Trumps Conflicts Of Interest
Trump has massive and unprecedented conflicts of interest.
Prior to becoming president, Trump owned and ran a worldwide business empire. This included hotels, golf clubs and other business enterprises. Trump also licensed his name to domestic and foreign owned businesses around the world for lucrative fees. After he was elected, he promised to remove himself from all of his business operations. Instead, he simply transferred day-to-day control of the businesses to his sons by forming a revocable trust and retained his financial interests and the ability to profit from them, as well as the ability to reassume control. 30
Under the terms of the trust instrument, according to published reports, the trustees are required to distribute income or principal to Trump at his request or as the Trustees otherwise deem appropriate. 31 This leaves Trump and his family as the financial beneficiaries of the business operations and leaves his business empire inextricably entangled with his presidency. The steps Trump took, claiming to deal with his conflicts, did not actually address his massive conflicts of interest problems at all.
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Erikson added that with Trump’s departure, the public might see Republican senators revert back to the truth, noting Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell is “already done with Trump” in reportedly telling senators to vote their conscience in the upcoming impeachment trial on an article which stems from the election lie.
“If they don’t stand up for the truth, then they’re overestimating the power of this base that still wants them to falsely believe the election was stolen,” Erikson warned.
The most recent Gallup poll on Trump’s favorability found that he is leaving office with his lowest approval rating of his four years in office at 34%. Trump is the only president not to reach 50% approval rating during his time in office, since Gallup started polling the number in 1938.
But despite no evidence to support the view, according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, one out of every three Americans — and two in every three Republicans — believes that there was widespread voter fraud in the presidential election, indicating damage on the country’s democratic institutions needing repairs far beyond the Capitol’s shattered glass.
TRUMP: The coronavirus pandemic is under control.
TRUTH: The US exceeded the White House’s 2020 death estimate by 100K lives.
One of the most dangerous lies of Trump’s involved the most serious threat to his presidency: his downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump Personally Interviewed Us Attorney Candidates
Breaking with well-established tradition of independence, President Trump is inviting a conflict of interest by personally interviewing potential U.S. Attorney nominees.
Flouting the American principle that no person is above the law, President Trump personally interviewed multiple candidates for U.S. Attorney positions who, if confirmed, would have jurisdiction over him and his businesses. 172 These positionsthe top federal prosecutors in each jurisdictionreport to the attorney general and are among the most powerful law enforcement officers in the country.
Ordinarily, presidents are much less involved in the hiring of U.S. Attorneys. It has been longstanding practice that candidates for these positions are vetted by the Department of Justice in consultation with home-state senators, even if those selected are ultimately nominated by the White House. 173 Particularly in the wake of President Trumps demands for loyalty pledges from law enforcement appointees including fired FBI Director James Comey, his close involvement in the selection process risks the appearance of corruption and favoritism. Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, explained that it is neither normal nor advisable for Trump to personally interview candidates for U.S. Attorney positions, especially the one in Manhattan. 174
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Lies About Appearance And Wealth
Donald Trump comes from the world of reality television which is notorious for faking reality at every turn. It is like WWE, another program Trump has appeared on, because everything is fake. It is no wonder that coming these experiences Trump feels entitled to make up his own world as he goes. And this false reality starts with his personal appearance.
Donalds skin color and hair are fake. His skin is obviously spray tanned. Gawker ran an excellent piece about how about how Trumps hair is in fact an elaborate wig created by French inventor Edward Ivari stating microcylinders would certainly explain how a 69-year-old man could grow hair with the capacity to effectively wrap itself around the circumference of his head several times over.
Trump claims to be personally worth in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS. No one truthful makes that claim about him. According to Rolling Stone the Federal Election Commission disclosure form filed by Trumps campaign offers a somewhat more conservative estimate of $8.7 billion, while Forbes pegs his fortune at more like $4.5 billion.
Trump Family Conflicts Of Interest
Trumps daughter and son-in-law both have White House positions and conflicts of interest.
Trump hired both his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner to work for him in the West Wing as advisors. 36 The couple had been heavily involved in his campaign, and kept up that involvement by becoming formal employees of the federal government in the White House.
Yet they, like the President, also come with conflicts of interest, and the public still doesnt have full information about those conflicts a full year into the presidency. Kushner repeatedly failed to disclose the extent of his business ties abroad, initially omitting 100 foreign contacts, including contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Russian government lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and subsequently having to revise his ethics disclosure form thrice. 37 He then failed to disclose his use of a private email server to the Senate Intelligence Committee, and subsequently omitted some relevant emails from the campaign documents he turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee for their investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. 38 As a result of this, he has actually been working with only an interim security clearance for the entirety of the first year and has not been granted a full clearance yet.
President Trump has elevated his daughter and son-in-law to positions of power in the White House. Their conflicts of interest have gone ignored or unresolved as they continue to serve.
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Other Investments And Debt
In 1984, Trump posed as his own spokesman John Barron and made false assertions of his wealth to secure a higher ranking on the Forbes 400 list of wealthy Americans, including by claiming he owned over 90 percent of his family’s business. Audio recordings of these claims were released in 2018 by journalist Jonathan Greenberg.
When the stock market crashed in October 1987, Trump told the press he had sold all his stock a month before and taken no losses. But SEC filings showed that he still owned large stakes in some companies. Forbes calculated that Trump had lost $19 million on his Resorts International holdings alone.
Challenging estimates of his net worth he considered too low, in 1989 Trump said he had very little debt. Reuters reported Trump owed $4 billion to more than 70 banks at the beginning of 1990.
In 1997, Ben Berzin Jr., who had been tasked with recovering at least some of the $100 million his bank had lent Trump, said “During the time that I dealt with Mr. Trump, I was continually surprised by his mastery of situational ethics. He does not seem to be able to differentiate between fact and fiction.”
A 1998 New York Observer article entitled “Tricky Donald Trump Beats Jerry Nadler in Game of Politics” reported that “Nadler flatly calls Mr. Trump a ‘liar’,” quoting Nadler stating, “Trump got $6 million in the dead of night when no one knew anything about it” by slipping a provision into a $200 billion federal transportation bill.
Looking Back At The Defining Falsehoods Of Trump’s Presidency
But that belief in the presidents words has become increasingly dependent on the political party to which a person belongs. Trump decries reports that are unflattering and facts that dont fit with his world view as fake news, fueling a growing partisan information divide on everything from the contagiousness of the coronavirus to the reliability of the media.
Trumps run for the presidency was fueled by political prominence gained by promoting the racist birther lie about President Barack Obama, and his 2016 victory was secured by a campaign rooted in false claims about immigrants and inner-city crime.
Once in the White House, the president routinely made false claims about everything from toilet flushes to tax reform. Some of Trumps false claims drove policy, while conspiracy theories were elevated in tweets and in public and private conversations with foreign leaders.
In the last year of his term, Trumps countless false claims about the coronavirus muddied the U.S. response to the pandemic, which has killed 339,062 people as of Dec. 29, according to an NBC News count. The presidents utterly baseless claim that the election was stolen from him delayed President-elect Joe Bidens transition for weeks hampering the incoming administrations efforts to prepare for wide-scale vaccine distribution and endangering national security, according to experts.
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But many experts, including a former director of the National Hurricane Center, took the side of Birmingham forecasters on social media and called the parent statement was “so disappointing,” — illustrating how Trump’s falsehoods eroded the credibility of the institutions around him, too.
“Either NOAA Leadership truly agrees with what they posted or they were ordered to do it,” Bill Read wrote on Facebook. “If it is the former, the statement shows a lack of understanding of how to use probabilistic forecasts in conjunction with other forecast information. Embarrassing. If it is the latter, the statement shows a lack of courage on their part by not supporting the people in the field who are actually doing the work. Heartbreaking.”
As with most of Trump’s false or misleading statements, enabled by the power of the presidency and his allies, “Sharpiegate,” too, appeared to blow over.
ABC News’ Ben Gittleson, Jordyn Phelps and Meg Cunningham contributed to this report.
We Asked A Psychologist Whether Donald Trump Is A Pathological Liar
Ted Cruz unleashed a stream of invective at Republican presidential primary foe Donald Trump on Tuesday, as voters headed to the polls in the crucial Indiana primary. Among the now-departed candidate’s pronouncements: Trump is a “pathological liar.”
Could that be true?
Mic asked a prominent political psychologist.
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Trump “has trouble with the truth and he has said things that he’s quite frankly wrong about and that appear to be flat-out lies and fabrications,” said Bart Rossi, who holds a doctorate from Fordham University.
That doesn’t mean he’s pathological, though: “I see him as a master manipulator. He’s deliberate in his fabrication,” said Rossi, whose career has included psychological evaluations of prison inmates and police officers.
“‘Pathological’ means that someone is going to go from one lie to the next to the next,” possibly without control, Rossi said.
In Trump’s case, it could very well be the opposite, according to Rossi. Trump doesn’t appear to be delusional: “He knows what he’s saying is wrong.”
In the world according to Cruz ironically, the man Trump nicknamed “Lyin’ Ted” while accusing him of underhanded campaign tactics Trump would ostensibly fit the profile of a pathological liar. For example, Cruz claimed Friday that practically everything Trump says is bull, which would match the description at hand.
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In The Art Of The Deal
Tony Schwartz is a journalist who ghostwroteTrump: The Art of the Deal. In July 2016, Schwartz was interviewed by for two articles in The New Yorker. In them, he described Trump, who was running for president at the time, highly unfavorably, and described how he came to regret writing The Art of the Deal. When Schwartz wrote The Art of the Deal, he created the phrase “truthful hyperbole” as an “artful euphemism” to describe Trump’s “loose relationship with the truth”. This passage from the book provides the context, written in Trump’s voice: “I play to people’s fantasies … People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggerationâand it’s a very effective form of promotion”. He said Trump “loved the phrase”.
Schwartz said “deceit” is never “innocent”. He added, “‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?'” Schwartz repeated his criticism on Good Morning America and Real Time with Bill Maher, saying he “put lipstick on a pig”.
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Washington Trying to pick the most notable lies from Donald Trump’s presidency is like trying to pick the most notable pieces of junk from the town dump.
The most telling lie: It didn’t rain on his inaugurationThe most dangerous lie: The coronavirus was under control The most alarming lie saga: SharpiegateThe most ridiculous subject of a lie: The Boy ScoutsThe ugliest smear lie: Rep. Ilhan Omar supports al QaedaThe most boring serial lie: The trade deficit with China used to be $500 billionThe most entertaining lie shtick: The burly crying men who had never cried beforeThe most traditional big lie: Trump didn’t know about the payment to Stormy Daniels The biggest lie by omission: Trump ended family separationThe most shameless campaign lie: Biden will destroy protections for pre-existing conditionsThe lie he fled: He got Veterans Choice
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Trumps Failure To Fill Government Vacancies
President Trump has purposefully left hundreds of vacancies in the federal government unfilled, rendering his transition the slowest in decades.
The Trump administration has failed to fill an unprecedented number of critical positions throughout the federal government. This is especially true in the State Department, where former Secretary of State Madeline Albright has called the absence of senior officials a national emergency. 51 Another former career federal official, R. Nicholas Burns of the State Department, said that theres no question this is the slowest transition in decades. It is a very, very big mistake. 52 Leaving key government decision-making offices vacant leads to dysfunction and wasted government resources as policies await direction.
Like most recent presidents, President Trump had more than 4,000 positions to fill when he took officeincluding more than 1,200 that require the Senates advice and consent. 53 The Washington Post, in collaboration with the Partnership for Public Service, has been tracking 633 of what they consider key executive branch nominations. 54 As of January 18, 2018, President Trump had yet to nominate anyone for 245 of those positions. 55
As of January 2018one year into the Trump administrationTrump had by far the fewest number of Senate-confirmed nominees in place compared to Presidents Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton, and George H.W. Bush at the same point in their presidencies. 59
What Are The Elements Of Trump’s Big Lie
1. The election was stolen because it’s not possible Trump didn’t win. this fact check from Daniel Dale
- “… millions of ballots that have been altered by Democrats, only for Democrats.”
- “All of the mechanical ‘glitches’ that took place on Election Night were really THEM getting caught trying to steal votes.”
- “700,000 ballots were not allowed to be viewed in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh which means, based on our great Constitution, we win the State of Pennsylvania!”
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If Trump Is A Pathological Liar What Type Of Liar Is Biden
Photograph Source: Matt Johnson CC BY 2.0
Bernie Sanders has routinely called Trump a pathological liar. The term pathological liar, a controversial one for psychiatrists, in common usage coveys someone who is an extraordinarily unrestrained liar. And so, Bernie knows that it is in no way radical to use this term to describe the unrelentingly self-serving Trump who unhesitatingly lies if he judges it to be in his self-interest. While Bernies diagnosis of Trump is a politically safe one, a more uncomfortable assessment for him would be: What type of liar is Joe Biden?
Ill get to Bidenwhose lies, not his gaffes, are what the Blue Team should worry most about. But first, some of what makes Trump an exceptional and extraordinary liar, even for a US president. Trump is obviously not the first politician to have zero allegiance to the truth, but he remains extraordinarynot merely in the sheer quantity of his lies but also in other ways.
The most obvious area of Trumps extraordinariness as a liar is his staggering number of lies. President Trump Made 16,241 False or Misleading Claims in His First Three Years was the headline of the Washington Post in January 2020, which reports, He averaged six such claims a day in 2017, nearly 16 a day in 2018 and more than 22 a day in 2019. This was before his 2020 epidemic of false and misleading claims around COVID-19.
Wicked or merely stupid? It is not only the British ruling class that provokes that question.
