Whitaker shows the entire world how inept Republicans are. The reason Donald Trump says I don’t know the guy is because he doesn’t know the guy.
The guy he just made acting Attorney General of the justice system for the entire United States.
It seems the White House was shocked and surprised that Whittaker made all these past comments. G how could they have found out what he said when he worked at CNN?
They could’ve gone to a website called Google.
They could’ve just read quotes and watched a video of Whittaker. That might’ve given them a clue.
Trump the Fraud
Donald, Ivanka, and Donald Trump, Jr., promote a Panama real-estate project at an event in New York in 2006.
Photograph by Orjan F. Ellingvag / Dagbladet / Corbis / Getty
What, exactly, is
Donald Trump’s business? The Trump Organization is unusual in that it doesn’t appear to do the same thing for very long. It was a builder of apartments for the lower middle class, then a builder of luxury buildings and hotels, then a casino company, and, most recently, a brand-licensing firm, selling its name to anybody who wanted “trump” emblazoned on a building, bottled water, or whatever else. These are wildly different businesses. The way a company raises money, plans projects, and gains profit are entirely different in each of these fields. Middle-class housing, for example, is typically a slow, steady business in which profits come from careful cost control; luxury housing, by contrast, is riskier, with bigger and faster rewards but a higher chance of failure. One hires different sorts of accountants and salespeople and construction managers. Casinos are something else entirely, and licensing is entirely different from any of those other businesses.
It is becoming increasingly clear that, in the language of business schools, the Trump Organization’s core competency is in profiting from misrepresentation and deceit and, potentially, fraud. There are many ways to make money in real estate. The normal way is to identify a need in the market, raise money by convincing lenders or investors that your plan is sound, build the structure, then either profit through ongoing rent or by selling units. The key variables in such a business are what is known as product-market fit—the accuracy with which a developer understands the housing or commercial needs of a place—and the ability to execute well by keeping costs down without sacrificing the right level of quality. Perhaps more than anything, practitioners of a successful real-estate business obsessively focus on maintaining the ability to borrow money cheaply. The profit on many real-estate projects often comes down to simple math: the cheaper you can borrow money to build, the more money you make. The more trustworthy you are, through a long period of successful projects, the less interest banks will demand on their loans, so the more profit you can make, and the more successful you will be.
Rather famously, Trump overinvested in luxury housing, spent too much on his casinos, and completely blew his brief foray into a regional airline. Far worse, Trump did the very opposite of insuring a long record of fiscal prudence that would allow him to borrow money cheaply. Despite the company’s mixed record, it has survived and grown. It’s doing something well, so what is it?
This month, two incredible investigative stories have given us an opportunity to lift the hood of the Trump Organization, look inside, and begin to understand what the business of this unusual company actually is. It is not a happy picture. The
Times published a
remarkable report, on October 2nd, that showed that much of the profit the Trump Organization made came not from successful real-estate investment but from defrauding state and federal governments through tax fraud. This week, ProPublica and WNYC
co-published a stunning story and a “
Trump, Inc.” podcast that can be seen as the international companion to the
Times piece. They show that many of the Trump Organization’s international deals also bore the hallmarks of financial fraud, including money laundering, deceptive borrowing, outright lying to investors, and other potential crimes.
The reporters—Heather
