Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2016 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
View more of the Sun's opinion section
I would like to point out a portion of a column by Catherone Rampell of The Washington Post that explains what kind of person we get in Donald Trump:
“The leader of the personal responsibility deadbeats is Donald Trump, a welfare queen if there ever was one.
“This is a man who has proudly ‘used the laws of the country to [his] advantage.’ That means racking up hundreds of millions of dollars in tax abatements — that is, government subsidies — to finance his real estate empire. That means using ‘government’s incompetence as a wedge to increase his private fortune,’ as one former New York City tax auditor put it. It means borrowing lots of money that he never paid back because it was discharged in four corporate bankruptcies, which he now looks back on with pride.
“That means trying to use eminent domain to seize an elderly widow’s property so he could build a limousine parking lot, or pressuring a city to condemn several businesses so he could buy the land on the cheap to build a ‘combined amusement park, shipping terminal and seaport village and office complex.’ That means slapping his name on all sorts of other projects he had relatively little involvement in, and then swooping in to take credit when things went well — or suing to have his name removed when things went badly.
“None of this is illegal, of course. But it’s also maybe not the track record of someone who wants to lead the party that has fashioned itself the party of personal responsibility, of freedom from government dependence, of the makers rather than the takers. Yes, Trump has been ‘making,’ but that making has been enabled by a fair amount of ‘taking,’ too.”
