firm Kaye Scholer who confronted Mr. Trump in three real estate lawsuits....Trump’s business record may help explain why various fact-checkers have barely been able to keep pace with his false claims on the campaign trail. PolitiFact has labeled 34 of Mr. Trump’s assertions “Pants on Fire” lies. As of July 1, the Washington Post had fact-checked 46 statements by Mr. Trump. It gave 70 percent of them its worst rating, four Pinocchios-- a record so abysmal that the newspaper recently compiled a video of what it called “Donald Trump’s most outrageous four-Pinocchio claims.”The taxonomy of Mr. Trump’s business deceptions has been the subject of legal and journalistic scrutiny for decades. A Fortune magazine article from 2000 memorably described Mr. Trump’s “astonishing ability to prevaricate” this way: “But when Trump says he owns 10 percent of the Plaza Hotel, understand that what he actually means is that he has the right to 10 percent of the profit if it’s ever sold. When he says he’s building a ‘90-story building’ next to the U.N., he means a 72-story building that has extra-high ceilings. And when he says his casino company is the ‘largest employer in the state of New Jersey,’ he actually means to say it is the eighth largest.”...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-- plaintiffs’ lawyers frequently return to the same two paragraphs from The Art of the Deal.“I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration-- and a very effective form of promotion.”In depositions, lawyers have repeatedly probed for the limits of Mr. Trump’s “truthful hyperbole,” or, as one lawyer framed it, the distinction Mr. Trump makes between “innocent exaggeration” and “guilty exaggeration.”...Trump has been repeatedly accused of bringing false legal claims to avoid paying debts and evade contractual obligations. As far back as 1983, a New York City housing court judge ruled that Mr. Trump filed a “spurious” lawsuit to harass a tenant into vacating a Trump building.Then there was the case Mr. Trump brought against Barbara Corcoran, the real estate broker best known for her appearances on Shark Tank. In the mid-1990s, Mr. Trump owed millions of dollars to Ms. Corcoran for helping him secure financing for a development. But when New York magazine published a cover story about the troubled project-- “Trump’s Near-Death Experience”-- Mr. Trump sued Ms. Corcoran, accusing her and her associates of sharing damaging information with the magazine and thus violating a confidentiality agreement. He refused to pay her the millions he owed, claiming her breach had gravely damaged his business.At trial, Mr. Trump was unable to produce a single document showing harm to his business. But his certitude never wavered, even after Ms. Corcoran’s lawyer, Mr. Seltzer, confronted him with article after article in which Mr. Trump himself had discussed with reporters much of the same “confidential” information he accused Ms. Corcoran’s team of divulging.“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.”)...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.Such was the case when Mr. Trump filed a libel lawsuit against Timothy L. O’Brien, the author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald. Among other things, 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.Mr. Trump’s lawsuit was dismissed.
Want to see what happens when a narcissistic bully like Trump gets power? Follow developments in Turkey as Erdogan consolidates his control and reshapes his country in his own image.
