Donald Trump likes to refer to Hillary Clinton as “Crooked Hillary” and say how she belongs in jail (and he says that *she* is the “mean”, “nasty” one! but that projection and hypocrisy is a story for another day). Well, let’s take a closer look, and see who’s the crooked one, who belongs in jail.
Trump has been involved in so many questionable activities, it’s hard to know where to begin. So I’ll just jump in with some.
There’s Trump University, where many of the people that paid for courses and instruction ending up saying it was a ripoff and a scam. Trump is being sued by at least one state (New York), and there are multiple class-action suits against him as well.
One state he is not being sued in is Florida. Why not? Well, the AG there, Pam Bondi, was looking into pursuing a fraud investigation against Trump U. So what does she so? She personally solicits Trump for a donation for her reelection campaign. And what do you know, a few days later, Trump donates $25,000. And then, a few days later, she says she’s not going to investigate or sue Trump. Nahhh, nothing fishy there.
And Florida isn’t the only state where something like this happened. In Texas, the AG, Greg Abbott, was also considering a lawsuit against Trump U, back in 2010. It was dropped though, and later Trump donated $35,000 to Abbott, who is now the Governor of Texas.
Interestingly, Trump is on record with quotes like the following:
As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.
When I want something I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass. It’s true.
BTW, the donation to Bondi actually came from the Trump Foundation, which is illegal, and Trump had to pay a fine to the IRS for it.
Another big, repeated issue, is how Trump refuses to pay workers and contractors, often leading to Trump being sued for non-payment and/or breach of contract. And we’re not talking about just a few times stiffing people of tens or hundreds of dollars. There have apparently been hundreds or thousands of these cases, sometimes involving hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars, with devastating effects on small businesses and their owners and employees.
And don’t buy Trump’s BS that this is typical in the business/real estate world, or that he’s just doing it because the work wasn’t up to par. You make a deal with someone, you stick to it, you don’t rip them off or shortchange them. This is apparently a very very standard business practice of Trump’s.
In fact, Trump has even been sued over unpaid bills by legal firms that represented him in some of these suits brought by contractors.
By now, pretty much everyone knows about the almost-billion dollar loss Trump declared on his taxes, allowing him to avoid paying federal income taxes for almost 20 years. But there are many questions about whether how he did this was entirely legal.
For instance, related to such financial losses by Trump, bondholders were forced to forgive hundreds of millions of dollars of debt. Such debt forgiveness should be counted as taxable income. But Trump apparently used some tax shenanigans, usually reserved for corporations, not partnerships, as he was in at the time, to get around this.
From this article:
…, Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would likely declare it improper if he were audited.
“Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.
Other tax questions arise related to the Trump Foundation, mainly involving “self-dealing”. This article does a good job covering them.
Other questions arise around Trump’s connections with Russia. The way Trump deals with and talks about Vladimir Putin and Russia is somewhat odd (well, there are explanations, related to Trump’s personality and idiosyncrasies). Generally he’s got pretty bad things to say about foreign countries (e.g., China and Mexico), but generally he only has positive things to say about Putin and Russia. That’s odd, because Putin is really a despicable person, and he’s doing some despicable things (e.g., in Ukraine and Syria). Beyond that, he’s trying to revamp Russia into more of the superpower they were in the days of the USSR. So you’d think anyone in line for leadership in the USA would be very wary of what Putin’s doing, and be very careful about dealing with Putin and Russia. So why does Trump gush over him?
So it’s interesting that there’s some reporting and investigation about Russia’s connections with Trump. Just recently there was an article by David Corn, an experienced national security and intelligence reporter, about a retired spy who found “troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government”.
Some of these investigations have to do with Trump’s previous campaign manager, Paul Mananfort, who had to resign when reports of his connections with Ukrainian and Russian interests became more prominent.
The final thing I’ll comment on here — perhaps you’ve been waiting for me to get to it, as it’s the most salacious and prominent thing related to Trump — are the sexual assault stories and accusations, most of which have come out in the last several weeks. Basically, the guy is caught on tape multiple times bragging about sexually assaulting women — grabbing them by their genitalia, kissing them without asking, walking in to dressing rooms unannounced at beauty pageants — and then over a dozen women come out with stories of him doing *exactly* those things.
What do you say about this?! This alone should be enough for him to be dropped from serious consideration for the presidency. How can *anyone* support him after this? Yet many still do.
Some people say it’s not true, it’s just “locker room” talk, that what he was talking about didn’t happen. Ummm, these people are *nuts*, they have no ability to objectively judge truth. When a guy is caught admitting something like that in what he thought was private, and then over a dozen women come out and say that, yes, in fact, that did happen, he did that to them, it’s not reasonable to just ignore it or say it’s made up. We’re talking about over a dozen, independent, corroborated reports — of things Trump himself, in an unguarded moment, said he did. (In fact, these are probably some of the few times Trump has told the truth.)
Then there are people who say it doesn’t matter. *It doesn’t matter?!* These people are saying it’s OK to elect someone who is a serial sexual assaulter to the highest office in the land, the most powerful position in the world?! Absurd! To compound things, these are most likley voters for whom “family values” have been so important in past elections — and now they show their “family values” by saying it doesn’t matter if they vote for a sexual predator!
Well, there you have it. A compendium of some of Crooked Trump’s greatest hits. You’ve got fraud, breach of contract, tax evasion, sexual assault, bribery, and possibly a whole lot more. The thing is, there’s *even* more out there. In such a small space I can’t possibly cover all the things I know about, and I’m sure there’s plenty more that I don’t even know about.
As digby writes:
The narratives were set early in the campaign cycle, with Trump being the bigoted, crazy one and Clinton being the corrupt one. That’s just how the media frames the contest.
They got it wrong. Yes, Trump is the crazy, bigoted one. He’s also a misogynist and worse. But he’s also the corrupt one, perhaps even more than most of us who had already understood that ever imagined.