Sunday, Sept. 18, 2016 | 2 a.m.
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Looking back to the start of this presidential campaign season, it is understandable that disaffected, angry or disillusioned Republicans became infatuated with the tell-it-like-it-is Donald Trump. He was a fresh, if unexpected, face on the political scene who promised to work all his mojo to turn things around. He must be good at what he does, some people figured; the Trump name is all over the place.
For voters who don’t pay attention to the details, nuances and consequences of domestic, foreign and economic policies, Trump was the refreshing anti-politician — not just arrogant, not just cocky but downright belligerent — who reduced everything to incomplete sentences and who even embraced vulgarity and violence. What a hoot this guy is!
Unleashed and putting his narcissism on full display, he promised he alone could fix everything while finding fault all around him — denigrating generals (“I know more about #ISIS than the generals do”), women, Mexicans, Muslims, Pope Francis and those with disabilities. Oh, Trump did find a few people to admire for their leadership — including North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, terrorist Saddam Hussein and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin (while forgetting, apparently, how their leadership is enforced).
Emboldened by ruffians at his rallies and lusting for the applause of wide-eyed supporters who loved his off-script sneers, the bully Trump squashed his primary opponents with personal insults and then threatened rebellion if he didn’t win his party’s nomination. And by now, the slow-reacting media were trying to play catch-up in their examination of an egomaniacal political novice who nobody really ever thought would have gotten so far down the campaign trail. He had elevated from a comical distraction to a brash buffoon who needed to be paid attention to.
Reporters started digging deeper into his business background (how he used bankruptcy as a financing scheme, for instance, even if it meant not paying subcontractors and tradesmen, and that he had applauded the Great Recession for benefiting his bottom line) and started to point out all the inaccuracies in Trump’s speeches. The media could barely keep up with the cascade of lies tumbling out of Trump’s mouth. Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking organization, awarded Trump’s statements its 2015 Lie of the Year; so far in the campaign, 70 percent of Trumps “facts” have been found to be “mostly false,” “false” or, most outrageously, “pants on fire.” In other words, most of what Trump says is provably inaccurate.
By now, a normal candidate would have been bounced out of the race by an alert public and wary donors who’d have had enough of this outrageousness. Indeed, some of Trump’s best friends have turned against him, embarrassed by his lying, insults and incompetence. One of them, music mogul Russell Simmons, posted an open letter on the internet that implored Trump: “Stop fueling fires of hate. … you are becoming a major embarrassment.” And U.S. banks have given Trump the cold shoulder for putting them through the financial wringer, forcing him to turn to Deutsche Bank, headquartered in Germany, as his primary funding partner. The Republican Central Committee is focusing most of its attention on down-ballot races, as are major donors.
Somewhere along the line, though, Trump-entranced, anger-consumed voters became inoculated to accurate and necessary criticisms of Trump — facts that in a sane election season would be enough to derail a candidate as a dangerous fraud unworthy of presidential consideration. Trump has told his faithful that the media were being mean-spirited and were out to get him, and his blindly loyal supporters believe him.
The media didn’t make up the facts that Trump calls climate change a hoax, that 50 Republican national security advisers are afraid of Trump’s proximity to the nuclear code, that he encouraged Russia to commit cyber-espionage against the United States, and that he raised the prospect of weakening NATO and wants to build an impossible wall on our border with Mexico.
So today as a nation we have reached a point where no matter how unqualified — politically and ethically — Trump has been factually shown to be, the nation’s next president could be this manipulative, deceitful self-promoter. He would move into the White House with baggage:
• The Donald J. Trump Foundation is under investigation for donating $25,000 to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who declined to join a lawsuit by New York state alleging fraud at Trump’s real estate training school in Florida.
• Trump has steadfastly refused to release his tax returns, making it ever so obvious that he’s got something to hide that would be devastating to his candidacy.
• He has stopped giving money to the Trump Foundation — a rare occurrence in the world of family foundations — and has instead donated money from the foundation to other charities and taken credit for it, according to The Washington Post. People also have complained that Trump has promised to provide money for various causes, only for those pledges to remain unfulfilled.
• He has not only stopped contributing to his own charity but, according to Post, spent $20,000 of the foundation’s money in 2007 to purchase a 6-foot portrait of himself to hang at one of his golf clubs, a violation of IRS rules for charities.
• He oversees the Trump Organization, the family enterprise that runs his overseas businesses and foreign-sourced income — money that, according to an exhaustive Newsweek examination, was not reflected in his campaign’s financial filings with the Federal Election Commission. Trump is so financially entangled in other countries — not in real estate development but in licensing his gold-plated name for others to use — that virtually any relationship between him as president and a foreign country where he does business would be a conflict of interest and perhaps collide with our national security interests as well, Newsweek concluded.
“Never before has an American candidate for president had so many financial ties with American allies and enemies, and never before has a business posed such a threat to the United States,” Newsweek reported. “If Donald Trump wins this election and his company is not immediately shut down or forever severed from the Trump family, the foreign policy of the United States of America could well be for sale.”
Trump’s supporters may choose to ignore of all the warning signs that this man is unfit to be our president. They likely will say he is being targeted by a liberal, biased news media. The fact is that reputable media outlets are doing precisely what the founders of our nation insisted they do: operate freely and diligently, without fear of intimidation or consequences, to closely examine our government’s operations and those who would take its helm, and to be the watchdog for us, the people.
Trump supporters have time to reassess this dangerous demagogue whose ego selfishly demands that he hang the Trump name on the White House, like some new trophy. As a nation, we can’t fall for this. Donald Trump cannot be trusted.
