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The Making Of Donald Trump


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Democracy & Government
The Making of Donald Trump, As Told by a Journalistic Nemesis
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston says his new book is “basically everything Donald Trump wants to make sure you do not know.”
By Kathy Kiely | August 5, 2016
The Making of Donald Trump
Veteran reporter David Cay Johnston wasn’t satisfied with how the media has been covering Donald Trump. So he wrote a book. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston isn’t happy with the way the press has been handling Donald Trump. “The coverage has been extremely poor in my opinion,” Johnston, who at 67 clearly still enjoys making trouble, pronounced at no less a lions’ den than the National Press Club on Thursday night in Washington.
So Johnston, as he is wont to do when he sees something going wrong, decided to tackle the problem himself.
His just-released book,The Making of Donald Trump, is a 288-page compendium of “basically everything Donald Trump wants to make sure you do not know,” said Johnston, who has been following the real estate mogul for decades.
The main reason he has “been extremely critical of my colleagues,” in the media Johnston said, is they’ve been too buttoned-down and professional. “They’re covering him as though he is a serious person,” Johnston said of the Republican presidential nominee. Though Johnston believes there has been some good coverage of Trump, he faulted it for being too highbrow, “not written in tabloid style.”
“Donald is a master of manipulating the conventions of journalism,” explained the veteran reporter. He proceeded to shatter many of those conventions in a book talk that was frequently punctuated with the declaration “because Donald just makes it up.” Johnston also repeatedly dubbed Trump “a modern-day P.T. Barnum.” The book by the former <=”” York=””man book already has provided fodder for the tabloids.
It chronicles the rise of Trump’s fortunes, beginning with the Republican presidential nominee’s grandfather, a German immigrant who, as Johnston put it in distinctly un-Timesian style, ran a “whorehouse,” and continuing through Trump’s father, whom Johnston described as an industrious businessman with some unfortunate views.
We have never had a major party candidate for president with the kinds of relationships Donald Trump has.
— David Cay Johnston
In 1927, Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Queens — something his son has tried furiously to deny, but, said Johnston: “I have the clips.” Later, as Johnston details in his book, the elder Trump, in trouble once before with the feds for allegedly bilking a federal housing program for returning GIs, was ordered by the federal authorities to stop discriminating against African-Americans who were trying to rent apartments he owned. The settlement came only after Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to get the allegations of racial bias thrown out by the courts — a lawsuit in which he was represented by Roy Cohn, former longtime aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), the disgraced Communist witch-hunt perpetrator.
Johnston sees Trump’s association with Cohn — who, he said, “taught Donald how to hurt people”— as part of a disturbing pattern. “We have never had a major party candidate for president with the kind of relationships Donald Trump has,” Johnston said. While some past presidents have had unsavory friends and business associations, Johnston continued, “They were not the mob. They were not drug traffickers.”
At the Press Club event, Johnston raised repeated questions about Trump’s ties to Felix Sater, a Russian-born stock fraudster and admitted fellow traveler with the mob. Sater is now a defendant in a tax fraud case; papers unsealed earlier this month name Trump and two of his children as “material witnesses.”
He invited his audience to contrast the treatment Trump gave a convicted drug dealer who ran a company that operated Trump’s helicopter fleet with what he did to his infant great-nephew, gravely ill with an ailment that caused seizures.
For his troubled helicopter provider, Joey Weichselbaum, the real estate mogul provided a luxury apartment, continued employment and a testimonial to the court after the Weichselbaum’s indictment for drug trafficking, Johnston recounts in his book. But Trump was much less accommodating to the grandson of his late older brother after the baby’s parents challenged the will of his father, Fred Trump (which cut them out), in court. Trump removed the ailing child from the family’s medical insurance policy. “I can’t help that,” Johnston quotes Trump telling a New York Daily News reporter who asked why he cut off the infant’s health care coverage (a court later restored it).
Now I go out of my way to make her life miserable.
— Donald Trump
Vindictiveness is a point of pride for Trump, Johnston said. “His personal motto is ‘get revenge,’” said the reporter, who devotes an entire chapter to Trump’s speechifying and writings on the subject. Describing how Trump fired a female employee who, citing ethical qualms, wouldn’t call a banker friend on his behalf, Johnston quotes Trump’s own account from his book, Think Big:
“She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad… I can’t stomach disloyalty…and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable.”
In another outside-the-box move for a journalist, Johnston said he has reached out to some of the evangelical ministers who back Trump, offering to provide evidence of how much the candidate’s personal views deviate from the philosophy that Jesus Christ outlined in his Sermon on the Mount. “I’ve called them. I’ve offered to go,” Johnston said. So far none has taken him up on the offer.
Having covered Trump since he was the Atlantic City bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Trump was trying to break into the casino business in the New Jersey beach town, “I have probably the largest Trump document collection in the world,” Johnston said. An expert on tax law who lectures on the subject at the Syracuse University, Johnston said he believes, “in all likelihood, Donald has paid no federal income taxes for years.” That’s based on some documents that have leaked out from various court cases, Trump’s lack of charitable giving to his own family foundation (which suggested no need for deductions), and a gaping tax loophole available to real estate developers.
It’s also possible that Trump’s decision to break with long-standing campaign tradition and not release his tax forms could be based on his reluctance to reveal his true net worth. While Johnston says he believes Trump is “very rich,” he, like many others, questions whether he’s quite as rich as he makes himself out to be. Trump’s chief talent lies in “making deals to bring in money that supports a lifestyle” fit for a billionaire, Johnston said. “How many billionaires, who you really know are billionaires, do you see out hawking ties, steaks, bottled water and board games?”
For all his denunciations of Trump, Johnston’s journalistic career has made him uniquely qualified to understand the Republican presidential nominee’s appeal. “I started documenting the growing inequality in America when I started working for The New York Times,” he said. “Government rules take from the many and give to the already rich few.” The people who are being inexorably pushed out of the middle class are on the edge of despair, not least because their plight is so invisible, he argued. “They get almost nothing written about them.”
Johnston’s got a plan to tackle that problem too. He says the Trump book was an interruption from writing his real magnum opus. “I’m writing an entirely new tax code — soup to nuts,” he said.
TOPICS: Democracy & Government
TAGS: 2016 election, donald trump, economic inequality, Roy cohn, taxes

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He Who Will Not Be named


The seemingly unending gaffes, distortions and out right lies of one Presidential contender as garnered all of the news. These inexplicable utterances have excited people to the point of insanity. Despite what reasonable people think, there are those who feel the candidate speaks for them or says what they are thinking and want to say. There is the fringe members of this group who feel that the Government is at fault and especially since the current White House resident is not like them. They are the dangers in America and potentially the home-grown terrorists. Each country in the world has their own homegrown terrorists but the wider world had not heard about it until the advent of social media. Returning to “He Who Will Not Be Named” this individual in my opinion had no intention of being in this contest this long and is apparently trying hard to get out but his supporters apparently do not see the bigger picture. His supporters are the folks who believe they are correct in their beliefs since their ancestors arrived in America, devastated the Native American economy in the name of God, stole people from Africa and held them hostage for hundreds of years. These supporters are the same people who believe anything that shows up on social media as true (the more sensational, the better). Our political parties have created these mindsets by following and perpetrating the “white/black” myth. He Who Will Not Be Named has just bullied his way into the spotlight that he so dearly loves and used the created racial divide to move it forward. It would be a tragedy for “HE” to be elected since that path would surely lead us to a path of war with some of our worldwide friends in the mix. The modern world has given us a good look at the other parts of he world and the countries that we interact with. We are (America) are not the chosen ones, we are just a better known part of the earth residents and as people we need to understand we have been where many other countries have recently come to. That being said our place is to look up from the world of  electronic news and read about the “real” events that affect us whether we want it to or not. If  voters continue to follow the “radical” rants of “He Who Will Not Be Named”, we could potentially become a “third” world country based on the isolation that could occur due to the crass and unknowing speeches of “He”.

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Tax Scams Again


I am posting another or continuing information on tax scams which have been elevated to an art form.

Kelly Phillips Erb-Forbes Staff 

I cover tax: paying tax is painful but reading about it shouldn’t be.

I had three messages on my voice mail on Monday.
The first was this message:
The reason of this call is to inform you that IRS is filing lawsuit against you. To get more information about this case file, please call immediately on our department number 862-274-2489. I repeat 862-274-2489. Thank you.
The second was a variation on that message but with a different callback number (716-265-1636).
The third was more stern, advising:
“Hello, this call is officially a final notice from IRS, Internal Revenue Service is filing lawsuit against you. To get more information about this case file, please call immediately on our department number 260-216-1206. I repeat 260-216-1206. Thank you.
I knew that I had to write about getting the calls because I think it’s important for folks to understand how widespread and common they are (even my daughter received one on her cell phone and she’s just a kid).
Recommended by Forbes
IRS Warns Again On Scams Targeting Taxpayers
New Scam Warning: Taxpayers Still Being Asked To Pay Taxes In Gift Cards
I thought about not posting the exact numbers when I wrote about them but ultimately decided to do so after a quick search on the internet. Apparently, taxpayers are still questioning whether these calls are for real (they are not). On a few sites dedicated to helping folks sort out potentially abusive calls, these specific phone numbers listed above have come up with comments like “seems fraudulent.” I posted the numbers to clarify that it “seems fraudulent” because it is (I should also note that these numbers have allegedly been associated with other scams, including a Microsoft hack scam and a payday loan scam, as well).
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued a warning about these “robo-call” scams just last week. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said, about the calls, “It used to be that most of these bogus calls would come from a live-person. Scammers are evolving and using more and more automated calls in an effort to reach the largest number of victims possible.”
And they don’t discriminate when choosing potential victims. They’ll call anyone, even a tax attorney, and even someone who has written about these scams pretty regularly.
How you react is important. You should not answer these calls, and you should not return these calls – even when you know that it’s a scam. There’s no way to win with scammers, and there may even be unintended consequences. Trust me. I wanted to call back. My husband joked I should start out by telling them they called a tax attorney. It doesn’t matter. Even when you call them on the scam or whistle in their ear, you lose: scammers are likely mining all kinds of data from these calls.
Other IRS and tax-related scams involve the nonexistent “Federal Student Tax,” scams targeting tax professionals and scams advising you to pay with iTunes gift cards and other gift cards).
As a reminder, the IRS will never:
Call to demand immediate payment over the phone, nor will the agency call about taxes owed without first having mailed you a bill.
Threaten to immediately bring in local police or other law-enforcement groups to have you arrested for not paying.
Demand that you pay taxes without giving you the opportunity to question or appeal the amount they say you owe.
Require you to use a specific payment method for your taxes, such as a prepaid debit card, gift card or wire transfer.
Ask for credit or debit card numbers over the phone.
Don’t engage or respond with scammers. Here’s what to do if you receive a suspicious phone call or message:
If you receive a call from someone claiming to be from the IRS, and you do not owe tax, or if you are immediately aware that it’s a scam, don’t engage with the scammer and do not give out any information. Just hang up.
If you receive a telephone message from someone claiming to be from the IRS, and you do not owe tax, or if you are immediately aware that it’s a scam, don’t call them back.
If you receive a phone call from someone claiming to be with the IRS, and you owe tax or think you may owe tax, do not give out any information. Call the IRS back at 1.800.829.1040 to find out more information.
You can also contact TIGTA to report scam calls by calling 1.800.366.4484 or by using the “IRS Impersonation Scam Reporting” form on their website. You may also want to report the scam to the Federal Trade Commission by using the “FTC Complaint Assistant” to report persons pretending to be from the government; please add “IRS Telephone Scam” in the notes.
Don’t fall for the tricks. Keep your personal information safe by remaining alert. For tips on protecting yourself from identity theft related tax fraud, click here.
Want more taxgirl goodness? Pick your poison: follow me on twitter, hang out on Facebook and Google, play on Pinterest or check out my YouTube channel. For cases and tax related docs, visit Scribd.
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The Many People of Donald Trump


Donald Trump as recently reported has the habit of using the words” Many People Have Said” in making statements about his rivals and enemies(?).Suppose this (pre)statement was used against him? I have made a short list:

Many People have said: Donald Trump is a lousy tipper!

Many People have said: Donald Trump has 2 illegitimate children

Many people have said: Donald Trump is a hair club member

Many people Have said: Donald Trump is not a Native born American

Many People have said: Donald trump is a draft dodger

Many people have said: Donald Trump is a transvestite

Many People have said: Donald Trump wears lifts

Many People have said; Donald Trump is broke

Many People have said: Donald Trump rents his suits.

Just to mention a few.

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WE Have To Do It


This election has shown how little we know about the election process and the effects of media coverage on our judgement of the candidates. Yes many if not all of us are angry or upset with how Government is run but unfortunately we are placing our hope for change in the wrong place. Reading more about the current seat fillers in Congress and in State legislatures will do more to improve our political system than the person who is elected to the top office. The National head is important but Congress is more so in that they stop or screw up more legislature than the President. Looking back at the decision to not support or even look at the Affordable care act and promising to defund , replace  or make something new has been an ongoing issue that has cost the voters more money and in some cases poorer service. The idea that they (Congress) will not even consider a replacement for the empty seat in the High court when there are issues that affect us all is unforgivable and has nothing to do with the Presidency but everything to do with the proper running of the country. The decisions made in our names are not necessarily decisions we asked for or wanted but we allowed it by not speaking up (this involves reading and listening to real news). Our Congress has overtly and covertly injected Racism in our politics while abdicating their responsibility as legislators. These are the people we have voted in over and over again and complained when nothing changes. The key to good government is the vote and we the “American People” control that. We would be well advised to remember that this country was founded by and on the backs of immigrants from all of the known world (even as far back as tens of thousand of years). We upon arrival in this country displaced the Native Americans almost to extinction and are just recently acknowledging their place as citizens of this country. Overall as a country we are still the destination for many other visitors from the rest of the world as temporary and permanent residents no matter what the current rhetoric indicates. A quick note on immigrants as related to terrorism: the average time before any immigrant can get into the U.S. is 5 years (of vetting), of course there are and probably will be the few that sneak in and get away with it but overall our borders are reasonably tight. We get up in arms when we hear about the bad ones but we did not ask for them or allow them in. There are homegrown bad actors from all citizens naturalized and native,these are people who would do what they have done or will do no matter where they live. Our obligation is to read and understand how the world works now and pay less attention to talking heads looking for acclaim as knowledgeable when their goal is their personal gain.

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Something to Talk About


We all (I hope) are looking to have a National leader who can take us forward in a good way .We have had many leaders in the past who have attempted this feat and while not failing have come up short. Looking at the common theme in these past administrations we voters should see the connecting line. That line is the 535 members of Congress. We have good, bad and awful in this situation. There are congressional members and there are statesmen, the major difference is that statesmen (or women) reach across party lines to do the best job for the people they represent, the members just do what is best for themselves and their backers. It is easy to say or agree to anything that will get them by while still doing nothing of value for their districts. It is worth pointing out that their “districts” should be the whole United States including its territories and commonwealths, even though their immediate areas are not in those areas. We have a responsibility to ignore the rhetoric and focus on the future under one of the current front-runners, on one side we have a demagogue who (I think) did not think he would get this far and we have on the other side a person who has vast Government experience even though there is baggage that many think is too heavy yet the experience required is there. Keep in mind that politics is a dirty business and anyone in it will have their “dirty laundry” aired and no one is perfect (if any person ascribes to being perfect, beware of them). As a country we need to cast off the past ideals and understand the world stage is no longer populated by just first world  countries and we have to have someone who can engage the various countries in a way that benefits us and them.

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Race for Our Souls


The race is on, now that we have a nominee form each party, the irrelevant, wild and irreverent talk will begin in earnest.  The Trump wagon will now start to race at top speed,  exposing us to so many upcoming and  memorable insults and  inaccuracies. The main words will be “huge, Great and believe me”. Taken in context these words are usually fine but in the context of  speeches to persuade it will get old quickly with people who really listen. This contest is unusual in that one candidate has no political experience and is essentially running on the fumes of several failed also-rans. This is a campaign being pushed along by hate, ignorance and paucity of facts. The Trump supporters are angry at the Government (by extension President Obama) and ignoring the fact that we have a non functioning Congress who they totally ignore as the real cause of many of the issues we face. Consider the fact that Congress is now on a 7 week recess and leaving important work undone along with denial of a hearing for a replacement chief Justice and hoping someone other than a Scamocrat gets into office. Our Dupublican Congress has done no more than obstruct any means to improve the lot of the American people they are so fond of quoting for their own needs. As one of the American people I do not recall telling or asking them to do anything that goes against my interests.

A Bit Of Honesty In A Nest Of Lies.


Ted Cruz is at least honest. His speech was met by boo’s and cat calls however he at this point is one of if not the only honest Dupublican in the party. The national party  with great reluctance and reticence fallen in behind the Donald as the candidate for the Presidency. Many of his supporters are single issue voters who seemingly cannot understand what the overall view is and how the single issue vote can bring other problems along that will affect everyone. Ted Cruz (who was called “Lyin’ Ted) spoke with eloquence about his views and while we may not agree with Cruz overall, he has allowed that Donald trump is not the best choice for the party long term. Mr. Cruz is an outsider in Washington and while being radical in a radical party he is at least maintaining his stance on his beliefs. There are several (if not many) Dupublicans who are (distantly) tacitly supporting the nominated candidate for the Presidency. I would like to think these semi supporters are distancing on moral grounds but the reasoning is more about being elected. Our greatest power as voters is first paying attention to these opportunistic office seekers who are no more than fair weather representatives.  These are the office holders who have done nothing for us and continue to cover their poor records with self serving lies and assertions. Politicians who talk about what they have done rather than show it are all suspect and need to be vetted each time they are up for election. Our votes as far as I am concerned are like currency and needs to be spent wisely.

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Why nobody is helping America’s displaced workers


All of the rhetoric on jobs makes for good press and fires up the general public but not enough people under stand why the job situation is like it is and what should and could  be done about it. Unfortunately too many of us follow the same path of listening to people who have an agenda that does nor include any good for any of us. We have for many years suffered under the hands of self serving politicians who play on our fears and weaknesses for their own ends. There was a statement ascribed to Native Americans in many Westerns which goes like this: “White Man Speaks with Forked Tongue”, now replace white man with politicians and you have  21st century America. 

Rick Newman
July 21, 2016

By Rick Newman

The little guy has an unusually loud voice in this year’s presidential election. Angry voters who feel they’re falling behind in the global economy have animated the entire campaign of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who wants to tear up trade deals and impose sharp new tariffs on cheap imports. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has shifted her own views as well, moving toward harsher trade policies and expanded government subsidies for those who are struggling.

The focus on free trade frustrates many economists, who argue that open borders benefit nearly everybody by lowering the cost of products in just about every category. But free-trade supporters increasingly acknowledge that there are also losers from free trade—and that the United States does very little to help them. “Trade isn’t a panacea,” John Murphy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobbying group, tells me in the video above. “It doesn’t mean rainbows and unicorns for everyone in the country when trade costs jobs, as it does occasionally.”

So why don’t we do more to help the workers harmed when work leaves the United States for cheaper foreign markets? Murphy outlines a few reasons. First, most government aid money is targeted at disabled workers, unemployment insurance and nutrition assistance. The U.S. government has never spent much on worker retraining, and the amount spent now is actually lower than it was 25 years ago, before the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994. Germany spends five to seven times as much as the United States, relative to GDP, helping workers adjust to disruption.

Some jobs are eliminated not by foreign competition but by new technology—and there are few government programs designed to deal with that. Many times it’s a combination of factors that cause a plant to close or a company to cut jobs. Businesses sometimes retrain their own workers or train new ones coming onboard. But no group, in either the public or private sector, is in charge of identifying the broad skills employers need at any given time, forming training programs, determining where the good jobs are and helping the people who need the jobs get there.

Trump and Clinton aren’t yet talking about how to address those problems, but businesses are starting to think about it—partly out of self-interest. “When members of our board of directors come together, one of the things we hear most often is the skills gap they face,” Murphy says. “It’s very difficult for some industries to fill vacancies they need to fill.” Job-seekers who can’t get a phone call returned might find that hard to believe, but the data does show a big gap between the technological skills companies need and the dated, 20th-century capabilities of many unemployed or underemployed workers.

Government moves slowly, however, and it could be a long time before life preservers go out to the people left behind by globalization. For the time being, attacking free trade seems like a simpler way to address the problem.

Rick Newman’s latest book is Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman

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I am really tired of the condoned, overt and covert  biases of the political parties. We all are at once conservatives, liberals and many variations of these labels. This just shows that as individuals we need to be wary of the extremes of these “labels”. Our politicians have for years listed and unfortunately mislabeled their intentions as what the “American People” want. This is why the politics have become so violent. Rationality will win the day if we (the often quoted “American People”) read and understand that politicians have one goal and that goal is power. Power does not translate into good things for us no matter what it appears to be. Once in the big office there are some radical changes in the what the new guy can and will do. Those changes are usually what the majority party in the Congress allows or will sometimes dictate. It is particularly disturbing that even the religious “right”, “moral(?) majority” and the complicit media can not see the forest for the trees. Our inability to parse the rhetoric of the campaigns is a possible cause of the irreverent and rise of the seemingly pre civil war sentiment. My explicit warning to all is again: “Let The Voters beware”. One party or the other in a majority is a reason to worry. We have NO friends in Congress, just people looking for power at our expense.

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