Trump 41: Waiting For My Impeachment

[GreyhoundFan]

Not surprising in the least: "Owners of former Trump hotel in Panama say president’s firm evaded taxes"

Spoiler

The majority owners of the former Trump Panama hotel — who last year removed President Trump’s name and cut ties with his company — say they’ve discovered old financial records showing that the Trump Organization was evading Panamanian taxes, according to a new legal filing.

That filing was made Monday in federal court in New York by Orestes Fintiklis, a Cypriot investor whose company is the majority owner of the building that once housed the Trump Ocean Club in Panama City. In March 2018, Fintiklis sought to fire the Trump Organization as the hotel’s manager — setting off an odd 10-day standoff that included visits from the police, shoving matches between Fintiklis’s staffers and Trump loyalists, and occasional piano concerts by Fintiklis in the lobby. Eventually, a Panamanian judge gave him control.

Now, the hotel is a Marriott. But Trump’s company and Fintiklis are still suing each other for millions in damages, with each accusing the other of breaching their prior agreements.

In Monday’s filing, Fintiklis says he was able to examine the hotel’s books after ejecting Trump employees, and those books showed that the Trump Organization was not paying Panama the required 12.5 percent tax on the management fees it collected to run the hotel. Fintiklis said Trump’s company also avoided taxes by underreporting the salaries it paid to hotel employees.

In the filing, Fintiklis does not give a dollar figure for the amount of taxes Trump allegedly evaded. But he says his company could now face “millions of dollars in liability” if Panama demands that it pay the taxes Trump did not. Fintiklis also asserts that the Panamanian authorities have audited the hotel’s books and “identified the failure to withhold and pay income taxes relating to Trump’s management fees.” But the filing offers no proof of a Panamanian government audit. The Washington Post was not able to reach tax authorities in Panama on Monday evening.

“Had Trump been honest . . . about its failure to pay taxes on the management fees it earned and its failure to properly report employee salaries to Panama’s social security agency,” Fintiklis says, his company would not have purchased his share of the hotel in 2017.

Trump’s company on Monday denied any wrongdoing.

“The Trump Organization did not evade any taxes. To the extent any taxes were to be withheld, it was the responsibility” of the building’s owners, company spokeswoman Kim Benza wrote in an email. “The Trump Organization’s only role was to manage the property. We look forward to taking the depositions of Mr. Fintiklis and his partners and unmasking their fraud.”

Fintiklis’s suit also accuses Trump’s company of misleading him in the months before he bought into the building, assuring him that the building was outperforming the rest of the Panama City luxury hotel market. Instead, Fintiklis says, the hotel was falling to the bottom of the market. He also accuses Trump’s company of understating the management fees it took for running the hotel.

Trump still owns the Trump Organization, though he has handed over day-to-day control to his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric.

Last year, after Trump lost control of the hotel, an attorney for Trump’s company wrote directly to Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela, appealing for his help and suggesting that the Panamanian government could be blamed for the loss. Varela said he did not take any action as a result, and Trump’s lawyers later said they had done it without asking the Trump Organization first.

 

[kpmom]

20 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Let the leadership just waft over you: "Trump urges customers to drop AT&T to punish CNN over its coverage of him"

  Reveal hidden contents

President Trump raised a familiar complaint — “unfair” coverage by CNN — in a pair of Monday morning tweets. But this time he took the unusual step of calling on supporters to boycott the cable news network’s corporate parent, AT&T, to drive his point home.

“I believe that if people stoped [sic] using or subscribing to AT&T, they would be forced to make big changes at CNN, which is dying in the ratings anyway,” Trump tweeted. “It is so unfair with such bad, Fake News!”

The president has repeatedly taken aim at the news network, which he routinely derides as “fake news,” and many of its on-air personalities over their coverage of him and his administration. Trump was vocal in his opposition to AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner — “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few, he has said. But critics contend his position is intrinsically linked to his ire at CNN.

The Justice Department sued to try to block the deal on the grounds it violated antitrust laws, but a federal appeals court upheld the merger in late February, giving the entertainment giant WarnerMedia extensive power over a wide array of television, film and video game properties. House Democrats have since demanded access to documents pertaining to the administration’s handling of the deal, which the White House has so far refused to provide.

AT&T and CNN declined to comment on Trump’s tweets.

Last spring, the New Yorker reported that Trump had asked the director of the National Economic Council to persuade the Justice Department to block the combination. Gary Cohn, who held the job at the time, reportedly refused.

Former Justice Department antitrust official Gene Kimmelman said Trump’s tweets raise questions about whether the White House is letting the president’s views of news organizations affect how the administration handles enforcement and regulatory matters.

“For the president to try to tilt the marketplace in favor of one outlet or another is dangerous to our democracy and the marketplace of ideas,” said Kimmelman, now president of Public Knowledge, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group.

Many presidents have expressed frustration and even anger over news coverage of their administrations, but Trump has taken the issue to an unusual extent in calling on supporters to wield their collective economic power against CNN’s parent company, historians say.

“He wants to sanction — and he wants the public more importantly to sanction — news organizations that produce news coverage that he doesn’t like,” said Timothy Naftali, a New York University historian and a CNN contributor. “The frequency and intensity of it is unusual.”

Historian Jon Meacham, who has written biographies of several presidents, agreed, saying, “For a president to call for punitive action against a corporation in an effort to shape news coverage is, to say the least, highly unusual. It’s the kind of behavior more commonly associated with authoritarian regimes, not democratic ones.”

Trump has often used Twitter to call out or berate companies that clash with his agenda. He’s threatened Ford and General Motors for not moving all auto production to the United States, and argued that Amazon should be paying higher postage rates — a move many interpreted as a swipe at the tech giant’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

In June 2018, Trump criticized Harley-Davidson after the motorcycle maker announced it would shift some production overseas because of the administration’s trade policy. The company estimated at the time that Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs would cost it $20 million, and that retaliatory tariffs could tack on an additional $45 million. Though the company said the move had no effect on U.S. jobs, some Harley owners vowed to boycott, and Trump Trump tweeted his approval: “Many @harleydavidson owners plan to boycott the company if manufacturing moves overseas. Great! Most other companies are coming in our direction, including Harley competitors. A really bad move! U.S. will soon have a level playing field, or better.”

Sales dropped 13 percent in the next three months, the worst decline for the company since 2010.

Monday’s tweets were among a stream of complaints and criticisms Trump posted Monday on Twitter, just before arriving in London for a state visit. He lashed out at the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, who said the United Kingdom was wrong to “roll out the red carpet” for Trump’s visit. The president misspelled Khan’s name, called him a “stone cold loser” and compared him to New York mayor Bill de Blasio. He also weighed in on the U.S.-China trade war, claiming that “many firms are leaving China for other countries, including the United States, to avoid paying the tariffs.”

Trump sparked debate in Britain last week after he called past comments by Meghan Markle, the wife of Prince Harry, “nasty.” During the 2016 election campaign, she’d accused Trump of being “misogynistic” and “divisive.”

Trump lashed out at CNN on Sunday as he denied making the “nasty” reference, despite a recording that proved otherwise.

 

What was funny was AT&T stock, which had been in the doldrums ever since the merger with Time Warner went up nicely yesterday after Trump said this! ?  Keep it up, jackass!

 

[fraurosena]

There was a tiny crowd out protesting Trump in London today.

The presidunce, of course, is in full denial. 

From the article linked in the tweet above:

Quote

"So a lot of it is fake news, I hate to say," he said. 

"It was tremendous spirit and love," he said of the crowds. "There was great love. It was an alliance. And I didn’t see the protesters until just a little while ago, and it was a very small group of people put in for political reasons. So it was fake news.

 

[fraurosena]

That counts him out then. 

 

[Alisamer]

Quote

"So a lot of it is fake news, I hate to say," he said. 

"It was tremendous spirit and love," he said of the crowds. "There was great love. It was an alliance. And I didn’t see the protesters until just a little while ago, and it was a very small group of people put in for political reasons. So it was fake news.

Wait. It just occurred to me. We know he is barely literate. We know he doesn't read any more than he absolutely has to. And he's getting up there in age, but is never seen wearing glasses or anything that I've noticed. Most people his age at least have readers. (I just bought a pair myself, actually! And I'm way younger than him.) He's been seen wandering off when there was a car waiting right in front of him.

What if he thinks they WERE cheering him? If he can't read the signs, can't distinguish what they're chanting, and just doesn't get it?

Sure, he regularly lies about things that are so easy to disprove that even most toddlers wouldn't bother trying to lie about them... but he's also dumb as a post, vain, and showing signs of mental decline. He's terrible, incompetent, ignorant, selfish, work-shy, and lies every time his mouth opens. He's a plague on this country. But I think he is probably also gullible enough that the people behind him are even more evil than him. Frighteningly. I'm less worried about him not wanting to give up the office - I think he'd leave tomorrow if they called off all investigations, so he could spend even more time playing golf and maybe start the TV show he was hoping to get by running for president - than I am worried about the people who put him in the White House not being willing to let go of power. He's barely controllable, but he's also spending 90 percent of his time doing nothing work related. Somebody is doing the work, somewhere.

[fraurosena]

Was the presidunce sundowning again?

 

[apple1]

My sister and I were discussing that pastor's letter.  We both think the letter makes the pastor look worse in a way. It's clear that some church members are not happy about the whole fiasco. So the letter, to us, seems insincere. It's like he is trying to limit the negative outcry.

[apple1]

And here's more (sorry, I have been thinking about this off and on):

The story doesn't make sense the way it's being told.

It's VERY difficult to believe that the pastor only knew MINUTES beforehand. Secret Service does not work like that. There would have been some sort of investigation and sweeping of the property. They don't let people stand close to the President like all that without being checked out carefully ahead of time. At least I don't think so.

[GreyhoundFan]

13 minutes ago, apple1 said:

They don't let people stand close to the President like all that without being checked out carefully ahead of time. At least I don't think so.

Except for all the people who keep sneaking into Mar-a-Loco.

[apple1]

1 minute ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Except for all the people who keep sneaking into Mar-a-Loco.

Weeeelllllll…….

There is that.

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘I don’t like critics’: Critic in chief Trump asks U.S. allies to abide by his double standard"

Spoiler

President Trump has called London Mayor Sadiq Khan a “stone cold loser” who is “soft on terrorism.”

He has criticized British Prime Minister Theresa May for not heeding his advice on Brexit.

He repeatedly attacked Britain’s former prime minister David Cameron for “subsidizing” Scotland and said Cameron should be “run out of office.”

He also criticized the British government, accusing it of trying to “disguise their massive Muslim problem” and for its national health-care system.

On Tuesday, the very same Trump said it was unproductive for British politicians to criticize him. “I don’t like critics as much as I like and respect people who like to get things done,” Trump declared. Referring specifically to Khan, Trump said, “I don’t think he should be criticizing a leader of the United States that could be doing so much good for the United Kingdom.”

Apparently, when it comes to U.S.-Britain relations, criticism should flow in only one direction across the Atlantic.

Trump’s declaration that he doesn’t like critics is a nice little window into his worldview. Basically nobody is immune to Trump’s jabs, and he often reserves some of his sharpest ones for top allies abroad. Trump has used his ability to criticize perceived foes and turn his supporters on them to great effect, in some cases, including by keeping congressional Republicans in line.

But he also regularly attacks the mere idea that anybody would criticize him.

“I don’t like critics,” he said when former defense secretary Robert Gates criticized him in 2016. “I don’t like critics. I like the people that get it done and get it done right.”

“In the ‘old days’ if you were President and you had a good economy, you were basically immune from criticism,” he tweeted in April.

At the commencement ceremony for the Coast Guard Academy in May 2017, Trump intoned: “No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly. . . . You can’t let the critics and the naysayers get in the way of your dreams.”

Less than two years earlier, in November 2015, he said: “You know, I don’t like critics. I never like even movie critics, theater critics. They complain, but they can’t do it themselves. I don’t like people that complain.”

Politics is a business rife with double standards. When someone does something you don’t like, they are “playing politics.” When you do something other people don’t like, it’s being principled. And, likewise, when you believe you are doing what is right, you will view criticisms of it as gratuitous and underhanded.

But as with many things, Trump takes this to another level. If you look at some of the comments above — most especially his comment about Khan and the tweet from April — they seem to betray a man who believes he should be somewhat immune from criticism. He argues he has been too successful and wields too much power as the president of the United States. British politicians apparently need him more than he needs them, and so they should fall in line.

And there’s something to that. The president of the United States is generally understood to be the leader of the free world. He wields tremendous power, as Trump is showing, over international treaties and trade agreements. He can often hurt other nations much more than they can hurt him. And Trump has certainly tested the limits of other countries’ willingness to tolerate his bull-in-a-china-shop approach to foreign policy. Generally, they have been forced to humor his double standard.

Which makes the strong Trump criticisms we’re seeing from Khan and the head of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, all the more notable. Corbyn, who spoke at an anti-Trump rally on Tuesday, leads a party that would need to forge a relationship with Trump if it were to gain power. Yet he attacked Trump on Tuesday for spreading hatred and for his treatment of minorities.

Even the favorite to become the next prime minister, Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson, has in the past leveled very tough criticisms of Trump, referring to his “stupefying ignorance” and saying he was “out of his mind.” The two have since become allies, with Trump promoting Johnson as a potential replacement for May.

It seems that one way or another, future relations between the U.S. and Britain will test Trump’s willingness to forgive the apostasy of criticizing Trump.

What a freaking manbaby.

[GreyhoundFan]

"What to do about Trump’s tailoring? We asked a tailor."

Spoiler

President Trump is not someone who hides his discomfort well. That comes through in his tweets, obviously, with his disdain or frustrations often only thinly veiled. At times, too, it comes through in his physical presentation, with Trump looking agitated or out of sorts.

That was the case Monday evening, when the president and first lady joined Queen Elizabeth II and her family for a formal dinner at Buckingham Palace. Photos show a sullen-looking Trump standing next to the queen, hands at his side, a frown on his face. He looks uncomfortable, and one would be forgiven for assuming that he was.

Photos of that meeting also made the rounds on social media for another reason: Trump’s tuxedo didn’t quite appear to fit as one might expect. Charles, Prince of Wales, was similarly attired, in a tuxedo that appeared to be proportional. Trump’s, on the other hand, appeared to have some sort of apron, a splash of white fabric that didn’t quite seem to work. Bette Midler recommended the president fire his tailor.

It was one of several recent sartorial questions about the president that have bounced around the Internet. In an effort to understand what Trump’s doing — and what he’s doing wrong — we turned to Ezra Lizio-Katzen, owner of the Washington menswear boutique Ezra Paul. Lizio-Katzen has, in the past, written about Trump’s fashion choices, so he seemed like a natural fit to provide insight into the president’s attire.

The tuxedo

Trump’s tuxedo consisted of five pieces: The black jacket (known as a tailcoat), a white shirt, a white tie, a white vest and black pants.

So what was the problem?

The vest, Lizio-Katzen said, is supposed to be shorter than the front of the tailcoat.

“People wear their pants much lower than they used to,” he said. “So even though a vest should be a certain length, if you wear your pants too low, then you get an unsightly gap between the pants and the bottom of the vest where your shirt shows.”

With a regular suit, that’s not necessarily a problem, because the jacket will cover the bottom of the vest. With a tailcoat, though, the front is cut shorter. The choice, then, is either a too-long vest or a visible shirt. That said, Lizio-Katzen said that this case appeared to be “exceptional” given that several inches of Trump’s vest is showing. (The jacket, he said, was properly tailored.)

Again, Charles’s tuxedo is properly proportioned, perhaps in part a function of his wearing this sort of formalwear more regularly. Part of it, too, is that Charles probably wears his pants higher — a function largely of the difference in size between the two men.

“Generally people with [Trump’s] proportions wear [pants] lower, particularly in the front,” he said. Men with larger stomachs will often wear pants below their bellies. In this case, that appears to have meant the need for a longer vest.

Consideration of Trump’s physical proportions brings us to his pants.

The pants

On Sunday, Trump visited a church in Virginia. He came directly from his golf club in Sterling and appeared before the congregation in long, oversized tan pants.

Around Memorial Day, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery with the first lady. Again, his pants appeared to be far looser than one might expect.

This, too, ties back to Trump’s size, according to Lizio-Katzen. He assumes that Trump buys suits off the rack, rather than having them custom made, which is where the problem originates.

In his essay about Trump’s suits written in 2017, Lizio-Katzen noted that Trump wears larger jackets in a likely effort to look broader in the shoulder — and therefore less disproportionately wide in the middle. Buying suits off-the-rack, though, has a ripple effect of the suit fitting awkwardly. (He made the accompanying animation to show how a slimmer suit would look.)

< I couldn't get the gif to embed correctly>

“Because he’s wearing a suit size probably two sizes, at least, too big for him in order to not make it look like he’s got a big stomach and instead make it look like he’s just a big guy,” he explained, “the pants that come with that suit are likely too big for him, especially if he wears the pants below his stomach.”

“That’s why they’re baggy like that. When you make a suit, everything’s extrapolated. So if they grow it, the pants keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” he added. The suit designers naturally assume someone wearing a bigger suit jacket also has much bigger legs. In this case, Trump doesn’t.

A preference for baggy pants is to some extent a function of age and style, he said, with men in recent years generally preferring a trimmer fit. Even buying a suit off the rack, though, the pants could be taken in and shortened to some extent.

Especially pants like the ones Trump wore to the church, which weren’t part of a suit.

“That one I can’t really explain,” he said. “They need to be tailored.”

The ties

Trump’s long ties are an established part of his aesthetic by now. (He has, at least, apparently stopped using Scotch tape to hold the tail of the tie in place.)

“That’s not an acceptable length for a tie,” Lizio-Katzen said. “Nobody wears them that long.”

The tie “should be flirting with the belt buckle,” he explained. “It should be a little shorter than your belt or longer, but his is into his fly, and that’s never really the proportion.”

In his book released last year, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie wrote that Trump told him to wear longer ties, too, to look thinner. Lizio-Katzen doesn’t ascribe to that — or to the idea that heavier people shouldn’t wear horizontal stripes, or that pinstripes are slimming.

“I don’t know that our eyesight gets cheated that easily,” he said.

We asked Lizio-Katzen what advice he might offer Trump. His response was blunt.

“My advice would be go on a diet, honestly,” he said. “It’s like Chris Christie. I can’t make the suit look good on Chris Christie, either.”

Trump is “doing the only reasonable thing he can, which is just looking like he’s a big guy,” he added, instead of simply looking like he’s overweight. It makes sense to wear jackets with broad shoulders, but Trump “really needs to make those pants trimmer ... more flattering and shorter.”

And, apparently, to avoid tuxedos with tails.

You know, some of my clothes don't fit all that well, but I'm just an average person. I'm going to the grocery store, not Buckingham Palace. I'm also not in a crapload of pictures every day.

[GreyhoundFan]

How very true: "Trump’s royal visit to the U.K. proves money can’t buy you class "

Spoiler

If there was “great love all around” during President Trump’s state visit to Britain, as he tweeted Monday, the participants royal and decidedly otherwise were deceptively discreet.

From the coverage, one might have thought that Madame Tussauds had teamed up with George Lucas to create a charade parade of mechanized wax figures. What a crew of dour sourpusses they were.

But then, what would one expect when New York’s most-famous hillbilly drags his entire entourage to sup at the sumptuous table of the queen of England as though word had leaked of an all-you-can-eat buffet and free booze over at Lizzie’s Eatery? Donald Trump may have plenty of dough and houses dripping with gold, but his money has that new smell, and his crass behavior is testament to the adage — and more recently Countess Luann de Lesseps’ song — “Money can’t buy you class.” To which I would only add, “honey.”

The countess should know. Marrying royalty won’t get you there, either, apparently. But then, Luann, as in “The Real Housewives of New York City,” perhaps was being ironic.

Queen Elizabeth, as in “The Crown,” was born to class, of course, and has spent her royal career marinating in irony. As a descendant of generations of royals, she epitomizes the definition of proper behavior, rarely displaying emotion or affection, always stoic in the face of adversity. A far cry is she from the effluvious Donald and his bloviating histrionics. But there she was playing sober hostess to a reality-show president and his carnivalesque courtiers.

The queen has seen it all: Her son, Charles, gallivanting with his then-lover-now-wife Camilla whilst married to the fair Princess Diana; the “people’s princess” shedding crocodile tears for television cameras while sharing her miseries and family secrets; her grandson wedding an American actress who, in an apparent act of defiance, declined to attend the state banquet.

Not even Monday evening’s strawberry sable with lemon verbena cream dessert could be richer than that.

Tis a shame, because Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, surely would have brought a smile to the Buckingham Palace proceedings. Instead, we saw mostly waxen, strained faces in the dinner procession of mismatched royals and American hirelings. Most expressions suggested that a hair shirt was concealed beneath their finery. There was the queen with The Don. Prince Edward, the queen’s first cousin, marched dutifully alongside Kellyanne Conway, bedecked in silver sequins and affecting a royal air her weary-eyed escort would be loath to approximate.

Princess Anne, the queen’s daughter, walked with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, who, in one frame, seemed to be trying to convince her that she was lucky. I’m a prince, you know, did you know that? , I thought he was saying. Then again, reading lips is second only to my snake-handling skills. Poor Countess Peel, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, got stuck with Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, whom she seemed to be trying to ignore. As do we all, Countess, as do we all.

Bringing up the rear were first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff Lindsay Reynolds and press secretary Stephanie Grisham, escorted, respectively, by Philip May (husband of outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May) and a kilted Michael Gove, secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs. Oh, and Dan Scavino was there! You know, Dan, the White House director of social media? How could the president attend a royal banquet without his social media guy? He was fortunately paired with a smiling Kathryn Parsons, co-CEO of a high-tech start-up. They may have been the happiest dinner guests that night.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders also stood out from the crowd, smiling in her crimson gown, clearly enjoying herself more than her staid partner, another titled first cousin of the queen. My favorite visual, however, was U.S. national security adviser John Bolton and his muscular mustache paired with Viscountess Brookeborough, who looked as though something most unpleasant had reached her nostrils.

Yes, of course, I’m envious. And, yet, the whole affair felt tawdry and cheap, joyless and stilted beyond the usual norms of pomp and circumstance. The queen must have wondered, did Trump raffle off tickets? Who are these people? Fair question.

Money can’t buy you class, but it can sure buy loyalty. Trump’s court at the palace was essentially his family and the few remaining White House staffers still willing to tell the president that, indeed, his exposed derriere is absolutely rocking raiment of finest silk and gold. The fake news, of course, are unable to see.

 

[AmazonGrace]

I thought Prince Edward is the queen's son, not a cousin.

[Ozlsn]

34 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

I thought Prince Edward is the queen's son, not a cousin.

There are two, her son and her cousin. Her cousin is the Duke of Kent, her son is the Earl of Wessex. No idea which one (or both?) was at this dinner (and no, I'm not a royal family fan... I had to google their titles.) 

My favoutite description of Trump's tuxedo was Jim Wright saying he looked like an orca.

[GreyhoundFan]

Clay Jones is a talented cartoonist. He also tweets some good observations:

 

[fraurosena]

If there were a thought bubble above her head, it would say:

Why, oh why haven't they impeached this bloviating buffoon yet?

 

[CTRLZero]

My husband and I met a couple guys yesterday who worked for a Canadian-owned manufacturer/distributor of building materials here in the United States.  My husband asked if tariffs were affecting their business, and they said management was using the tariff wars as an excuse to inflate all their prices.  If the customer asked, the high prices were because of tariffs, whether that was the case or not. 

I figured we were heading for inflated prices, but had not considered some companies might use the tariff wars to their advantage.  My mind doesn't automatically run to how I can make a quick buck, which probably explains my current living standard, lol. 

[fraurosena]

Wut?

 

[Alisamer]

19 hours ago, apple1 said:

And here's more (sorry, I have been thinking about this off and on):

The story doesn't make sense the way it's being told.

It's VERY difficult to believe that the pastor only knew MINUTES beforehand. Secret Service does not work like that. There would have been some sort of investigation and sweeping of the property. They don't let people stand close to the President like all that without being checked out carefully ahead of time. At least I don't think so.

I agree. Before we moved, my workplace was diagonally across the street from our football stadium, where the DNC was having their big thing where they officially announced Obama was running again for a second term. Our building is lower than the stadium, not near any entrances, etc. But it was just inside the security perimeter. Our building was gone through with sniffer dogs twice, we were visited by secret service at least 3 times, and there were government helicopters over the city for 2-3 weeks before as preparations were made. Sure, that was a much bigger event with many more important political leaders and celebrities and such, but still - there's always preparation ahead of time. My sister's high school band played for Clinton once, and all their instruments and cases had to be sniffed by the dogs while they were going through security. I think even for things that aren't special public events, there'd still be secret service agents there ahead of time, scoping the building, etc.

[47of74]

I agree. Before we moved, my workplace was diagonally across the street from our football stadium, where the DNC was having their big thing where they officially announced Obama was running again for a second term. Our building is lower than the stadium, not near any entrances, etc. But it was just inside the security perimeter. Our building was gone through with sniffer dogs twice, we were visited by secret service at least 3 times, and there were government helicopters over the city for 2-3 weeks before as preparations were made. Sure, that was a much bigger event with many more important political leaders and celebrities and such, but still - there's always preparation ahead of time. My sister's high school band played for Clinton once, and all their instruments and cases had to be sniffed by the dogs while they were going through security. I think even for things that aren't special public events, there'd still be secret service agents there ahead of time, scoping the building, etc.

President Obama visited the place I worked at back in 2011. I remember all the work that went in to that. I arrived at work at 5:00am to get a parking spot and the upper floors of the office building were closed. I slept real good the following weekend.

[GreyhoundFan]

"“Marla Was Under Duress”: Revealed in His Marla Maples Prenup, Donald Trump’s Draconian Art of the Marriage Deal"

Spoiler

In the fall of 1993, Donald Trump was clawing out of the rubble of a cratering business career. Three of his Atlantic City casinos had gone bankrupt. He’d nearly defaulted on $3.4 billion in debt, and, humiliatingly, his creditors had put him on a living allowance: $450,000 a month. Bankers forced him to sell his 282-foot yacht, the Trump Princess, as well as the Trump Shuttle airline and stake in the Plaza hotel, which Trump had once called “the ultimate trophy in the world.” His relationship with Marla Maples had begun in Trumpian glory, with the words “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had” on the front page of the New York Post, but Maples had just given birth to their daughter, Tiffany, and was eager to get married. “I’m going to have to make a decision about Marla...what should I do?” Trump asked his mother around this time. He was 47 years old. Many people in the city believed he was finished.

A source recently passed me a revealing document from this era: Trump’s prenuptial agreement with Maples. Its draconian terms suggest a penuriousness at odds with his public image as a free-spending billionaire in his gilded triplex penthouse. And its confidential financial statements included in the agreement is a sketch of Trump’s immense privilege and the wealth he squandered, telling in both what it illuminates and what is obfuscates.

With Trump fighting House Democrats over the release of his tax returns, what we know about his opaque financial life has largely come from a paper trail unearthed by investigative reporters. Journalists at The New York Times have blazed much of this difficult terrain with bombshells such as the revelation that his father, Fred, bequeathed Trump more than $400 million in today’s dollars, and that IRS tax receipts indicate Trump lost more than more than $1 billion between 1985 and 1994. Dogged reporting by the Times and others revealed Trump’s core argument for being president—he’s a self-made billionaire who alone can solve the world’s most intractable problems—to be as credible as a degree from Trump University. But the deal he made with his second wife was, as a business proposition, a raging success, even though as a personal matter, it was as ugly as could be.

Even Donald Trump realized that, when it comes to romance, a prenup is a buzzkill. “A prenuptial is a horrible document,” he once told a reporter, “because it says, ‘When we get divorced, this is the way we’ll split things up.’ And when you’re a believer in positive thinking, it isn’t good. But it’s a modern-day necessity.”

Raoul Felder, the legendary divorce lawyer whose clients have included Trump’s own lawyer Rudy Giuliani, agreed. “A prenup sucks romance out of the relationship,” he told me. “It’s a prior agreement as to the disposition of money, assets, payments. You basically plan the divorce before you get married.”

Prenup negotiations require both parties to disclose to the other how much money they have. In the document, Trump stated he was worth $1.17 billion; Maples had $100,000 in the bank. But while Trump presented himself as a Master of the Universe, back and bigger than ever, he was, in all likelihood, not an actual billionaire when he signed the agreement. (He didn’t appear on the Forbes list between 1990 and 1995.) And Trump had financial incentive to inflate his wealth: if he understated his fortune, Maples could later claim in a divorce that Trump hid money from her at the time, which could void the prenup’s terms. “When you’re doing a prenup, the worry is you understate your assets. If you overstate it, then you’re protected,” a high-profile Manhattan divorce lawyer told me.

To keep himself in the nine-figure club, Trump provided extremely optimistic values for his real estate assets. For instance, he stated the Taj Mahal was worth $1.25 billion, even though it had trouble making debt payments virtually from the moment it opened. (In 2017 it sold for 4 cents on the dollar.) He valued the Trump Castle and Trump Plaza casinos $450 million and $650 million, respectively. (Both went bankrupt in 1992.) Trump’s accountants at Spahr, Lacher & Sperber didn’t vouch for his fuzzy math. “We have not audited or reviewed” the numbers Trump provided, they stated in a note attached to the financial report. They added: “Assets are presented at current values estimated by Trump using various valuation methods.”

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Trump, of course, overstated his net worth and business acumen since his first forays into Manhattan real estate in the 1970s. In a 1976 interview with the Times, he claimed to be worth “more than $200 million” when, in fact, he reportedly had taxable income of only about $75,000 in 1975. In subsequent years, he posed as a Trump Organization official to mislead Forbes editors, so they would include him on the magazine’s annual list of billionaires.

More than anything, the prenup shows how fiercely Trump wanted to protect the money he did have. Maples reportedly wanted $25 million, but Trump agreed to pay her only $1 million if they separated within five years, plus another $1 million to buy a house. Trump also would stop making $100,000 child support payments for Tiffany when she turned 21. The agreement states that Trump’s payments would cease earlier if Tiffany got a full-time job, enlisted in the military, or joined the Peace Corps. “The way it was drawn up is ironclad and shows how wary he was,” Felder told me after reviewing the prenup. “He was leaving nothing to chance.”

Maples agreed to these terms with the hope that Trump would renegotiate a better deal in five years. “We basically came to an agreement that for the first few years we would agree on something and then tear it up,” she told a journalist. “She was telling people it was love,” said a source who knew the couple well. Ultimately, Maples didn’t have much of a choice if she wanted to get married—which she desperately did. When she traveled, she brought along her wedding dress, so that she would be ready at a moment’s notice if Trump said he wanted to get married, said the source. Maples declined to comment.

Marla Maples entered Trump’s life as his marriage to Ivana was crashing. They bumped into each other on Madison Avenue. Maples was Ivana’s opposite in almost every way, a difference that the tabloids mined in their endless coverage of the domestic soap opera. Where Ivana was the austere European with royal aspirations, Maples was a beauty queen from the Bible Belt. “I’m, like, of the soil, of the country, of a solid, firm belief in God,” Maples told Vanity Fair in 1990. The only daughter of a small-time subdivider turned Elvis impersonator, Maples came to New York in 1985 in her early 20s, with celebrity dreams and a kooky spirituality that was both Christian and New Age. “A psychic told me I’m just a little girl inside this grown-up body,” she said in the 1990 interview with V.F. “That’s what makes me feel uncomfortable—I forget I have this body. I’m just a little girl.” The source close to the couple told me she was out of her depth in Trump’s world. “It’s a sad story. She really didn’t know how to handle him,” the person said.

Trump and Maples’s relationship was at a crossroads after Trump and Ivana divorced in 1992. At one point, he broke up with Maples by FedEx-ing her a letter, the source said. Trump bragged about his bachelorhood. “I had been in Europe fucking every model in the world. My life was wild,” he told Vanity Fair in 1994. But Trump, a famous germophobe, also found monogamy reassuring as the AIDS crisis raged. “Being single out there is a little bit scary, to put it mildly,” he said. “It’s like being in Vietnam, in the forests, and knowing there are guns pointed at your head.”

Two factors—one personal, the other professional—ultimately led Trump to propose to Maples. On October 13, 1993, Maples gave birth to Tiffany. Trump’s conservative parents were upset that he’d fathered a child out of wedlock. But the bigger problem was that it likely complicated Trump’s plan to rid himself of his failing casinos. At the time Tiffany was born, Trump was preparing to take his casinos public to raise cash to pay down his debts. His tabloid domestic life spooked Wall Street and diminished his chances for an IPO. Marrying Maples would calm investors.

But before marrying, Trump needed Maples to sign a prenup. His divorce with Ivana had been a legal war. (In March 1990, Ivana sued Trump for $2.5 billion to nullify a revised version of the prenup that Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, had drafted back in 1977.) Ultimately, Trump and Ivana settled for $14 million. (Ivana took the deal because her team worried Trump was going bankrupt.) In addition, Trump gave Ivana their Greenwich estate and agreed to pay $650,000 annually to support Ivanka, Eric, and Don. Jr. Trump wanted to make sure Maples couldn’t come after his money.

Convincing her wasn’t easy. “This was the big battle all along,” Maples told Vanity Fair at the time. But Trump persisted and Maples relented, telling a journalist that she would renegotiate the agreement in five years. Trump hired the lawyer Stan Lotwin to draw up terms. Maples was represented by the New York lawyer Sharon Stein. Maples tried to hold out for better terms, but Trump utterly refused to budge, the source told me. He held the line up their wedding day at the Plaza, said the source. “Marla was under duress. Donald’s position was: without the prenup he wasn’t going to get married.” With 24 hours to go before a thousand guests arrived, Maples caved.

The stringent agreement Maples signed reflected the degree of leverage Trump had over the Georgia-born beauty queen whose most valuable asset was the $250,000 engagement ring Trump bought her. “What was she going to do? She would have taken whatever he said,” Felder told me. According to the prenup, Maples surrendered any claim to Trump’s future income and inheritances. The $1 million award Trump would pay her was it. (There would be no alimony.)

Having protected his money, Trump designed the agreement to also protect his image. His divorce with Ivana played out in public, and Trump was determined to keep Maples quiet. Under the extensive confidentiality agreement, Maples agreed she wouldn’t publish “any diary, memoir, letter, story, photograph, interview, article, essay, account or description or depiction of any kind whatsoever, whether fictionalized or not, concerning (or seeming to concern) the details of the parties’ marriage.” And if she did, the prenup stated: “Donald will suffer irreparable damage and injury in the event of any such breach.”

As for Maples’s plan to renegotiate a better deal after five years of marriage, she and Trump separated after only four. The divorce was messy. Ironically, it was triggered by a May 1996 National Enquirer cover. “Shock for Trump! MARLA CAUGHT WITH HUNK” blared the headline for an article revealing how Palm Beach police caught Maples during a “frolic” on the beach at 4 a.m. with a Trump bodyguard—an account that both Trump and Maples denied. Trump went nuclear over the article, said the source. But he didn’t want to divorce Maples right away, because it would make him look like he’d been cheated on. “He bided his time,” the source said.

Trump and Maples separated the following year. Maples moved to California where she raised Tiffany, and largely stayed out of public view. But during the 2016 campaign, she thought about breaking her silence. According to the source, she wrote a memoir that would detail the marriage. She even had spoken to a publisher, the source said: Judith Regan. (Regan did not respond to a request for comment.) But Maples got cold feet after a Trump Tower meeting with Donald and Ivanka. “They really double-teamed her. They got her not to write the book,” the source said.

How sad that she was so needy and seemed to fool herself into thinking he actually cared.

[47of74]

"“Marla Was Under Duress”: Revealed in His Marla Maples Prenup, Donald Trump’s Draconian Art of the Marriage Deal"
In the fall of 1993, Donald Trump was clawing out of the rubble of a cratering business career. Three of his Atlantic City casinos had gone bankrupt. He’d nearly defaulted on $3.4 billion in debt, and, humiliatingly, his creditors had put him on a living allowance: $450,000 a month

I wish I had a $450,000 a month allowance. I’d just keep living like I do now and invest the rest.

[GreyhoundFan]

"How Trump channels Henry VIII"

Spoiler

Robert Zaretsky, a professor of history at the University of Houston, and John Scott, professor of political theory at the University of California at Davis, are the authors of “The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Understanding.”

Buckingham Palace dates from the 18th century, but the land on which it stands was purchased more than two centuries earlier. It happens that a portrait of the purchaser, Henry VIII, hangs in the the palace’s Queen’s Gallery. Posing with his third wife, Jane Seymour, and his three children, the corpulent Tudor king, with a complacent gaze, man-spreads in the center of the canvas.

This week another ruler, accompanied by his third wife and several children from various marriages, visited Buckingham. If the visitor glanced at this painting, he might have caught a resemblance to himself. Indeed, ever since he became president, Donald Trump has spurred comparisons to Henry VIII. The reasons seemed obvious: the president’s serial marriages and staggering self-esteem, his priapic personality and protruding paunch, his interest in pomp and disinterest in others, all recalled Henry’s outsize character. Even those closest to Trump saw the resemblance. “I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,” gloated Stephen K. Bannon. Evidently the then-chief strategist had not read to the end of the story.

If two years of his presidency have only reinforced the comparison of The Donald to the mercurial monarch, the relevance of the Tudor court for understanding the Trump administration is more disturbing and certainly less amusingly ironic, intentional or otherwise, than initially thought.

To cast light on these parallels, we can turn to David Hume’s “History of England.” At first glance, this seems an odd choice. Not only was the work published 250 years ago, but Hume is today considered first and foremost a philosopher. Yet in his own day, Hume owed his fame to his six-volume history.

For Hume, history-writing was philosophizing by other means. When his great philosophical opus, the “Treatise of Human Nature,” initially failed, Hume turned to the past. Not only was there money to make — the work quickly became a bestseller — but also there were ideas at stake. One of his most provocative ideas, especially in the Age of Reason, is that our passions command and our reason complies. As he notoriously claimed in the “Treatise,” reason is the slave to the passions. What better stage than the past to portray the truth of this claim? And what better episode from the past — at least England’s past — than the Tudors?

Hume’s account of the reigns of the Tudor and then Stuart kings and queens targeted the reigning understanding of English history as reasonable and rational. According to the Whig interpretation, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 reestablished the hallowed “ancient constitution” of limited government and established liberties stretching back to the Magna Carta and beyond, making the expulsion of the tyrannical Stuarts less a revolution than a bloodless restoration. Nonsense, Hume responded. His reasoning was simple: There were no such ancient constitution or established liberties to restore.

In fact, as he bluntly stated, the Tudors were tyrants. Exhibit A: Henry VIII.

While many of Henry’s qualities find little resonance in the White House — for example, the king’s "frankness," “sincerity" and “generosity" — there are others some that make for a deafening echo. When not dwelling on Henry’s ”violence” and “cruelty,” Hume marvels over the king’s “impetuosity.” In fact, Hume finds Henry’s capriciousness to be his most unsettling quality. The king, Hume writes, “was so much governed by passion that nothing could have retarded his animosity and opposition … but some other passion which raised him new objects of animosity.”

These passions were often on public display. At Westminster, Henry even staged a theological town hall where, with prelates and parliamentarians arrayed behind him, he challenged a schoolteacher who had dared question his spiritual authority. The poor man, unable to be heard over the deafening ovations for Henry’s ”reasoning" and “erudition” was then, quite literally, fired: Henry had him “committed to the flames.”

Although Hume never loses sight of Henry’s self-centeredness and impulsiveness, his other target was his enablers. First there were his courtiers. The efforts made by the ever-changing parade of favorites to anticipate and applaud Henry’s impulsive decisions only aggravated their predicament. Even when Henry “stood alone in his opinion,” Hume observes, the court’s flattery merely fed “his tyrannical arrogance.” The few individuals who refused to silence their conscience, most notably Thomas More, were eventually led not to plum positions at Fox News but instead to the gallows.

Second, there was Parliament. Far from checking royal prerogative in the name of constitutional government and established liberties, as the Whig historians claimed, Parliament under the Tudors mostly permitted rather than protested royal whims. Like Henry’s courtiers, members of Parliament rationalized their complicity. Because they “dreaded to lose [Henry] by the smallest opposition, [they] flattered themselves that a blind compliance with his will would throw him, cordially and fully, into their interests.” It was, in Hume’s burn, the “prostitute spirit of the Parliament” that cemented Henry’s power and led to “a total subversion of the English constitution.”

Ultimately, Hume’s account of Henry unsettles because of the people and institutions surrounding the king. If England under the Tudors had no proper constitution to uphold, as Hume claimed, we do. We are all taught as schoolchildren that the genius of our Constitution lies in its separation of powers, checks and balances, Bill of Rights, and rule of law.

Yet today, the behavior of Trump’s courtiers and his party’s leaders reminds us that offices and institutions are inhabited by human, all-too-human, beings. We should recall what Hume’s good friend Benjamin Franklin said when asked what sort of government the Constitutional Convention had created: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

I don't think we should insult Henry VIII by comparing him to the mango moron.

[fraurosena]

His embarrassing ignorance is staggeringly dangerous.

As Ireland is part of the European Union, the border between them and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, will become contentious again when that hard Brexit the UK is heading for actually happens. There is a real chance the Troubles could start up again.