by Marion Marks
You would expect that Donald Trump couldn’t keep doing the same thing, behaving the same, denying the state of affairs as he explains history and expect the public to change their perception of him. Certainly problems of his opponent make his record less troubling to supporters.
But, the truth is that there are no other politicians who have the history of corruption, double-dealing, and fraud that Donald Trump has clearly established. The record, including court documents, deserves more articles that detail staggering data will appear before November. This is a partial list of Trump tragedies that would each cripple a normal candidate:
- Trump’s casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money
- Trump’s habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for
him, many of whom are struggling small businesses - Trump University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into Trump U was quashed.
- The Trump Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which Trump allowed a couple of grifters to use his name t
bilk people out of their money - The Trump Network, a multi-level marketing venture (a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins
- Trump Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did
- Trump’s employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work
- Trump’s use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work
- Trump’s history of being charged with housing discrimination
- Trump’s connections to mafia figures involved in New York construction
- The time Trump paid the Federal Trade Commission $750,000 over charges that he violated anti-trust laws when trying to take over a rival casino company
Trump is now being advised by Roger Ailes, who was forced out as Fox News chief when dozens of women came forward to charge him with sexual harassment should worry some conservatives. According to the allegations (settled for over $20 million), Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.
That last one is happening right now. To repeat, the point is not that these stories have never been covered, because they have. The point is that they get covered briefly, then everyone in the media moves on to new issues. If any of these kinds of stories involved Clinton, news organizations would rush to assign multiple reporters to them. Those reporters would start asking questions, and we’d learn more about all of them.
That’s important, because we may have reached a point where the frames around the candidates are locked in: Trump is supposedly the crazy/bigoted one, and Clinton is supposedly the corrupt one. Once we decide that those are the appropriate lenses through which the two candidates are to be viewed, it shapes the decisions the media make every day about which stories are important to pursue.
And it means that to a great extent, for all the controversy he has caused and all the unflattering stories in the press about him, Trump is still being let off the hook.
The record of Trump is one of years of embarrassing business practices, and for someone who claims to be “the business candidate,” that should be a serious problem. Trump’s record is year after year of business schemes that are exclusively self-promotion. If you want to elect a successful business candidate, Trump is just the wrong one to chose.