Tag Archives: Fred Trump

national news

Yep, Trump’s lying is ‘pathological’

I think it was one or more of his 2016 Republican Party presidential primary foes who called Donald Trump’s penchant for prevarication a “pathological” condition.

That is, he can’t help himself. He has some sort of liar’s disease that guides him toward the telling of outright falsehoods, even when they serve no purpose — at all!

Such as what transpired this week in an Oval Office meeting the Liar in Chief had with the NATO secretary-general.

Trump went on a brief riff about how he gets along so well with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Then he blurted out something about his late father, Fred Trump, being born in Germany.

Hold on! He wasn’t born in Germany! He was born in 1905 — in New York City, New York, U.S.A.!

We all looked it up. It’s right there, all over every Internet platform you can find. Just Google “Fred Trump” and it pops up. Place of birth: New York, New York. 

OK, this is a little thing. It doesn’t matter all by itself. It’s just one of those examples Trump critics keep noticing, that he cannot tell the truth about anything. Not ever!

So it’s fair to wonder: If he’s going to lie about something as inconsequential as that, what other truths is he keeping from the rest of the world?

Hmm, I’m thinking . . . probably a lot!

business news

Why worry now about Trump’s business history?

Someone, somewhere — maybe a lot of folks out here in Trump Country, where I live — may be asking: Why are the media obsessing now about Donald Trump’s business practices when he was a much younger man, an up-and-comer in the real estate development industry?

I think I might have an answer. It’s because Donald Trump sold his presidential candidacy largely on the notion that he is a self-made man, that he had a “little bit of help” from his father, Fred Trump, as he sought to build a business empire.

The New York Times has put the lie to that boast. It has revealed in an exhaustive investigation that Trump received a lot of help from his father and that he well might have used fraudulent tax schemes to benefit his father’s business.

Donald Trump’s status as president of the United States of America makes this a legitimate issue of discussion, particularly as he prepares to campaign for re-election in 2020. The issue of his truthfulness in describing his pre-political business career must be brought up and it must be discussed thoroughly.

I doubt seriously that Trump himself will engage in that serious discussion. He’ll toss out insults at the media and his foes. He will energize his base of supporters. The president isn’t likely to provide forthright answers to direct questions about the Times’s story.

However, the president’s business history and the huge disparity between what a media outlet has uncovered and what he has said about that history demand a full and complete airing.

I hope the president would explain himself. My fear is that he won’t.

national news

Mitt was right: Trump is a first-class ‘fraud’

The next U.S. senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, was absolutely spot on when he delivered that blistering speech two years ago about Republican presidential nominee Donald John Trump Sr.

Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, called Trump a “phony” and a “fraud” in a 17-minute tirade against the man who would become the 45th president of the United States.

I have just read that lengthy New York Times investigative article about how Trump acquired his wealth. It is quite clear, based on some of the most exhaustive reporting I’ve ever seen in a newspaper article, that Trump is the farthest thing possible from a “self-made” billionaire, which is how he presented himself while running for the presidency.

Read the NY Times piece here. Make sure you have a good bit of time to read this piece.

What will happen with this information? Will it change minds? Probably not.

I am an avid Trump critic. This report merely cements my own view of what I and many others have suspected all along about the president, and which comports with Mitt Romney’s view: that the man is a charlatan and a bald-faced liar.

Trump’s “base,” though, will see it differently. They’ll take aim at The New York Times, which they’ll contend is a “mainstream liberal media outlet” that is out to “get” Donald Trump. They will disbelieve the meticulous reporting by a team of journalistic professionals and choose to side with a man known to be a liar.

Such is the state of play on today’s political landscape.

I’ll just declare once again that Mitt Romney had it right in 2016. If only his fellow Republicans would have listened to him.

business news

Another reason to demand POTUS’s tax returns

Wouldn’t you know it?

Among the first things that crossed my mind when I heard about The New York Times’s in-depth look at how Donald Trump obtained his wealth dealt with those mysterious tax returns that no one has seen.

That’s right. The president who defied political tradition dating back to 1976 continues to keep his tax returns from public scrutiny. He said while running for office in 2016 that he was being audited by the Internal Revenue Service. Every presidential candidate going back four decades has released their tax returns for public review.

Why is that relevant today? Because the NY Times’s investigation revealed that a much younger Donald Trump used possibly illegal tax “schemes” to his financial advantage while he was taking many millions of dollars from his late father, Fred Trump, who helped him build his real estate empire.

So … the question persists: When are we going to see those tax returns, Mr. President?

I know he’s not going to release them unless someone orders it. I also believe the IRS audit is a sham, a dodge that Trump used as a pretext to keep the returns hidden from public review. The IRS doesn’t comment on specific audits, but it also has said an audit doesn’t preclude a public official from releasing them.

Meanwhile, we have this lengthy newspaper report that goes into excruciating detail how Donald Trump and his father possibly gamed the tax system to their financial advantage.

Read the Times story here.

The Times story is a long one. It’s worth your time if you want to take a peek into how a future president of the United States built his financial empire in a way that contradicts his own statements that he scaled the mountain all by himself.

He didn’t. He had lots of help from his father … and possibly from the federal tax system.

We cannot talk to Fred Trump, given that he’s no longer with us. The public, though, can get a good look at those tax returns to draw its own conclusions about how Donald Trump got his start in the rough-and-tumble world of business.

What’s more, the president calls the Times’s story “100 percent false.” Prove it, Mr. President. Deliver those tax returns!