Illegitimate

Trump's Election and Failed Presidency

Harold J Breaux, Deborah Kevin

• Publisher: Harold J. Breaux
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780578783932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Illegitimate: Trump ' s Election and Failed Presidency explores and analyzes the phenomena that resulted in an unlikely candidate, Donald J. Trump, becoming the forty-fifth president of the United States. Thoroughly researched, this book provides a needed history of what was known about Trump's negatives before the 2016 election, and how-despite these negatives-Trump's assumption of the presidency occurred through the anachronistic electoral college and three whammies: the Comey Letter, voter suppression, and fake news/Russian meddling.This book is a must-read for anyone contemplating the consequences of a second term Trump presidency.

Chapter 1

What We Knew (or Should Have Known) About Trump Before the 2016 Election

1-1. Trump’s Qualifications to be President

Franklin Roosevelt had been governor of New York before being elected president. Harry Truman had been a US senator and vice president. General Dwight Eisenhower had been supreme allied commander in Europe, leading the United States and its allies to victory over Hitler and the Nazis in WWII. John F. Kennedy had been a WWII hero, author of Profiles in Courage (a best-selling book), and senator from Massachusetts. Lyndon Johnson had been a senator from Texas, senate majority leader, and vice president. Richard Nixon had been a senator from California and vice president. George Herbert Walker Bush had been a congressman, CIA director, ambassador to the UN, vice president of the United States before becoming president. Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy graduate, had been a submarine officer and governor of the state of Georgia. Ronald Reagan had been president of the Screen Actors Guild and governor of California. Bill Clinton had been governor of Arkansas. George W. Bush had been governor of Texas. Barack Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, was the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review, a three-time Illinois Senate member, and US senator from Illinois.

Unsuccessful presidential candidates include Hubert Humphrey, who had been a senator from Minnesota and vice president of the United States. Al Gore was a military officer, had authored a book, titled Earth in the Balance, as an early visionary on the need to care for the earth’s climate (which eventually led to his winning a Nobel prize), and an originator of key legislation that led to Mosaic (the first internet browser) and the National Research and Education Network (NREN) (both crucial steps leading to the internet as we know it), a senator from Tennessee, and vice president. John Kerry had been a Vietnam war hero, lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, a United States senator, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and secretary of state.

From these two lists, one can conclude that experience in government and leadership has historically been a bell-weather credential upon which US citizenry bestowed their trust to be their president or serious candidates for the office. And so, in 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States (through the Electoral College) despite losing the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, over a candidate who had been a children and civil rights advocate, an attorney staff member on the Watergate Committee that began the Richard Nixon impeachment process, a United States senator from New York, and US secretary of state.

And so, one might logically ask, what were Donald Trump’s credentials? We knew he was a TV program host and were told (especially by him) that he was a highly successful (self-made) businessman who was worth billions of dollars—a much-disputed claim that will be re-examined herein.

One of the tragedies of the 2016 election dynamics was that the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, David Kay Johnston,¹⁴ had a late start in writing and publishing his book The Making of Donald Trump.

The book was published on July 31, 2016, and, accordingly, there wasn’t much time for it to circulate broadly before election day on November 8, 2016. In his book, Johnston states:

I will always wonder what might have happened had journalists, and some of the sixteen candidates vying with Trump for the Republican nomination, started asking my questions earlier.

In his book Introduction, Johnston summarizes Trump with the words:

More important, Trump has worked just as hard to make sure few people know about his lifelong entanglements with a major cocaine trafficker, with mobsters and many mob associates, with con artists and swindlers. He has been sued thousands of times for refusing to pay employees, vendors, and others. Investors have sued him for fraud in a number of different cities. But among Trump’s most highly refined skills is his ability to deflect or shut down law enforcement investigations.

As I first wrote this quote (namely, sued thousands of times) from Johnston, I noted that it needed to be verified (such a large number of lawsuits seemed incredible) and that it was a possible exaggeration. Later in my research, I found and obtained the book by Zirin titled Plaintiff in Chief – A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3500 Lawsuits¹⁵ published in September 2019. This book was thus not available to the voting public before the election in the fall of 2016. However, my research led to finding that on June 16, 2016, four and a half months before the election, USA Today published an article titled:¹⁶ “Exclusive: Trump’s 3,500 lawsuits: unprecedented for a presidential nominee.”

Here one should note that USA Today is distributed throughout the United States and has the largest circulation of any newspaper equaling the combined circulation of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Accordingly, one can conclude that Trump’s incredible litigiousness should have been well known. Referring to Trump’s lawsuits, the two authors, Penzenstadler and Page, in the USA Today article, observed:

The legal actions provide clues to the leadership style the billionaire businessman would bring to bear as commander in chief. He sometimes responds to even small disputes with overwhelming legal force … He sometimes refuses to pay real estate brokers, lawyers, and vendors.

Their description of the myriad of Trump lawsuits included the following:

• The sheer volume of lawsuits is unprecedented for a presidential nominee.
• Since his announced candidacy, a year ago, at least seventy new cases have been filed about evenly divided between suits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them.
• He doesn’t hesitate to deploy his wealth and legal firepower against adversaries with limited resources, such as homeowners.
• He sometimes refuses to pay real estate brokers, lawyers, and other vendors.
• He also uses the legal system to haggle over his property tax bills.
• His companies have been involved in more than 100 tax disputes, and the New York State Department of Finance has obtained liens on Trump properties for unpaid tax bills at least three dozen times.
• Despite his boasts on the campaign trail that he “never” settles lawsuits, for fear of encouraging more, he and his businesses have settled with plaintiffs in at least 100 cases reviewed by USA Today.
• The analysis found Trump has been involved in more legal skirmishes than the next five top real estate companies (of similar size and business) combined.
• Trump railed against a federal judge overseeing a then-ongoing lawsuit against Trump University, saying Judge Gonzalo Curiel “happens to be, we believe, Mexican” and called him a “hater of Donald Trump” who “railroaded” him.
• At times, he and his companies refuse to pay even relatively small bills.
• The USA Today analysis identified at least 3,500 legal actions involving Trump.
• Dozens dealt with the bankruptcy of Trump’s companies, and dozens more involved plaintiffs’ lawsuits against Trump businesses that judges terminated because the Trump companies targeted had gone bankrupt.
• Trump is … quick to distance himself from deals that struggle, willing to deploy outsized resources against adversaries…, even in disputes that involve small amounts of money … approaches however appropriate in a business setting may not translate to a political one, especially at the level of the White House.
• Trump distances himself from deals that sour.
• Experts in the presidency say Trump’s record … raises questions about whether he has exhibited the leadership qualities that have distinguished the nation’s most successful presidents … including attention to detail, the subordination of one’s ego, and the art of compromise.
• Six in ten voters said they had reservations about or were uncomfortable with Trump’s lack of experience in government or the military.

The contradiction in the origin of Trump’s wealth and his explanation of why he refused to reveal his tax returns, which he promised to do during the run-up to the election, is examined by Chris Cillizza¹⁷ in a YouTube “The Point” video segment.

As noted above, Johnston’s book was too late for the tutorial on Trumps’ business acumen (or lack thereof) to be fully exposed to the American media and electorate as a whole. As the election of November 2020 approaches, my objective is thus to assist in the national exposure on the following:

• The con job Trump perpetrated on the American public as to his alleged incredible success as a businessman and his myriad of other shortcomings as a candidate.
• A mathematical/statistical analysis of the politics, intrigue, skullduggery, and numbers associated with the three factors (whammies) that made Trump “an illegitimate, unduly elected president.”
• Trump’s extreme failure as president.

Numerous facets of Trump’s history will be examined from listed references that (where available) are dated before November 8, 2016—thus suggesting that the material was available to voters before the 2016 election. Additionally, each sub-topic on Trump’s history will also be illuminated further, with cited references that were published after the 2016 election.

1-2. Did Trump Make Billions in Business?

Trump has effectively claimed numerous times that ¹⁸ “his success in business was based on getting a one million dollar loan from his father which he had to pay back with interest.”

Despite this claim being debunked before the election, the public largely believed it and this belief, undoubtedly, in no small measure, led to his election. Trump became head of his father’s real estate empire in 1971. Matthews¹⁹ quotes an article from the National Journal:

… in 1974, the real estate empire of Trump’s father, Fred, was worth about $200 million, making his stake (as one of five siblings) at that time worth about $40 million. If one were to invest $40 million in an S&P index in August of 1974, reinvest all dividends, not cash out and have to pay capital gains, and pay nothing in investment fees, he’d wind up with about $3.4 billion come August 2015.

Matthews also claimed (in March 2016) that “Bloomberg currently estimated Trump’s net worth at $2.9 billion with Forbes estimating it at $4 billion.”

The public was repeatedly told of his great success in business and, in general, the people believed it. Before the election, Fisher and Hobson²⁰ wrote that Trump had, on several occasions, feigned to be John Miller or John Baron, associates of his. Trump pretending to be John Baron or John Miller, regaled reporters on the phone about his boss (Trump’s) relationships with model Marla Maples, Italian model Carla Bruni, Madonna, and actress Kim Bassinger. Fisher and Hobson reported that “editors at New York tabloids said calls from Trump (posing as Baron) were at points so common that they became a recurring joke on the city desk.” Trump was later to name his son with Melania “Barron.” Unfortunately, it was not until 2018 that Jonathan Greenberg²¹ wrote that, in May 1984, when he was working for Forbes, he had been conned by Trump, again posing as John Baron. The latter duped him into believing that Trump’s finances were of such a value as to be placed in the Forbes 400. Greenberg wrote:

But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had enacted to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn’t just poorer than he said he was. Over time, I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million—a paltry sum by the standards of the super-monied peers—as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.

Many other instances of Trump calling the press posing under pseudonyms are listed by D’Antonio in Fortune.²² Such blatant fostering of “untruths” became a well-known pattern after Trump began his presidency. As a result, the press eventually cast aside its propensity for press manners to replace the word “untruths” with the word “lies” when referring to Trump. In fact, “fact-checking” eventually became a cottage industry, spawned by Trump’s lies (as of this writing, more than 16,000, averaging more than ten per day during his presidency).

After the election, the press continued searching for the real value of Trump’s finances, the potential violation of the Emoluments Clause, and his potentially steering both the US and foreign government business/funds to his properties. In 2018, Buettner, Craig, and Barstow of the New York Times did an extensive investigation into Trump’s wealth.²³ One of their findings was that “Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire…much of this money came to Mr. Trump through dubious tax schemes.”

The New York Times authors listed numerous “takeaways” from the Times investigation, including:

• The Trumps’ tax maneuvers show a pattern of deception, tax experts say.
• Donald Trump began reaping wealth from his father’s real estate empire as a toddler.
• That ‘small loan’ of one million was actually at least $60.7 million—much of it never repaid.
• Fred Trump wove a safety net that rescued his son from one bad bet after another.
• The Trumps turned an eleven million dollar loan debt into a legally questionable tax write-off.
• Father and son set out to create the myth of a self-made billionaire.
• Donald Trump tried to change his ailing father’s will, setting off a family reckoning.
• The Trumps created a company that siphoned cash from the empire.
• The Trump parents dodged hundreds of millions in g...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication to Nollie J. Arcement Jr.
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 What We Knew (or Should Have Known) About Trump Before the 2016 Election
• Chapter 2 The First Whammy
• Chapter 3 The Second Whammy
• Chapter 4 The Third Whammy
• Chapter 5 Trump's Anti-Obama Syndrome
• Chapter 6 Trump's Lies Are His Modus Operandi
• Chapter 7 Coronavirus Was Trump's Cuban Missile Crisis-He Failed Us Miserably
• Appendix I Derivation of General Equations
• Appendix II Intelligence Assessments: Russian Fake News
• Appendix III Essay on Obamacare
• Appendix IV Essay on Trump's Muslim Ban
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• References