Commentary

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Trump Heads West After a Rocky Week


NEW YORK–(ENEWSPF)–July 1, 2016.  Who would’ve thought lying about his trade policies in front of a pile of garbage would be the high point of Trump’s week? From a “Mexican plane…ready to attack” to new revelations of shady Trump brand scams and outsourcing schemes that hurt workers and families, Trump proved once again this week that he is temperamentally unfit to serve as president and simply in it for himself.

So as Trump heads to the Western Conservative Summit today (with Sarah Palin!) to deliver his next speech, we at Hillary for America want to take a look back at what we’ve learned about the Donald so far this week:

The Trumps pocketed $500,000 for a failed Baja condo project that left customers bankrupt and betrayed

  • LAT: “When the project went south, no one from the Trump organization even contacted us to take responsibility,” Sapol said. “We were misled — all the marketing materials, the brochures, the name of the building, the fact that Trump’s daughter was at the event, saying she and her brother bought units.”…Soon after losing her deposit, she and everyone else at the aerospace office where she worked in Westlake Village were laid off. Her condo in Canoga Park went into foreclosure. When lawyers in the fraud suit invited her to join the case, she had no money to take part. “No savings, 401K, home equity, job, nothing,” she wrote to them in an April 2010 letter

The Trump-connected Cambridge Who’s Who preyed on the vulnerable and elderly, selling useless services at exorbitant prices

  • NYT: In Oregon, Phyllis Fread was in her 80s, dealing with Parkinson’s disease and had been retired from teaching for almost two decades when Cambridge started calling her at home, where she lived alone. Cambridge salespeople telephoned Ms. Fread — who did not use the internet — 42 times trying to sell her networking services, a website and other products she did not need, according to an investigation by the Oregon attorney general’s office…Eventually, Ms. Fread reached her credit card limit and her son disconnected her telephone to stop Cambridge from calling. In a recorded interview with an investigator from the attorney general’s office, Ms. Fread became emotional as she recalled how “there were all kinds of things they’d push and I’d say, ‘I don’t want it at all.’” “I remember saying, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t need anything, I don’t want anything.’ And then you couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I probably should have hung up,” she said. “But I didn’t.” Cambridge was accused by the state of “unfair, deceptive and unconscionable practices” and settled without admitting guilt, issuing a refund to Ms. Fread in 2012. She died 18 months later.

In addition to the scam that was Trump University, Trump Institute was a seminar program that sold overpriced and plagiarized get-rich quick schemes

  • NYT: As with Trump University, the Trump Institute promised falsely that its teachers would be handpicked by Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump did little, interviews show, besides appear in an infomercial — one that promised customers access to his vast accumulated knowledge. “I put all of my concepts that have worked so well for me, new and old, into our seminar,” he said in the 2005 video, adding, “I’m teaching what I’ve learned.” Reality fell far short. In fact, the institute was run by a couple who had run afoul of regulators in dozens of states and had been dogged by accusations of deceptive business practices and fraud for decades. Similar complaints soon emerged about the Trump Institute.

Trump continued his derogatory attacks against Native Americans and Latinos this week…

  • NBC: In the phone interview Trump re-upped his “Pocahontas” nickname for the Massachusetts senator, which some in the party have cautioned him against using in his attempt to appeal to a wider swath of the electorate. “I do what I do. I’ve listened to this for a long time – at the beginning of the primaries, ‘He should do this, he should do that.’ I won in a landslide,” Trump said.
  • HuffPo: Donald Trump seems so intent on turning Mexico into America’s boogeyman that even a passing airplane got incorporated into his stump speech on Thursday.

…and now his warm up acts and followers are taking his cue…

  • CNN: A conservative radio host opening for Donald Trump on Wednesday during a rally picked up on the billionaire’s criticism of Sen. Elizabeth Warren by putting his hand over his mouth and mimicking a stereotypical Native American war cry.
  • ABC: During a question-and-answer session following a trade policy-themed town hall event in Manchester, New Hampshire, audience member Cathie Chevalier asked, “Why aren’t we putting our military retirees on that border or in TSA? Get rid of all these hibi-jabis they wear at TSA? Chevalier, the past state president of the New Hampshire Ladies Auxiliary Veterans of Foreign Wars, was referring to a hijab, the headscarf some Muslim women wear. “I understand,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee responded.

…and he’s citing “Jimmy The Greek” as a reason they shouldn’t apologize.

  • Boston Globe: ‘‘’You never hear me apologize, do you?’’’ Trump added, according to Carr. ‘‘That’s what killed Jimmy the Greek way back. Remember? He was doing OK ‘til he said he was sorry.’’
  • Slate: Really? Trump thinks Jimmy the Greek shouldn’t have apologized? Let’s go back and look at the comments that got Snyder fired from his broadcasting job in 1988. On Jan. 15, Martin Luther King’s birthday, a reporter asked Snyder about the status of blacks in sports. Snyder, on video, gave several answers.

True to form, Trump delivered a trade speech that did nothing more than underscore his own hypocritical record of outsourcing…

  • TIME: In a blog post written just three years ago, Trump called for global unity and international economic interdependence, writing that there were important opportunities to do business in Europe. And in a 2005 essay, Trump said that outsourcing jobs is “not always a terrible thing,” arguing for a more nuanced view of shipping jobs out of the United States.
  • Daily Beast: Here’s a shorter version of the trade policy speech Donald Trump gave in front of a pile of garbage on Tuesday: Don’t do as I do. Do as I say. As the presumptive Republican nominee unveiled his new trade proposals at an aluminum plant in Pennsylvania, he ignored decades of his own actions, opinions and to oppose outsourcing and free trade.
  • NYT: But such declarations are at odds with Mr. Trump’s long history as a businessman, in which he has been heavily — and proudly — reliant on foreign labor in the name of putting profits, rather than America, first. From cheap neckties to television sets, Mr. Trump has benefited from some of the trade practices he now scorns.

…but he hasn’t just spurned workers by shipping jobs overseas, he’s also refused to pay them for work completed on his projects in the US

  • AP: A quarter of a century had passed since Donald Trump refused to pay $1.2 million for the paving stones her late husband installed at Atlantic City’s Taj Mahal casino. But for Paone and others like her — the dozens of contractors and their families who never got all they were owed — it could have happened yesterday. The contractor who provided the onion domes atop the Taj had to eat $2 million in losses. The contractor who supplied the Carrara marble from Italy ended up filing for personal bankruptcy. The contractor who put in the bathroom partitions had to lay off his brother.

And yet again, we learned that Trump’s claims of charitable giving are highly inflated…

  • WaPo: Trump promised millions to charity. We found less than $10,000 over 7 years.
  • Buzzfeed: Donald Trump Took Back His Promise To Donate His “Apprentice” Salary To Charity “You’re not giving your whole salary to charity, are you?” asked Stern. “No,” Trump replied.

…almost as inflated as his promises to reduce the debt.

  • WSJ: Donald Trump’s tax and spending proposals would greatly increase the national debt over the next 10 years, while Hillary Clinton’s combination of new revenue and new spending would have a nearly negligible effect on the country’s $14 trillion debt, according to a study released Sunday.

All of this might explain why Republicans refuse to get in line behind the presumptive Republican nominee.  We know Trump antagonist Senator Ben Sasse is speaking at the Summit, but does anyone know if Trump’s chief Republican rival,”Someone Else,” will be speaking? Please keep us updated.

Source: http://www.hillaryclinton.com

 


ARCHIVES