Trump 31: Parody of a Presidency

[fraurosena]

Presidunce dear, your stable genius must have had a brain fart. How will you get cheap labour for Mar-a-Lago if you close the borders?

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

 

I just had a disturbing thought. Is Trump going to try and set up an impromptu rally at the same time as McCain's funeral? 

[onekidanddone]

Rufus have mercy! Is the world ready for another shit show? Is he going to get his "facts" straight this time? Is he going to be reading off cue cards? Is he going to completely contradict what he said the last time? Is he going to blame the Clinton for his own hot mess? But OBAMA! 

So many questions.

 

[Cartmann99]

From the article @onekidanddone linked to:

Quote

In what was reportedly a strategy cooked up between Trump and Giuliani without consulting lawyers or other White House figures, Giuliani appeared on multiple Fox News programs.

Unless they are being blackmailed for something that would land them in prison for a nice long stretch, why would Trump's other lawyers put up with this sort of nonsense?

I read something earlier this week about how Trump won't tell his other lawyers what was in the files that Cohen had about him. How are Trump's lawyers supposed to come up with a good defense if they have no idea what's in those files?!?

Rudy's Saturday night interview with Judge Jeanine:

 

[fraurosena]

Every time I read about him not listening or informing or even outright lying to his lawyers, I’m glad, because it means he’s digging his own grave and contributing to his own downfall.

But today I thought that if there is to be a trial and a conviction, the argument could be made that he didn’t have adequate representation, and what if any conviction and subsequent sentencing could be overthrown because of it, and the whole thing will have to be done over again?

Is that a possibility?

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Cartmann99]

47 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Every time I read about him not listening or informing or even outright lying to his lawyers, I’m glad, because it means he’s digging his own grave and contributing to his own downfall.

Oh, I agree with you. I just don't understand the point of going through the trouble of hiring lawyers, and then sabotaging them. 

Entire cold open from SNL:

Oh man, Jimmy Fallon as Jared! 

[fraurosena]

32 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

I just don't understand the point of going through the trouble of hiring lawyers, and then sabotaging them. 

It's because the stable genius believes he's smarter than any of them. Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your viewpoint.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

After 48 hour timeout, Trump sends Giuliani out for another train wreck

Truly, I think the Russians have seized control of Rudy Giuliani's mind, but it's gone pear shaped and he's completely out of control.  Michael Avenatti is  composing a tweet thanking Rudy personally and some WH aide is desperately trying to call Rudy's doctors to see about getting him on some meds.  Any meds. 

If our country weren't at stake, I'd see this as burlesque, with Trump high kicking to the back row. 

A brand new Infrastructure Week starts tomorrow! 

 

[Cartmann99]

11 hours ago, fraurosena said:

It's because the stable genius believes he's smarter than any of them. Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your viewpoint.

I guess since Trump is not responsible for finding new lawyers he doesn't care about the time spent on this task, but why go through all that when Trump: Super E. Genius Lawyer Edition can just represent himself?

C'mon people, it's not like you have to study or work hard to become a lawyer. You just make stuff up and collect a big paycheck. Watch a couple of episodes of your favorite courtroom drama to get the lingo, hang a sign on your front door, and watch the billions roll in. 

*whispers* If Trump ever does fire all of his lawyers and decide to represent himself, I may do some serious damage to myself laughing at his stupidity. 

[fraurosena]

14 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

*whispers* If Trump ever does fire all of his lawyers and decide to represent himself, I may do some serious damage to myself laughing at his stupidity. 

*whispers back* It wouldn't surprise me one bit if he does decide to represent himself, so we'll both be in a spot of bother. I tend to choke if I laugh too much so now I'm worried...

[JMarie]

I think Guiliani should be on TV as much as he wants, and let him appear on as many programs as he wants.  Loose lips sink ships, right??

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/06/politics/giuliani-cohen-payment-trump-allegations/index.html

Quote

One of President Donald Trump's attorneys in the Russia probe, Rudy Giuliani, left open the possibility that Michael Cohen might have doled out payments like the one he made to adult film star Stormy Daniels to other women.

In an interview Sunday on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Giuliani said Trump reimbursed Cohen with his own money in a retainer agreement for his services as Trump's personal attorney, which included $130,000 Cohen paid Daniels to keep quiet about allegations she had a sexual encounter with Trump.

"The agreement with Michael Cohen, as far as I know, is a longstanding agreement that Michael Cohen takes care of situations like this then gets paid for them sometimes," Giuliani said.

"So did Michael Cohen make payments to other women for the President?" Stephanopoulos asked.

"I have no knowledge of that, but I would think if it was necessary, yes," Giuliani replied. "He made payments for the President or he's conducted business for the President, which means he had legal fees, monies laid out and expenditures."

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Naked Truth About Trump"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — Before I get to America’s Mayor and America’s Nightmare, I would like to say this:

Michelle Wolf was right when she turned a gimlet eye on the media.

“You guys are obsessed with Trump,” the comedian said at the White House Correspondents Dinner. “Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him.

“I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. If you’re going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money, because he doesn’t have any.”

You know Donald Trump also believes that he is the best thing to ever happen to the media — and that he should be getting a cut of the action. There’s nothing he hates more than feeling that someone has profited off him, while he gets nothing. Remember when he proposed a $5 million ransom to show up at the CNN debate?

Donald Trump is damaging the country and civic discourse, and undermining the First Amendment. But this Batman cartoon villain with an uncanny gift for cliffhangers and lurid story lines is buoying journalism, giving us a reprieve while we figure out how to save ourselves in the digital age.

And he’s making journalists stars in a way they haven’t been since Watergate, inspiring documentaries and movies and helping them secure lucrative book and TV deals.

The most intense, toxic cat-and-mouse game in President Trump’s life is not with Robert Mueller. It’s with the press. (Besides, it’s not a cat-and-mouse game with Mueller; it’s just cat.)

Trump is an attention addict, and now he’s in a position to get all the attention in the world, as long as he keeps those sirens blaring. CNN has been on a constant Breaking News Alert for months. And we are Trump addicts, hooked on the hyperventilating rush of wild stories and all the great things that accrue from playing Beowulf to Trump’s Grendel.

As we pat ourselves on the back, though, for the grueling hours and Pulitzer-quality scoops, we should remember one thing: Even if we vanished tomorrow, Trump would probably end up in the same place.

You could put a nanny cam on the guy and leave the room, and he would crash out of his high chair. He incriminates himself faster than we can incriminate him. And he surrounds himself, in the Trumpland of Misfit Toys, with playmates who have that same perverse gift for self-incrimination and immolation.

You know you’re in trouble when Donald Trump has to correct you on the facts. And Rudy Giuliani is in trouble. He and the Donald, the lawyer who was a mob buster and the president who acts like a mob boss, cooked up a harebrained plan to get Trump past the Stormy Daniels problem.

The gruesome twosome, whose reputations have grown darker since the days when they swanned around New York as larger-than-life figuras, didn’t consult any top White House officials, even the counsel. When Ashley Parker, a Washington Post White House reporter, texted a West Wing adviser, the adviser texted back a string of emojis, including a popcorn box, as in they were just watching this horror movie from the audience.

Even on a great day, things are always unraveling with Trump. Chaos is always getting unleashed. Turbulence is always brewing.

So Rudy’s scheme quickly unraveled.

He admitted in TV interviews this week that President Trump had reimbursed Michael Cohen — also a Sean Hannity lawyer — for the $130,000 payoff to keep the porn star mum about her Lake Tahoe liaison with Trump, while claiming that the president didn’t know specifically what the payment was for. “Oh my goodness, I guess that’s what it was for,” Trump said, according to Giuliani, incredibly making the First Vulgarian sound more like Mike Pence or James Comey.

Instead of getting Trump out of a jam, it jammed him into a deeper hole, giving Mueller’s team new areas of legal inquiry and material to add to its mountain of damaging records, and possibly helping the special counsel fill in the blanks on the 70 blank subpoena forms he just requested from a courthouse in Virginia.

Trump distanced himself from his good friend, as he is wont to do, promising that Rudy will “get his facts straight.” This prompted Vanity Fair to write the headline: “Trump Assures Reporters He’ll Make Giuliani a Better Liar.”

Trump’s game is keeping everyone, especially the press, riveted.

“He needs the excitement,” says Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio. “Without the drama and the crisis and the powerful opponent, he’d be just another guy.”

D’Antonio compares Trump, who has compared himself to Babe Ruth and who once wrote a poem when he was 12 about being a baseball player — “I like to hear the crowd give cheers, so loud and noisy to my ears” — to Jimmy Piersall. Piersall, a charismatic and talented baseball player, described his emotional spiral in his memoir, “The Truth Hurts”: “Probably the best thing that happened to me was going nuts. It brought people out to the ballpark to get a look at me.”

The center fielder engaged in brawls, scuffles and pranks, once bringing a water pistol to home plate. Then one day he lost his grip; in a movie based on his life, that was depicted as him climbing up the backstop at Fenway Park.

“That may wind up happening with Trump,” D’Antonio says. “One day he might walk to Marine One stark naked and we’ll all just say: ‘This is the end. It has finally happened.’”

 

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"The Naked Truth About Trump"

  Reveal hidden contents

WASHINGTON — Before I get to America’s Mayor and America’s Nightmare, I would like to say this:

Michelle Wolf was right when she turned a gimlet eye on the media.

“You guys are obsessed with Trump,” the comedian said at the White House Correspondents Dinner. “Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him.

“I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. If you’re going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money, because he doesn’t have any.”

You know Donald Trump also believes that he is the best thing to ever happen to the media — and that he should be getting a cut of the action. There’s nothing he hates more than feeling that someone has profited off him, while he gets nothing. Remember when he proposed a $5 million ransom to show up at the CNN debate?

Donald Trump is damaging the country and civic discourse, and undermining the First Amendment. But this Batman cartoon villain with an uncanny gift for cliffhangers and lurid story lines is buoying journalism, giving us a reprieve while we figure out how to save ourselves in the digital age.

And he’s making journalists stars in a way they haven’t been since Watergate, inspiring documentaries and movies and helping them secure lucrative book and TV deals.

The most intense, toxic cat-and-mouse game in President Trump’s life is not with Robert Mueller. It’s with the press. (Besides, it’s not a cat-and-mouse game with Mueller; it’s just cat.)

Trump is an attention addict, and now he’s in a position to get all the attention in the world, as long as he keeps those sirens blaring. CNN has been on a constant Breaking News Alert for months. And we are Trump addicts, hooked on the hyperventilating rush of wild stories and all the great things that accrue from playing Beowulf to Trump’s Grendel.

As we pat ourselves on the back, though, for the grueling hours and Pulitzer-quality scoops, we should remember one thing: Even if we vanished tomorrow, Trump would probably end up in the same place.

You could put a nanny cam on the guy and leave the room, and he would crash out of his high chair. He incriminates himself faster than we can incriminate him. And he surrounds himself, in the Trumpland of Misfit Toys, with playmates who have that same perverse gift for self-incrimination and immolation.

You know you’re in trouble when Donald Trump has to correct you on the facts. And Rudy Giuliani is in trouble. He and the Donald, the lawyer who was a mob buster and the president who acts like a mob boss, cooked up a harebrained plan to get Trump past the Stormy Daniels problem.

The gruesome twosome, whose reputations have grown darker since the days when they swanned around New York as larger-than-life figuras, didn’t consult any top White House officials, even the counsel. When Ashley Parker, a Washington Post White House reporter, texted a West Wing adviser, the adviser texted back a string of emojis, including a popcorn box, as in they were just watching this horror movie from the audience.

Even on a great day, things are always unraveling with Trump. Chaos is always getting unleashed. Turbulence is always brewing.

So Rudy’s scheme quickly unraveled.

He admitted in TV interviews this week that President Trump had reimbursed Michael Cohen — also a Sean Hannity lawyer — for the $130,000 payoff to keep the porn star mum about her Lake Tahoe liaison with Trump, while claiming that the president didn’t know specifically what the payment was for. “Oh my goodness, I guess that’s what it was for,” Trump said, according to Giuliani, incredibly making the First Vulgarian sound more like Mike Pence or James Comey.

Instead of getting Trump out of a jam, it jammed him into a deeper hole, giving Mueller’s team new areas of legal inquiry and material to add to its mountain of damaging records, and possibly helping the special counsel fill in the blanks on the 70 blank subpoena forms he just requested from a courthouse in Virginia.

Trump distanced himself from his good friend, as he is wont to do, promising that Rudy will “get his facts straight.” This prompted Vanity Fair to write the headline: “Trump Assures Reporters He’ll Make Giuliani a Better Liar.”

Trump’s game is keeping everyone, especially the press, riveted.

“He needs the excitement,” says Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio. “Without the drama and the crisis and the powerful opponent, he’d be just another guy.”

D’Antonio compares Trump, who has compared himself to Babe Ruth and who once wrote a poem when he was 12 about being a baseball player — “I like to hear the crowd give cheers, so loud and noisy to my ears” — to Jimmy Piersall. Piersall, a charismatic and talented baseball player, described his emotional spiral in his memoir, “The Truth Hurts”: “Probably the best thing that happened to me was going nuts. It brought people out to the ballpark to get a look at me.”

The center fielder engaged in brawls, scuffles and pranks, once bringing a water pistol to home plate. Then one day he lost his grip; in a movie based on his life, that was depicted as him climbing up the backstop at Fenway Park.

“That may wind up happening with Trump,” D’Antonio says. “One day he might walk to Marine One stark naked and we’ll all just say: ‘This is the end. It has finally happened.’”

 

A good article but, please, anything but Trump and naked in the same sentence. There's not enough  for that! 

[47of74]

John McCain to Fuck Face: Don't attend my funeral.

Quote

Amid Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) battle with brain cancer, the 81-year-old reportedly wants President Donald Trump to stay away from his funeral.

Friends of the Vietnam war veteran and 2008 presidential candidate, who has had a rocky relationship with Trump, asked the White House that they send Vice President Mike Pence instead, The New York Timesand NBC News reportedon Saturday.

The service is planned for Washington’s National Cathedral and will have eulogies read by former Presidents Barack Obamaand George W. Bush, a source close to McCain told NBC News.

McCain has been battling an aggressive form of brain cancer since being diagnosed with the disease in July. He is recovering at his Sedona, Arizona, home after undergoing surgery for an intestinal infection last month.

Can't say I blame him.  I wouldn't want fuck face at my funeral either.  Or anything else for that matter. 

5 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

A good article but, please, anything but Trump and naked in the same sentence. There's not enough  for that! 

Yeah, not even a whole truckload of this would be enough to wash the mental images of a naked fuck face from my mind...

[Audrey2]

5 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

John McCain to Fuck Face: Don't attend my funeral.

Can't say I blame him.  I wouldn't want fuck face at my funeral either.  Or anything else for that matter. 

 

This is exactly why I'm praying Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush can somehow outlive Trump's presidency. I believe Carter is a good man and Bush, for his faults (not quite as many as his son, but still several) doesn't deserve Trump at his funeral either, especially since his family had been outspoken against Trump.

[Cartmann99]

13 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

A good article but, please, anything but Trump and naked in the same sentence. There's not enough  for that! 

Okay everyone, I've figured it out. @GreyhoundFan has secretly taken out life insurance policies on all of us, and now she's trying to scare us all to death by making us think about Trump being naked. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

7 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Okay everyone, I've figured it out. @GreyhoundFan has secretly taken out life insurance policies on all of us, and now she's trying to scare us all to death by making us think about Trump being naked. 

No, no, no, no, no...I need my fellow FJers to remain sane! I can't share my increasing appalled feelings about this circus of an administration without the folks here. I would never try to scare y'all to death.

 

Here's a good opinion piece from Walter Schaub: "Mar-a-Lago isn’t the ‘Winter White House.’ It’s just an embarrassing cash grab."

Spoiler

The “Southern White House” is a nearly perfect symbol of the Trump administration’s ethical failings. President Trump has on a number of occasions tweeted or spoken the phrase “Southern White House” in reference to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla. Last month, for example, while sitting beside Japan’s prime minister in front of a television crew at Mar-a-Lago, he proclaimed that the club is “indeed” the Southern White House, boasting, “And again, many, many people want to be here. Many of the leaders want to be here. They request specifically.”

But there is no “Southern White House.” The Confederate States of America claimed an executive mansion, first in Alabama and then in Richmond, but the Union’s victory in the Civil War ended that assertion. Other presidents had nicknames for their homes away from Washington, but those were private residences. President George W. Bush, for example, informally dubbed his private ranch in Texas the “Western White House” and even met foreign officials there, but it was a relatively private retreat. The ranch was a personal residence. Bush was not implying a link to government, and he definitely was not selling membership privileges with respect to the unassuming four-bedroom, single-story home on his ranch.

Now, there is only the sitting president’s conflicting financial interest 1,000 miles south of the seat of government. In contrast to the homes of his predecessors,  Trump’s ostentatious club is a commercial enterprise featuring guest suites, ballrooms, dining, a beach, pools, a spa, tennis courts, a “chip and putt” course, a fitness center and access to his affiliated golf courses. The phrase “Southern White House” is a transparent marketing pitch, connoting the availability of access to power for a price. Interested parties — be they captains of industry or agents of hostile foreign governments — can buy insider access to a place the president frequents. The initiation fee, which Trump doubled upon winning the election, is $200,000. He may belong to the people now, but the club belongs to him. Prospective purchasers can rest assured that their cash will still reach him.

This “Southern White House” branding is part of a broader effort that aims to lend official sanction to the president’s properties. When a lobbyist announced at a White House meeting that he was a member of one of Trump’s clubs, Trump responded, “Very good, very good.” Hope Hicks once masterfully pitched Mar-a-Lago’s link to government as the fulfillment of destiny, writing in an email to a reporter that, “[T]he president looks forward to using the property as the Southern White House, as it was intended to be.”

This allusion to what Mar-a-Lago “was intended to be” is a sinister distortion of history. Socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post donated the property to the federal government upon her death, in the hope, a friend of hers told the New York Times, that it might serve as a residence for hosting foreign dignitaries to rival those used for diplomacy in Europe. Exorbitant maintenance costs, however, led the government to return Mar-a-Lago to her foundation. Trump later bought the property and established his private club there. Post’s bequest could be read generously as an attempt to provide a venue for productive international relationships. Alternatively, one might cynically understand it as an elitist attempt to put American presidents and diplomats on a footing with sophisticated international counterparts. Either way, her plans became irrelevant when the government disowned the property, and they only withered further when Trump purchased it. Rather than establishing a second house of the people in Florida, he built a profitable leisure center for the privileged.

The link between government and  Trump’s financial interests is anything but normal. One popular definition holds that corruption is the misuse of entrusted authority for private gain. We entrust our leaders with great power, and it is their responsibility not only to use that authority solely for our benefit but also to demonstrate that they are using it solely for our benefit. Branding the president’s for-profit club as government-linked demonstrates the opposite.

Trump’s supporters might remind us that he is exempt from the primary criminal conflict of interest statute, 18 U.S.C. § 208, and most of the regulatory standards of conduct. This is true, but past presidents understood that their exemption from ethics requirements was not a reward for attaining high office; it was a practical necessity. The primary conflict of interest statute requires executive branch employees to recuse themselves from — meaning stay out of — any particular matters affecting their financial interests. A president simply cannot recuse from anything without shirking constitutional duties and depriving us of our chief executive official. The standards of conduct, which contain rules on such things as gifts, would be similarly difficult to apply to the president due to protocols of international diplomacy and other matters. Heads of state exchange gifts as signs of goodwill between nations, for instance.

Past presidents knew, however, that it would be wrong to hold themselves to lower ethical standards than those to which they held their subordinates. After all, the whole idea of government ethics is to ensure that power is used for the benefit of the people, and nobody in our government has more power than our president. Accordingly, all past presidents who took office since enactment of the Ethics in Government Act in 1978 fulfilled the spirit of the primary conflict of interest law by either divesting their conflicting financial interests or establishing qualified blind or diversified trusts certified by the Office of Government Ethics. They also adhered as closely as practicable to the standards of conduct, including the provisions on misuse of position.

Trump, who once pledged to “in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses,” failed to live up to this honorable tradition when he took office. Since then he has applied himself vigorously to monetizing the presidency. Making explicit the commingling of personal and public interests, the Trump Tower gift shop has been caught grotesquely hawking a Trump mug bearing the presidential seal, and the Trump Organization ordered tee markers with that seal for his golf courses. Each of his trips to his properties is an advertisement, inasmuch as the media must follow him and that he never misses an opportunity for promotion. Who could forget his recounting that his club was serving “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen” while he was bombing Syria?

I would say Trump is getting the kind of advertising money can’t buy, but we taxpayers are paying tens of millions for him to spend almost a third of his days in office visiting his properties. Some of the money goes into his pocket. We learned last fall that the Secret Service had paid him over $150,000 in golf cart rental fees for the privilege of guarding his life while he golfs. Last month, Public Citizen issued a report finding that Trump’s businesses had billed $15.1 million to campaign, political committee and federal government sources since he first launched his presidential campaign.

The spectacle of businesses, industry associations, politicians, political groups, charities and even countries booking events at his properties suggests that they are using his businesses to ingratiate themselves with him. Even if any have innocent motives, the appearance problem undermines government legitimacy all the same. Trump certainly hasn’t discouraged anyone looking to curry his favor. His businesses don’t refuse service to foreign governments. He has not pledged to stop visiting his properties, nor has he forbid his appointees from attending events at them. The White House doesn’t decline meetings with visitors who stay in his nearby Washington hotel, and sightings of White House staffers at the hotel’s bar are now commonplace.

This profiteering sets a bad tone from the top. It tells the 2.8 million civilian federal employees who work for him that the man at the top doesn’t care about government ethics. This departure from our government’s norms creates a pressure that the government ethics program may not be able to withstand indefinitely, especially if Trump’s successor engages in similar behavior. We have already seen a trickle-down effect on his appointees, with two Cabinet officials ousted for ethics problems and accusations of unethical behavior against EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, as well as a growing list of scandals that seem to erupt weekly, sometimes daily, in this administration. We should hope that his behavior is an aberration and that future Republican and Democratic administrations will restore the ethical norms of government. In the meantime, the phrase “Southern White House” is a symbol of corruption that should set alarm bells ringing.

 

[RainbowSky]

I'm sorry for this, but did a former mayor of NYC say that he thinks that there is an agreement that a lawyer hands out cash to take care of potential issues for the president as a regular thing? That this WASN'T a one time thing? Or am I misreading this somehow? And he didn't seem to think there was a problem with it? What the hell did I just see?

[GreyhoundFan]

"As the ‘King of Debt,’ Trump borrowed to build his empire. Then he began spending hundreds of millions in cash."

Spoiler

In the nine years before he ran for president, Donald Trump’s company spent more than $400 million in cash on new properties — including 14 transactions paid for in full, without borrowing from banks — during a buying binge that defied real estate industry practices and Trump’s own history as the self-described “King of Debt.”

Trump’s vast outlay of cash, tracked through public records and totaled publicly here for the first time, provides a new window into the president’s private company, which discloses few details about its finances.

It shows that Trump had access to far more cash than previously known, despite his string of commercial bankruptcies and the Great Recession’s hammering of the real estate industry. 

Why did the “King of Debt,” as he has called himself in interviews, turn away from that strategy, defying the real estate wisdom that it’s unwise to risk so much of one’s own money in a few projects? 

And how did Trump — who had money tied up in golf courses and buildings — raise enough liquid assets to go on this cash buying spree?

From the outside, it is difficult to assess how much cash the Trump Organization has on hand.

Eric Trump, a son of the president who helps manage the company, told The Washington Post that none of the cash used to purchase the 14 properties came from outside investors or from selling off major Trump Organization assets. 

Instead, Eric Trump said, the firm’s existing businesses — commercial buildings in New York, licensing deals for Trump-branded hotels and clothes — produced so much cash that the Trumps could tap that flow for spending money. 

“He had incredible cash flow and built incredible wealth,” Eric Trump said. “He didn’t need to think about borrowing for every transaction. We invested in ourselves.”

He added: “It’s a very nice luxury to have.”

The cash purchases began with a $12.6 million estate in Scotland in 2006. In the next two years, he snapped up two homes in Beverly Hills. Then five golf clubs along the East Coast. And a winery in Virginia. 

The biggest cash binge came last, in the year before Trump announced his run for president. In 2014, he paid a combined $79.7 million for large golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. Since then, those clubs have lost money while Trump renovated them, requiring him to pump in $164 million in cash to keep them running.

Trump’s lavish spending came at a time when his business was leaning largely on one major financial institution for its new loans — Deutsche Bank, which provided $295 million in financing for big projects in Miami and Washington.

Eric Trump said his father wasn’t forced to turn to a cash-heavy strategy. Trump could have borrowed more if he wanted, he said. But he had soured on borrowing in general, Eric Trump said, after contending with unpaid debts in the early 1990s.

“Those lessons undoubtedly shaped his business approach and the conservative nature of how we conduct business today,” Eric Trump said. 

Real estate investors typically don’t buy big properties with their money alone. They find partners to invest and banks to lend alongside them. That allows the investors to amplify their buying power, and it increases the odds of earning higher returns. 

“For privately held real estate firms, basically they like to use as much debt as they can. The only brakes are put on by the lending institutions, who don’t want to lend too much,” said David Geltner, a professor of real estate finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Industry experts said avoiding loans can alleviate risk for real estate companies and allow them to maneuver more quickly. 

But they said that approach is typically undertaken by cash-rich investors that aren’t focused on maximizing the money they make off a property or by companies that aren’t trying to minimize their tax bills, because interest payments on mortgages are often tax-deductible. Companies that have trouble obtaining loans would also turn to cash, they noted. 

Particularly when pursuing major projects, private real estate firms usually borrow. “I still think at the end of the day, you want some debt,” said Ed Walter, a Georgetown University real estate professor and former chief executive of Host Hotels, which owns more than 100 hotels under various brands.

Trump himself embraced that philosophy — extolling the virtues of borrowing big, even more enthusiastically than other real estate executives. Until, suddenly, he didn’t.

To total up Trump’s cash payments in real estate transactions, The Washington Post examined land records and corporate reports from six U.S. states, Ireland and the United Kingdom. These records show purchase prices for Trump’s properties, details about any mortgages and — in the United Kingdom and Ireland — the amount of cash Trump plowed into his clubs after he bought them. The Post provided the figures it used to the Trump Organization, which did not dispute them.

... < graphs >

Documents tell the story — written in tiny type and in the lifeless prose of lawyers — of Trump’s flashy career in real estate.

It was a career built on chutzpah, debt . . . and more debt.

“He always used other people’s money. That’s for sure. Not cash,” said Barbara Res, who was a top executive for Trump throughout the 1980s and continued to work for him for most of the 1990s. “He always got somebody to put up funds for him. To put up the money. And he’d put up the brilliance.”

Debt helped make Trump in the first place, allowing the prince of an outer-borough apartment empire to play a king in Manhattan. 

In 1988, when Trump bought New York’s famed Plaza Hotel, he paid $407.5 million. He got a $425 million loan.

“If the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a dollar,” Trump bragged to a reporter in 1988. He said he had offloaded the risk by investing and borrowing against other people’s money. 

But then it was debt that nearly sank Trump, when a late-’80s recession undercut his risky investments in hotels, casinos and airplanes. Among the things he lost was the Plaza: The bank took it back and sold it for $325 million in 1995. He never personally went bankrupt, but his real estate holdings dwindled. 

Then debt helped him come back. 

After several low years in the 1990s, Trump began to rebuild his real estate business with borrowed money. He got mortgages to buy an office building on Wall Street. Golf courses in Florida and New York. A $700,000 home in Palm Beach, Fla.

George Ross, a senior counsel who advised Trump for 25 years, summed up the developer’s attitude toward debt in one sentence.

“Borrow as much as you can for as long as you can,” Ross wrote in his book “Trump Strategies for Real Estate.” 

In the book, Ross explained that borrowing allowed Trump to seed his money into multiple projects at once, then fill out the rest with loans and partners’ investments, protecting his bank account and getting significant tax write-offs on the interest he had to pay.

“When Trump invests in a real estate project, he typically puts up less of his own money than you might think,” Ross wrote, explaining how Trump followed this rule. “Typically, his investors in the project will put up 85 percent while Trump puts up 15 percent.”

Then in 2006, the same year Ross’s book was published, Trump changed his approach.

He began buying up land near Aberdeen, on Scotland’s North Sea coast. Trump ultimately paid $12.6 million for the property. He’s spent at least $50 million more to build a golf course there, which was wrapped up in land-use fights and didn’t open until 2012.

“Even his closest senior advisers in NYC were surprised” that Trump paid cash, recounted Neil Hobday, a British developer who worked on the Aberdeen project with Trump. 

Why did he do it? 

Hobday said it was a personal connection: Trump’s mother was born in Scotland.

“He was, I believe, ‘mystically’ connected and hooked to this project. All my conversations with him were almost on an emotional rather than hard business level,” Hobday wrote in an email to The Post.

But Trump soon began to buy other properties in cash, in places far from his mother’s homeland. 

In 2008 and 2009, he paid $17.4 million in cash for two neighboring Beverly Hills homes.

In 2009, Trump spent at least $6.7 million on two golf clubs, one outside New York City and another outside Philadelphia.

In Charlottesville, he paid $16.2 million for a winery, buying up the first plots in 2011. “I own it 100 percent, no mortgage, no debt. You can all check,” Trump said of that winery during the 2016 campaign.

By 2011, Trump had spent at least $46 million on all-cash purchases. 

Public records reveal some details about the Trump Organization’s finances during this time period.

The company was taking in tens of millions from the sale of residential properties, including a home in Palm Beach for $95 million in 2008. It made money off licensing deals: In 2015, Trump reported making at least $9.1 million from those deals over 16 months. The firm also collected rent from its commercial buildings, producing what Forbes recently estimated was $175 million annually.

But that wasn’t all free cash. Those businesses came with costs — salaries, renovations, taxes, payments on existing mortgages — that pulled money out of the business. Those costs haven’t been released.

In the same period, some of Trump’s companies also experienced financial problems. His publicly traded casino and hotel company declared bankruptcy in 2009. And in 2008, Trump sued Deutsche Bank to challenge the size of his payments on a loan related to his tower in Chicago. Trump’s logic in that case: The 2008 financial crisis had crushed the real estate business so completely that it should be considered like an act of God.

Eric Trump said that, in this time, the company had accumulated enough cash to have ready spending money, so it could bid on short notice.

When the Trumps felt an emotional connection to a property, Eric Trump said, they didn’t want to wait for banks and outside partners to sign off. So they paid cash.

“We want to be nimble. If we see an unbelievable opportunity or something that interests us, we want to jump on it,” he said. 

“With lenders, every time you sneeze, you have to write a four-page report,” he added.

Despite that distaste for bankers’ paperwork, the Trump Organization still obtained loans in this period from Deutsche Bank. Starting in 2012, Trump borrowed $125 million from Deutsche to purchase the Doral golf club in Florida and $170 million from the same bank to renovate the Old Post Office into a hotel in Washington. The Trump Organization declined to comment about why it turned to borrowing in these cases.

Trump spent $65 million of his own on those two deals to cover the costs that Deutsche Bank did not. 

Then the spending got bigger.

The year before he launched his campaign for president, Trump made the two most expensive all-cash purchases that The Post found in its review. In 2014, he shelled out $79.7 million for the huge golf resorts in Doonbeg, Ireland, and Turnberry, Scotland — both of which were losing money at the time. 

The golf courses were his most recent cash deals and last acquisitions before becoming president.

The Trump Organization pursued pricey renovations of both courses, during which time the properties have continued to suffer losses. Under Trump, the two courses are at least $240 million in the hole so far, according to British and Irish corporate records. 

Had Trump financed the property, the risks to the investment would be shared among lenders and other partners.

Geltner said it was unusual to see a company not bring in financial partners in either the purchase or construction of such large development projects. 

Eric Trump said that when he, his brother, Donald Trump Jr., and sister, Ivanka Trump, joined their father’s business over a decade ago, they agreed to grow the company around properties that would produce income long-term. 

He said that they would never sell any of their properties and that he expected the European clubs to lose money while they were being renovated. The Trumps plan to wait, work and eventually make their money back. 

“You’re going to have some operational losses,” he said, “and then you get into the black, and you make great money.”

During the 2016 campaign, Trump continued to brag about how he’d mastered the art of spending other people’s cash.

“I do that all the time in business: It’s called other people’s money. There’s nothing like doing things with other people’s money because it takes the risk,” Trump told a campaign-trail audience in North Carolina in September 2016. “You get a good chunk of it, and it takes the risk.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Daily 202: Rudy Giuliani is repeating seven mistakes that brought down previous Trump advisers"

Spoiler

Rudy Giuliani has neither reduced Donald Trump’s legal exposure nor helped him in the court of public opinion during his weeklong media blitz, but the former New York City mayor’s pugnacity has pleased the president. Can it last?

Giuliani huddled with Trump yesterday afternoon at his golf club in Sterling, Va., to discuss legal strategy after he appeared on Fox News Saturday night and ABC on Sunday morning. Then he spoke with several other reporters by phone.

Rudy’s public comments have primarily been aimed at an audience of one, from likening FBI agents to “stormtroopers” to describing James Comey as “Judas” and calling on Jeff Sessions to investigate the people investigating Michael Cohen.

Giuliani is being as aggressive as Trump has said he wants his lawyers to be. He asserted yesterday that Trump does not need to comply if special counsel Robert Mueller subpoenas him, opened the door to the president invoking the Fifth Amendment if forced to testify and then declared that “the founding fathers created immunity for a president, so the president can't be indicted.”

“I am focused on the law more than the facts right now,” he told CNN last night.

Earlier in the day, he told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week”: “My issue is getting up to speed on the facts here. I’m about halfway there.”

Some lawyers might wait to defend their client on television until they were all the way there. Not Rudy. But this is not actually his biggest problem.

Giuliani is repeating seven of the mistakes that have felled previously high-flying Trump aides, who rose rapidly only to fall out of favor:

1. He’s overconfident about his standing with the president.

“We’ve made a deal this weekend: He stays focused on North Korea, Iran and China, and we stay focused on the case and we’ll bother him when we have to,” Giuliani told The Washington Post’s Robert Costa yesterday after his meeting with Trump.

The cigar-chomping politician, fresh off his third divorce, added that the recent media blitz has “all worked out” because “we’re setting the agenda.”

“Everybody’s reacting to us now, and I feel good about that because that’s what I came in to do,” he told Bob.

People often feel emboldened after getting hired by Trump, only to get their legs cut out from underneath them after they overinterpret their mandate. The best example of this was Anthony Scaramucci’s 11-day tenure as White House communications director. Many observers see parallels with Giuliani. The Mooch himself responded last night:

Challenging Giuliani’s statement that he knew about the hush money paid to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, Trump on Friday said Giuliani “just started a day ago” and is “learning the subject matter.” (In fact, it had been 15 days at that point.) “Rudy is great, but Rudy has just started and he wasn’t familiar with everything,” Trump told reporters on his way to speak at the NRA convention. “He’ll get his facts straight.”

In an interview that afternoon with The Post, Giuliani said Trump was not actually mad at him. “He says he loves me,” Giuliani said.

Trump always “loves” his advisers – until he doesn’t.

2. He’s acting like a principal, not a staffer.

The man who was called “America’s Mayor” after the Sept. 11th attacks – who was once seen as a frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination and who earned notoriety in the 1980s as a swashbuckling and self-promoting U.S. attorney – sees himself as a principal who calls the shots. That’s understandable. But when he's representing the president, he’s not.

Giuliani, who turns 74 this month, is a staffer now – a retainer, a spokesman, an adviser. He’s got stature, but he’s still just one lawyer in a stable of them – representing a client who struggles to take counsel and churns through attorneys. He’s serving at the pleasure of a mercurial president who prizes loyalty above all else.

Trump also hates when others hog the spotlight, and he tends to diminish people when he thinks they’ve gotten too big for their britches or get too much credit for what he’s doing. The beginning of the end for White House chief strategist Steve Bannon came when he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine and “Saturday Night Live” portrayed him as a Grim Reaper-like figure who told Trump what to do.

3. He’s embarrassing the president.

Giuliani’s evolving explanations about the $130,000 that Cohen paid to Daniels have raised more questions than they’ve answered. He said Sunday that it is possible that the president’s longtime fixer paid off other women to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump. “I have no knowledge of that, but I would think if it was necessary, yes,” he said on ABC, adding that Cohen is no longer Trump’s attorney. (It’s unclear if that’s correct, and Cohen didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Rudy told BuzzFeed last Wednesday that Cohen “had complained to some people” after the 2016 election that he’d not been fully paid by Trump. “At some point — Giuliani said he did not know when or where specifically — Cohen met with Trump and told him of his complaint,” the site reported. “Giuliani said that Trump told Cohen, ‘We’ll cover your expenses,’ and agreed to pay him $35,000 a month ‘out of his personal funds’ over the course of a year-long period that began in the first few months of 2017 and has since ended.”

Stephanopoulos asked about this yesterday. “Those are the facts that we’re still working on,” Giuliani replied. “And that, you know, may be in a little bit of dispute. This is more rumor than it is anything else.”

“But that’s what you said. You said that to BuzzFeed,” the anchor replied.

“Well, yes,” Giuliani said. “That’s one of the possibilities and one of the rumors.”

“You stated it as fact,” Stephanopoulos shot back.

“Well, maybe I did,” said Giuliani. “But I — right now, I’m at the point where I’m learning, and I can only — I can’t prove that. I can just say it’s rumor. I can prove it’s rumor, but I can’t prove it’s fact. Yet. Maybe we will. … I don’t know how you separate fact and opinion.”

Giuliani also said Trump fired Comey because the then-FBI director wouldn’t clear him in the Russia investigation, which the president has admitted in the past but is at odds with the official rationale that it was due to his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. “He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn’t a target of the investigation,” Giuliani told Hannity.

4. He’s clashing with the kids.

Giuliani told Sean Hannity last week that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, is “disposable.” He was making the point that Mueller shouldn’t target Ivanka Trump, the first daughter. “Men are disposable. But a fine woman like Ivanka? Come on,” Giuliani said. “I think I would get on my charger and go right into ... their offices with a lance if they go after Ivanka.”

The dig came partly because Giuliani still blames Kushner for Trump passing him over for secretary of state last year, but being on the wrong side of Javanka has imperiled many West Wing aides. “In private, according to a Republican close to the White House, Giuliani has also blamed the negative view of him in the media, including the whispers about his mental health, on Kushner and Ivanka Trump,” Politico’s Annie Karni reports. “Some point to Giuliani’s main ally in the White House as an explanation: Giuliani, according to people in the building, has aligned himself with Don McGahn, the White House counsel who has clashed repeatedly with Kushner. ‘He’s spent time with him getting indoctrinated,’ said a White House official. ‘Giuliani and McGahn are largely aligned. Rudy’s heard from McGahn that everything would be better without Jared, and he just assumes that’s commonly understood without better understanding the nuance.’”

5. He’s earning the enmity of some key Trump friends.

Alan Dershowitz, the emeritus Harvard law professor who has been informally advising Trump about how to deal with the Russia investigation, chastised Giuliani publicly yesterday. “They're admitting to enough that warrants scrutiny,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It shouldn't be put on television shows off the cuff. This is not the way to handle a complicated case.”

Others who work inside the White House are also angling to undercut Rudy. “If the Giuliani circus continues unabated … White House staff will likely quit,” Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported Sunday, citing “a well-placed source.”

6. He keeps going outside his lane.

Giuliani announced out of the blue last week on “Fox and Friends” that North Korea was poised to release three Americans being held hostage. This was supposed to stay a secret. 

"We can't confirm the validity of any of the reports currently out about their release," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders replied at her briefing later in the day, using a euphemism to refer to the president’s own lawyer.

But Giuliani came back to the same topic on Saturday, announcing during a speech that there’s a “good chance” the hostages will be freed in the coming days. He made that comment at the Iran Freedom Convention for Democracy and Human Rights in an unscripted speech that covered a range of topics. Speaking about the Iran nuclear deal, Rudy picked up a piece of paper and pretended to rip it apart: “What do you think is going to happen to that agreement?!”

Trump does not like being boxed in like this or when aides go on the record to get out in front of him.

7. He’s making predictions about Mueller’s investigation that seem unlikely to come true.

One reason the president grew to dislike Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer he hired last summer who departed last week, is that he felt like he didn’t give him good advice. Cobb repeatedly said after he got the job that he thought Mueller’s work would be wrapped up quickly.

“I’d be embarrassed if this is still haunting the White House by Thanksgiving and worse if it’s still haunting him by year end,” Cobb told Reuters last August. “I think the relevant areas of inquiry by the special counsel are narrow.”

That obviously turned out to be wrong.

Giuliani is now making bold statements about where Mueller’s investigation is headed that legal experts don’t think will pan out.

“Among his ludicrous pronouncements, Giuliani now declares that the chances that Mueller would subpoena Trump are ‘50/50,’” writes Jennifer Rubin, a longtime practicing lawyer before becoming a blogger. “Where does Giuliani get his ‘50/50’ analysis? He made it up. Let me give a better prediction: 90/10. Trump is a critical witness whose testimony can materially affect charges against himself and others, including Cohen and Paul Manafort. It would be a dereliction of Mueller’s duties as a prosecutor not to seek the information. The notion that he would not try to subpoena Trump because he might lose in court is nonsensical. The available precedent is all on Mueller’s side, and the potential that one might lose in court or that it might take time to enforce the subpoena would have little, if any, impact on Mueller’s thinking. … Count this 50/50 hooey as another instance of Giuliani’s atrocious legal advice.”

-- Rudy’s media tour has provided fodder for every late-night comedian.

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