1988: The Year Donald Lost His Mind

[Geee]

Politico:

Reviewers trashed Donald Trump’s first book. They dismissed The Art of the Deal as self-promotional pap. They called the author a huckster. “The man’s lack of taste is as vast as his lack of shame,” said the Washington Post. Fortune noted his “shallowness” and “pomposity” and his need for “more money,” more “toys” and “more attention.” The book, said The New Republic, “is a weapon in the continuing public relations war that is Donald Trump’s way of doing business.”

 

None of it mattered. Shortly after its release, a few weeks into January of 1988, Trump’s book was at the top of the New York Times’ list of best-sellers, surprising even his publishers. “Everyone has been astounded,” the director of publicity of Random House told the Associated Press. The scathing critiques, she said, “don’t seem to be making much of a difference.”

 

This was the beginning of a stretch of time that can be seen as peak Trump—at least until this unprecedented and Trump-centric presidential campaign. He had shrugged off his critics and risen to the top of a new field. He had never been hotter, or more famous, than he was at 41 years old, at the start of 1988.

But his response to his surging celebrity was a series of manic, ill-advised ventures. He cheated on his wife, the mother of his first three children. In business, he was acquisitive to the point of recklessness. He bought and sold chunks of stocks of companies he talked about taking over. He glitzed up his gaudy yacht, the yacht the banks would seize less than three years later. He used hundreds of millions of dollars of borrowed money to pay high prices for a hotel and an airline—and his lenders would take them, too. And he tussled for months with game-show magnate Merv Griffin for ownership of his third casino in Atlantic City, the most expensive, gargantuan one yet, the Trump Taj Mahal, which led quickly to the first of his four corporate bankruptcy filings.

[Geee]

TRUMPCARE: A HAZY PLAN FROM A LAZY MAN

 

If you haven’t already concluded that Donald Trump is the most intellectually lazy man to run for president in the history of this republic, take a minute to peruse the health care proposal he has finally cobbled together and posted on his campaign website. And, rest assured, it won’t take more than a minute to read. Trump’s “plan” consists of seven random nostrums that appear to have been hastily cribbed from conservative and libertarian websites by his various flunkies. And it confirms yet again that neither “the Donald” nor his yes men are willing to do their homework.

 

If you have read any serious Obamacare replacement plan, such as Senator Tom Price’s proposal, you will recognize Trump’s solution as the empty blather of a profoundly unserious man. Consider this stroke of genius (number 4 on his list): “Allow individuals to use Health Savings Accounts (HSAs).” Evidently, neither Trump nor his minions realize that individuals are already “allowed” to use HSAs. If this part of the plan more closely resembled the sweeping proposal for which Ben Carson was viciously attacked last year, it might be worthy of serious consideration.

 

Now that Dr. Carson has endorsed Trump, perhaps he can convince the Donald to build a genuine health reform plan around the HSA. That’s unlikely, however. Like Trump’s other proposals, it’s just something to put on the website so he can claim to have an actual plan. Number 5 on his list, for example, reads thus: “Require price transparency from all healthcare providers, especially doctors and… hospitals.” As with his HSA proposal, this betrays breathtaking ignorance. Such transparency has already been mandated by Obamacare and it has accomplished nothing.

 

Transparency isn’t the panacea Trump thinks it is because he makes uninformed assumptions about the health care market. His ignorance is such that, even when one of his borrowed ideas makes sense, he adds some caveat that would hobble its effectiveness. Item 2, for example, calls for removal of legal barriers that prevent the sale of coverage across state lines: “As long as the plan purchased complies with state requirements, any vendor ought to be able to offer insurance in any state.” Trump clearly has no idea that such requirements have been a major driver of our high

 

http://spectator.org/articles/65771/trumpcare-hazy-plan-lazy-man

[Geee]

American Communications Network: How Trump Backed a Multi-Level Marketing Boondoggle

 

 

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last August on the subject of his relationship with ACN, formerly the “American Communications Network,” Donald Trump was unequivocal: “I do not know the company. I know nothing about the company other than the people who run the company,” he said. “I’m not familiar with what they do or how they go about doing that.”

 

 

That was a surprising statement, given that, from 2006 until he announced his presidential bid in 2015, Trump was easily ACN’s most famous unofficial spokesman. For nearly a decade, Trump appeared in promotional videos touting ACN’s “revolutionary products,” he devoted an episode of NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice to ACN’s “revolutionary” videophone, and he earned millions of dollars giving speeches at ACN events as recently as early 2015. Introducing ACN executives Greg Provenzano and Mike Cupisz on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2011, Trump said: “They run a company called ACN, which I know very well.”

 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432709/donald-trump-american-communications-network-multi-level-marketing-boondoggle

[nickydog]

Mo-o-o-oan.

[Geee]

Trump’s Week of Errors, Exaggerations and Flat-out Falsehoods

 

Donald Trump says he is a truthful man. “Maybe truthful to a fault,” he boasted last week at a North Carolina rally where one of his supporters sucker punched a protester.

 

But truthful he is not.

 

With the GOP front-runner scooping up delegates in a march toward the Republican nomination, POLITICO subjected a week’s worth of his words to our magazine’s fact-checking process. We chronicled 4.6 hours of stump speeches and press conferences, from a rally in Concord, N.C., on Monday to a rally on Friday in St. Louis.

The result: more than five dozen statements deemed mischaracterizations, exaggerations, or simply false – the kind of stuff that would have been stripped from one of our stories, or made the whole thing worthy of the spike. It equates to roughly one misstatement every five minutes on average.

 

From warning of the death of Christianity in America to claiming that he is taking no money from donors, the Manhattan billionaire and reality-show celebrity said something far from truthful many times over to the thousands of people packed into his raucous rallies. His remarks represent an extraordinary mix of inaccurate claims about domestic and foreign policy and personal and professional boasts that rarely measure up when checked against primary sources.

 

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/trump-fact-check-errors-exaggerations-falsehoods-213730

[Valin]

44 BC - Roman Emperor Julius Caesar was assassinated by high ranking Roman Senators. The day is known as the "Ides of March."