ThinkProgress: How Much Is Donald Trump Worth? An Examination Of The Evidence

By Bryce Cover:

Tax records also show that Trump hasn’t given any money to the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity he controls but is funded by a number of donors, since 2008. Before that time, he donated only a third of what he had pledged to the foundation. In fact, between 1988 and 2014, Trump gave just a little over $5 million to his foundation, according to BuzzFeed, less than other outside donors. In seven of those years he gave nothing, and in the years between 1991 and 1996 he never gave more than $60,000.

Certainly Trump is under no obligation to give any of his money to charity, no matter how much he might have. But the dissembling around his donations is just one more elision of the truth about his financials.

The Full Story (July 21, 2016)

The Atlantic: Do Republicans Still Think America Is Exceptional?

By Peter Beinart: 

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of Trump’s remarks. NATO, the military alliance that underpins the post-World War II order, rests on the principle that if one member is attacked, the others will come to its aid. Saying that the United States may or may not abide by that principle is the military equivalent of saying that the United States may or may not default on its national debt (which Trump has also said). Were Trump elected, these comments alone would reshape the geopolitics of Eastern Europe, as regional leaders began cozying up to Russia out of fear that the United States wouldn’t defend them. (Especially in the wake of Brexit, which has already weakened NATO.)

Trump’s comments mark a massive shift within the GOP. Since the 1940s, solidarity with the Baltic states has been a passion of the American right. Throughout the Cold War, conservatives railed against Franklin Roosevelt’s abandonment of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to Soviet domination at the 1945 Yalta Conference. In 2012, Mitt Romney traveled to Poland to emphasize the Republican argument that President Obama had sold out Eastern Europe in an attempt to curry favor with Vladimir Putin. Think about that for a second. Obama, who this year agreed to deploy NATO battalions to the Baltic states, is still widely derided inside the GOP as insufficiently committed their security. Yet the Republican presidential nominee has now implied that America shouldn’t defend them at all.

But if Trump’s comments about the Baltics constituted his sharpest policy deviation, his comments about Turkey were his most astonishing ideologically. Asked about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s massive crackdown on dissent in the wake of a failed coup, Trump asked, “How are we going to lecture when people are shooting policemen in cold blood?” He added that, “When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger.”

To grasp how extraordinary those sentences are, it’s worth remembering that Republicans have spent the last seven years accusing Obama of not believing in “American exceptionalism.” Over and over, GOP politicians and conservative pundits have suggested that the core problem with Obama’s foreign policy—the reason he’s presiding over America’s global retreat—is that he doesn’t believe America is any better than other countries. In 2010, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a widely discussed National Review cover story arguing that Obama’s lack of faith in American superiority threatened “America’s civilizational self-confidence.” In 2011, Newt Gingrich wrote an entire book about the Obama administration’s assault on American exceptionalism.

The Full Story (July 21, 2016)

The New York Times: Transcript - Donald Trump on NATO, Turkey’s Coup Attempt and the World

By New York Times Editorial Staff:

SANGER: But I guess the question is, If we can’t, do you think that your presidency, let’s assume for a moment that they contribute what they are contributing today, or what they have contributed historically, your presidency would be one of pulling back and saying, “You know, we’re not going to invest in these alliances with NATO, we are not going to invest as much as we have in Asia since the end of the Korean War because we can’t afford it and it’s really not in our interest to do so.”

TRUMP: If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I’m talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal, I would like you to say, I would prefer being able to, some people, the one thing they took out of your last story, you know, some people, the fools and the haters, they said, “Oh, Trump doesn’t want to protect you.” I would prefer that we be able to continue, but if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth — you have the tape going on?

SANGER: We do.

HABERMAN: We both do.

TRUMP: With massive wealth. Massive wealth. We’re talking about countries that are doing very well. Then yes, I would be absolutely prepared to tell those countries, “Congratulations, you will be defending yourself.”

The Full Story (July 21, 2016)

The New Yorker: Donald Trump Threatens The Ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal”

By Jane Mayer:

[Jason D. Greenblatt, the general counsel and vice-president of the Trump Organization] demands that Schwartz send “a certified check made payable to Mr. Trump” for all of the royalties he had earned on the book, along with Schwartz’s half of the book’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance. (The memoir has sold approximately a million copies, earning Trump and Schwartz each several million dollars.) Greenblatt also orders Schwartz to issue “a written statement retracting your defamatory statements,” and to offer written assurances that he will not “generate or disseminate” any further “baseless accusations” about Trump.

On Thursday, reached by e-mail on an airplane, Schwartz said that he would continue to speak out against Trump, and that he would make no retractions or apologies. “The fact that Trump would take time out of convention week to worry about a critic is evidence to me not only of how thin-skinned he is, but also of how misplaced his priorities are,” Schwartz wrote. He added, “It is axiomatic that when Trump feels attacked, he will strike back. That’s precisely what’s so frightening about his becoming president.”

The Full Story (July 20, 2016)

The New Yorker: Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

by Jane Mayer:

But Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.

Other journalists have noticed Trump’s apparent lack of interest in reading. In May, Megyn Kelly, of Fox News, asked him to name his favorite book, other than the Bible or “The Art of the Deal.” Trump picked the 1929 novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Evidently suspecting that many years had elapsed since he’d read it, Kelly asked Trump to talk about the most recent book he’d read. “I read passages, I read areas, I’ll read chapters—I don’t have the time,” Trump said. As The New Republic noted recently, this attitude is not shared by most U.S. Presidents, including Barack Obama, a habitual consumer of current books, and George W. Bush, who reportedly engaged in a fiercely competitive book-reading contest with his political adviser Karl Rove.

* * *

After hearing Trump’s discussions about business on the phone, Schwartz asked him brief follow-up questions. He then tried to amplify the material he got from Trump by calling others involved in the deals. But their accounts often directly conflicted with Trump’s. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz said. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” Often, Schwartz said, the lies that Trump told him were about money—“how much he had paid for something, or what a building he owned was worth, or how much one of his casinos was earning when it was actually on its way to bankruptcy.” Trump bragged that he paid only eight million dollars for Mar-a-Lago, but omitted that he bought a nearby strip of beach for a record sum. After gossip columns reported, erroneously, that Prince Charles was considering buying several apartments in Trump Tower, Trump implied that he had no idea where the rumor had started. (“It certainly didn’t hurt us,” he says, in “The Art of the Deal.”) Wayne Barrett, a reporter for the Village Voice, later revealed that Trump himself had planted the story with journalists. Schwartz also suspected that Trump engaged in such media tricks, and asked him about a story making the rounds—that Trump often called up news outlets using a pseudonym. Trump didn’t deny it. As Schwartz recalls, he smirked and said, “You like that, do you?”

The Full Story (July 25, 2016)

The New York Times: How Donald Trump Picked His Running Mate

By Robert Draper:

One day this past May, Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reached out to a senior adviser to Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who left the presidential race just a few weeks before. As a candidate, Kasich declared in March that Trump was “really not prepared to be president of the United States,” and the following month he took the highly unusual step of coordinating with his rival Senator Ted Cruz in an effort to deny Trump the nomination. But according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer nonetheless: Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history?

When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.

Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of?

“Making America great again” was the casual reply.

The Full Story (July 20, 2016)

The Washington Post: Trump, Seeking GOP Unity, Has Tense Meeting With Senate Republicans

By Sean Sullivan and Philip Rucker:

Trump’s most tense exchange was with Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who has been vocal in his concerns about the business mogul’s candidacy, especially his rhetoric and policies on immigration that the senator argues alienate many Latino voters and others in Arizona. When Flake stood up and introduced himself, Trump told him, “You’ve been very critical of me.” “Yes, I’m the other senator from Arizona — the one who didn’t get captured — and I want to talk to you about statements like that,” Flake responded, according to two Republican officials. Flake was referencing Trump’s comments last summer about the military service of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict. Trump questioned whether McCain was a war hero because he was captured. Flake told Trump that he wants to be able to support him — “I’m not part of the Never Trump movement,” the senator said — but that he remains uncomfortable backing his candidacy, the officials said. Trump said at the meeting that he has yet to attack Flake hard but threatened to begin doing so. Flake stood up to Trump by urging him to stop attacking Mexicans. Trump predicted that Flake would lose his reelection, at which point Flake informed Trump that he was not on the ballot this year, the sources said.

The Full Story (July 7, 2016)