1. On February 27, 2016, Senator Marco Rubio, a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, delivered remarks to voters at a campaign rally on the Mount Paran Christian School football field in Kennesaw, Georgia. Senator Rubio talked about a number foreign and domestic issues. He also talked about what he characterized as the danger of the Republican Party nominating front-runner Donald Trump to be its 2016 presidential nominee. The following are excerpts from Marco Rubio's no-holds-barred verbal assault on Donald Trump at his campaign rally on February 27, 2016. (Begin excerpts) …. Now look, I want to be frank with you. You deserve the truth about what's happening. Our party today after four states, according to the polls, is on the verge of being taken over. The party of Lincoln and Reagan is on the verge of being taken over by a con artist named Donald Trump. Now, how do con artists work? A con artist identifies people who are struggling and convinces you they have something that will turn that around. Donald Trump has done this before. He had a school. He had a thing called Trump University. They would go to people who were looking to make more money. People who paid as much as $35,000 because they were told that Donald Trump's real estate genius would give them all the secrets to making money. They were told, max your credit card. You can make even more money if you sold up for the gold course. And they did. At the end of the process the only thing they got was a paper, a certificate, and they got to take a picture with a cardboard cutout of Donald Trump. That's what they got. That is called a con job. That is what he's doing now to millions of Americans. Millions of Americans who are hurting, people are struggling. You are struggling, some of you are. You're working as hard as you ever have and you're running in place. You have trouble getting ahead, because the world is been unfair, the economy has gone upside down, and here comes this guy who tells you on going to help turn this around because I've been very successful in business. Not really. He inherited millions of dollars. If he had taken those millions of Warren Buffett. But instead he invested in hotels that went bankrupt. He bankrupted a casino. How do you bankrupt a casino? [laughter] The house always wins. Any time he bankrupted a business, any time he bankrupted a business the people who paid the price where the contractors he had hired. We are over hearing from them. They're calling nonstop, small businesses that did work and he pulled his money out and did what he needed to do and they never got paid. He is not a great businessman. He has taken 4 companies into bankruptcy. You ever heard of Trump Air? It's gone. Four casinos in Atlantic City. He's a guy who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars and had he invested in the stock market, he would have been better off. He's the only one running for president who has hired illegal immigrants to work for him. He hired Polish workers to help on Trump Tower. He's going to protect you from immigrants taking your jobs -- why is he hiring foreigners to do the jobs at his hotel that Americans are trying to get, and he's hiring foreigners to do the job? He's fighting for the little guy, the little guy are the people he's treated the whole time he's been in business. Time and again, it is a con job. I'm a strong leader and the other day he told the protester, I'm going to punch you in the face. He has never punched anyone in the face. [laughter] Ok? He's a guy who has been protected and privileged his whole life and insulated his whole life. This is a massive fraud he is perpetuating. The stakes are not just a fake degree. The stakes are giving control of the conservative movement and ultimately the United States over to a con artist. That will not happen. I make this promise to you today. I will campaign as long as it takes. I will stay in this race as long as it takes. Donald Trump, a con artist, will never get control of this party. I know some of your friends have brought -- bought into this. Friends don't let friends vote for con artists. It is time to open our eyes. We cannot allow a con artist to get access to the nuclear codes of the United States of America. It is a big fraud, and it's time to open our eyes, and we will in the days and weeks to come. What happens when you attack Donald? He goes on twitter. You guys want to have a little fun today? Last night he actually was pretty calm. After I punched him around a little bit. [inaudible] is learning how to spell, I guess. Somebody said that here. He's flying around on Hair Force One and tweeting -- here's the one tweet he put out. He put a picture of me having makeup put on me at the debate, which is amazing to me that a guy with the worst spray tan in America is attacking me for putting on makeup. [applause] Donald Trump likes to sue people. He should sue whoever did that to his face. [applause] Alright, so let's move on. This is an important election. Why am I so fired up about this? Not just because I want to save the country from a con man, not just because I want to save the party from a con artist, but because this election is so important for our future. What is it stake here is what kind of country is America going to be in the 21st century. And we have a chance to make this country better than it has ever been. But that is not the road we are on right now. That is not the road we're on right now. The last eight years have placed us on a road that will leave us as the first Americans who will leave our children worse off than ourselves. That's the road we are going to stay on if we nominate someone who cannot win. If you nominate a con artist, the media will take him apart. Watch the media coverage of Donald Trump. There are two reasons they're laying off of him. I'm convinced some of these reporters are scared of him. The bigger reason is they are just licking their chops. They're waiting for him to be the nominee. The day he's the nominee, which will never happen, they will tear him to shreds. The Democrats are being gleeful about it. They know if I am nominated, we are going to win. They attack me more than anyone else in this race. They know that if I'm nominated, we will win because we will unite this party and we will grow it. But they are holding back and they know if we nominate Donald Trump, they will win. And they can't wait to shred him. And they will. We cannot afford to lose this election… (End excerpts) https://www.c-span.org/video/?405374-1/marco-rubio-campaign-rally-kennesaw-georgia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Rubio
2. Jane Mayer has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1995. She covers politics, culture, and national security for the magazine. Previously, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1984, she became the paper’s first female White House correspondent. She is the author of the 2016 Times best-seller "Dark Money," which the Times named as one of the ten best books of the year, and which began as a 2010 New Yorker piece about the Koch brothers’ deep influence on American politics. “The Art of the Deal” made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing knack for business. Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for Donald Trump, helped create that myth — and regrets it. The following excerpts are from the Jane Mayer's July 25, 2016 article headlined "Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All" at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all (Begin excerpts) ...Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, “We need a leader that wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ” If that was so, Schwartz thought, then he, not Trump, should be running. Schwartz dashed off a tweet: “Many thanks Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ” Schwartz had ghostwritten Trump’s 1987 breakthrough memoir, earning a joint byline on the cover, half of the book’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, and half of the royalties. The book was a phenomenal success, spending forty-eight weeks on the Times best-seller list, thirteen of them at No. 1. More than a million copies have been bought, generating several million dollars in royalties. The book expanded Trump’s renown far beyond New York City, making him an emblem of the successful tycoon. Edward Kosner, the former editor and publisher of New York, where Schwartz worked as a writer at the time, says, “Tony created Trump. He’s Dr. Frankenstein.” ...as he watched a replay of the new candidate holding forth for forty-five minutes, he noticed something strange: over the decades, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz recalls thinking, “If he could lie about that on Day One—when it was so easily refuted—he is likely to lie about anything.” It seemed improbable that Trump’s campaign would succeed, so Schwartz told himself that he needn’t worry much. But, as Trump denounced Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” near the end of the speech, Schwartz felt anxious. He had spent hundreds of hours observing Trump firsthand, and felt that he had an unusually deep understanding of what he regarded as Trump’s beguiling strengths and disqualifying weaknesses. Many Americans, however, saw Trump as a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for business — a mythical image that Schwartz had helped create. “It pays to trust your instincts,” Trump says in the book, adding that he was set to make hundreds of millions of dollars after buying a hotel that he hadn’t even walked through. In the subsequent months, as Trump defied predictions by establishing himself as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, Schwartz’s desire to set the record straight grew....Schwartz’s colleagues urged him to avoid the political fray. But the prospect of President Trump terrified him. It wasn’t because of Trump’s ideology — Schwartz doubted that he had one. The problem was Trump’s personality, which he considered pathologically impulsive and self-centered. Schwartz thought about publishing an article describing his reservations about Trump, but he hesitated, knowing that, since he’d cashed in on the flattering “Art of the Deal,” his credibility and his motives would be seen as suspect. Yet watching the campaign was excruciating. Schwartz decided that if he kept mum and Trump was elected he’d never forgive himself. In June, he agreed to break his silence and give his first candid interview about the Trump he got to know while acting as his Boswell. “I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”... “I was shocked,” Schwartz told me. “Trump didn’t fit any model of human being I’d ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didn’t care what you wrote.” He went on, “Trump only takes two positions. Either you’re a scummy loser, liar, whatever, or you’re the greatest. I became the greatest. He wanted to be seen as a tough guy, and he loved being on the cover.” Schwartz wrote him back, saying, “Of all the people I’ve written about over the years, you are certainly the best sport.” And so Schwartz had returned for more, this time to conduct an interview for Playboy. But to his frustration Trump kept making cryptic, monosyllabic statements. “He mysteriously wouldn’t answer my questions,” Schwartz said. After twenty minutes, he said, Trump explained that he didn’t want to reveal anything new about himself—he had just signed a lucrative book deal and needed to save his best material. ....A lifelong liberal, he was hardly an admirer of Trump’s ruthless and single-minded pursuit of profit. “It was one of a number of times in my life when I was divided between the Devil and the higher side,” he told me... ....the discussion was soon hobbled by what Schwartz regards as one of Trump’s most essential characteristics: “He has no attention span." ...He asked Trump to describe his childhood in detail. After sitting for only a few minutes in his suit and tie, Trump became impatient and irritable. He looked fidgety, Schwartz recalls, “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Even when Schwartz pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his youth, and made it clear that he was bored. Far more quickly than Schwartz had expected, Trump ended the meeting. Week after week, the pattern repeated itself. Schwartz tried to limit the sessions to smaller increments of time, but Trump’s contributions remained oddly truncated and superficial. “Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said. In a recent phone interview, Trump told me that, to the contrary, he has the skill that matters most in a crisis: the ability to forge compromises. The reason he touted “The Art of the Deal” in his announcement, he explained, was that he believes that recent Presidents have lacked his toughness and finesse: “Look at the trade deficit with China. Look at the Iran deal. I’ve made a fortune by making deals. I do that. I do that well. That’s what I do.” 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.... “He was playing people,” Schwartz recalls. On the phone with business associates, Trump would flatter, bully, and occasionally get mad, but always in a calculated way. Before the discussion ended, Trump would “share the news of his latest success,” Schwartz says. Instead of saying goodbye at the end of a call, Trump customarily signed off with “You’re the greatest!” There was not a single call that Trump deemed too private for Schwartz to hear. “He loved the attention,” Schwartz recalls. “If he could have had three hundred thousand people listening in, he would have been even happier.” This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There is no private Trump.” This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on “The Art of the Deal,” Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention. “All he is, is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular,” he observed, on October 21, 1986. But, as he noted in the journal a few days later, “the book will be far more successful if Trump is a sympathetic character—even weirdly sympathetic—than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.” ....“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?” Schwartz says of Trump, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.” When challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent. This quality was recently on display after Trump posted on Twitter a derogatory image of Hillary Clinton that contained a six-pointed star lifted from a white-supremacist Web site. Campaign staffers took the image down, but two days later Trump angrily defended it, insisting that there was no anti-Semitic implication. Whenever “the thin veneer of Trump’s vanity is challenged,” Schwartz says, he overreacts—not an ideal quality in a head of state....
In his journal, Schwartz wrote, “Trump stands for many of the things I abhor: his willingness to run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic obsessions, the absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.” Looking back at the text now, Schwartz says, “I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is.” The first line of the book is an example. “I don’t do it for the money,” Trump declares. “I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” Schwartz now laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. “Of course he’s in it for the money,” he said. “One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.’ ” As for the idea that making deals is a form of poetry, Schwartz says, “He was incapable of saying something like that—it wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.” He saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.” Often, after spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile one hugely expensive project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning plates, Schwartz would go home and tell his wife, “He’s a living black hole!” Schwartz reminded himself that he was being paid to tell Trump’s story, not his own, but the more he worked on the project the more disturbing he found it. In his journal, he describes the hours he spent with Trump as “draining” and “deadening.” Schwartz told me that Trump’s need for attention is “completely compulsive,” and that his bid for the Presidency is part of a continuum. “He’s managed to keep increasing the dose for forty years,” Schwartz said. After he’d spent decades as a tabloid titan, “the only thing left was running for President. If he could run for emperor of the world, he would.” ...Wayne Barrett, whose reporting for the Voice informed his definitive 1991 book, “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” says, “It was all Fred’s political connections that created the abatement.” In addition, Trump snookered rivals into believing that he had an exclusive option from the city on the project, when he didn’t. Trump also deceived his partner in the deal, Jay Pritzker, the head of the Hyatt Hotel chain. Pritzker had rejected an unfavorable term proposed by Trump, but at the closing Trump forced it through, knowing that Pritzker was on a mountain in Nepal and could not be reached. Schwartz wrote in his journal that “almost everything” about the hotel deal had “an immoral cast.” But as the ghostwriter he was “trying hard to find my way around” behavior that he considered “if not reprehensible, at least morally questionable.” Many tall tales that Trump told Schwartz contained a kernel of truth but made him out to be cleverer than he was. One of Trump’s favorite stories was about how he had tricked the company that owned Holiday Inn into becoming his partner in an Atlantic City casino. Trump claimed that he had quieted executives’ fears of construction delays by ordering his construction supervisor to make a vacant lot that he owned look like “the most active construction site in the history of the world.” As Trump tells it in “The Art of the Deal,” there were so many dump trucks and bulldozers pushing around dirt and filling holes that had just been dug that when Holiday Inn executives visited the site it “looked as if we were in the midst of building the Grand Coulee Dam.” The stunt, Trump claimed, pushed the deal through. After the book came out, though, a consultant for Trump’s casinos, Al Glasgow, who is now deceased, told Schwartz, “It never happened.” There may have been one or two trucks, but not the fleet that made it a great story. ...Barrett notes that in “The Art of the Deal” Trump describes his father as having been born in New Jersey to Swedish parents; in fact, he was born in the Bronx to German parents. (Decades later, Trump spread falsehoods about Obama’s origins, claiming it was possible that the President was born in Africa.) In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump portrays himself as a warm family man with endless admirers. He praises Ivana’s taste and business skill—“I said you can’t bet against Ivana, and she proved me right.” But Schwartz noticed little warmth or communication between Trump and Ivana, and he later learned that while “The Art of the Deal” was being written Trump began an affair with Marla Maples, who became his second wife. (He divorced Ivana in 1992.) As far as Schwartz could tell, Trump spent very little time with his family and had no close friends.....Schwartz says of Trump, “He’d like people when they were helpful, and turn on them when they weren’t. It wasn’t personal. He’s a transactional man—it was all about what you could do for him.” According to Barrett, among the most misleading aspects of “The Art of the Deal” was the idea that Trump made it largely on his own, with only minimal help from his father, Fred. Barrett, in his book, notes that Trump once declared, “The working man likes me because he knows I didn’t inherit what I’ve built,” and that in “The Art of the Deal” he derides wealthy heirs as members of “the Lucky Sperm Club. Trump’s self-portrayal as a Horatio Alger figure has buttressed his populist appeal in 2016. But his origins were hardly humble...when Barrett investigated he found that Trump’s father was instrumental in his son’s rise, financially and politically. In the book, Trump says that “my energy and my enthusiasm” explain how, as a twenty-nine-year-old with few accomplishments, he acquired the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Barrett reports, however, that Trump’s father had to co-sign the many contracts that the deal required. He also lent Trump seven and a half million dollars to get started as a casino owner in Atlantic City; at one point, when Trump couldn’t meet payments on other loans, his father tried to tide him over by sending a lawyer to buy some three million dollars’ worth of gambling chips. Barrett told me, “Donald did make some smart moves himself, particularly in assembling the site for the Trump Tower. That was a stroke of genius.” Nonetheless, he said, “The notion that he’s a self-made man is a joke. But I guess they couldn’t call the book ‘The Art of My Father’s Deals.'" The other key myth perpetuated by “The Art of the Deal” was that Trump’s intuitions about business were almost flawless. “The book helped fuel the notion that he couldn’t fail,” Barrett said. But, unbeknown to Schwartz and the public, by late 1987, when the book came out, Trump was heading toward what Barrett calls “simultaneous personal and professional self-destruction.” O’Brien agrees that during the next several years Trump’s life unravelled. The divorce from Ivana reportedly cost him twenty-five million dollars. Meanwhile, he was in the midst of what O’Brien calls “a crazy shopping spree that resulted in unmanageable debt.” He was buying the Plaza Hotel and also planning to erect “the tallest building in the world,” on the former rail yards that he had bought on the West Side. In 1987, the city denied him permission to construct such a tall skyscraper, but in “The Art of the Deal” he brushed off this failure with a one-liner: “I can afford to wait.” O’Brien says, “The reality is that he couldn’t afford to wait. He was telling the media that the carrying costs were three million dollars, when in fact they were more like twenty million.” Trump was also building a third casino in Atlantic City, the Taj, which he promised would be “the biggest casino in history.” He bought the Eastern Air Lines shuttle that operated out of New York, Boston, and Washington, rechristening it the Trump Shuttle, and acquired a giant yacht, the Trump Princess. “He was on a total run of complete and utter self-absorption,” Barrett says, adding, “It’s kind of like now.” Schwartz said that when he was writing the book “the greatest percentage of Trump’s assets was in casinos, and he made it sound like each casino was more successful than the last. But every one of them was failing.” He went on, “I think he was just spinning. I don’t think he could have believed it at the time. He was losing millions of dollars a day. He had to have been terrified.” In 1992, the journalist David Cay Johnston published a book about casinos, “Temples of Chance,” and cited a net-worth statement from 1990 that assessed Trump’s personal wealth. It showed that Trump owed nearly three hundred million dollars more to his creditors than his assets were worth. The next year, his company was forced into bankruptcy—the first of six such instances. The Trump meteor had crashed. But in “The Art of the Deal,” O’Brien told me, “Trump shrewdly and unabashedly promoted an image of himself as a dealmaker nonpareil who could always get the best out of every situation—and who can now deliver America from its malaise.” This idealized version was presented to an exponentially larger audience, O’Brien noted, when Mark Burnett, the reality-television producer, read “The Art of the Deal” and decided to base a new show on it, “The Apprentice,” with Trump as the star. The first season of the show, which premièred in 2004, opens with Trump in the back of a limousine, boasting, “I’ve mastered the art of the deal, and I’ve turned the name Trump into the highest-quality brand.” An image of the book’s cover flashes onscreen as Trump explains that, as the “master,” he is now seeking an apprentice. O’Brien said, “ ‘The Apprentice’ is mythmaking on steroids. There’s a straight line from the book to the show to the 2016 campaign.”... In my phone interview with Trump, he initially said of Schwartz, “Tony was very good. He was the co-author.” But he dismissed Schwartz’s account of the writing process. “He didn’t write the book,” Trump told me. “I wrote the book. I wrote the book. It was my book. And it was a No. 1 best-seller, and one of the best-selling business books of all time. Some say it was the best-selling business book ever.” (It is not.) Howard Kaminsky, the former Random House head, laughed and said, “Trump didn’t write a postcard for us!”... Schwartz got more of an education the next day, when he and Trump spoke on the phone. After chatting briefly about the party, Trump informed Schwartz that, as his ghostwriter, he owed him for half the event’s cost, which was in the six figures. Schwartz was dumbfounded. “He wanted me to split the cost of entertaining his list of nine hundred second-rate celebrities?” Schwartz had, in fact, learned a few things from watching Trump. He drastically negotiated down the amount that he agreed to pay, to a few thousand dollars, and then wrote Trump a letter promising to write a check not to Trump but to a charity of Schwartz’s choosing. It was a page out of Trump’s playbook. In the past seven years, Trump has promised to give millions of dollars to charity, but reporters for the Washington Post found that they could document only ten thousand dollars in donations—and they uncovered no direct evidence that Trump made charitable contributions from money earned by “The Art of the Deal.” Not long after the discussion of the party bills, Trump approached Schwartz about writing a sequel, for which Trump had been offered a seven-figure advance. This time, however, he offered Schwartz only a third of the profits. He pointed out that, because the advance was much bigger, the payout would be, too. But Schwartz said no. Feeling deeply alienated, he instead wrote a book called “What Really Matters,” about the search for meaning in life. After working with Trump, Schwartz writes, he felt a “gnawing emptiness” and became a “seeker,” longing to “be connected to something timeless and essential, more real." Schwartz told me that he has decided to pledge all royalties from sales of “The Art of the Deal” in 2016 to pointedly chosen charities: the National Immigration Law Center, Human Rights Watch, the Center for the Victims of Torture, the National Immigration Forum, and the Tahirih Justice Center. He doesn’t feel that the gesture absolves him. “I’ll carry this until the end of my life,” he said. “There’s no righting it. But I like the idea that, the more copies that ‘The Art of the Deal’ sells, the more money I can donate to the people whose rights Trump seeks to abridge.” Schwartz expected Trump to attack him for speaking out, and he was correct. Informed that Schwartz had made critical remarks about him, and wouldn’t be voting for him, Trump said, “He’s probably just doing it for the publicity.” He also said, “Wow. That’s great disloyalty, because I made Tony rich. He owes a lot to me. I helped him when he didn’t have two cents in his pocket. It’s great disloyalty. I guess he thinks it’s good for him—but he’ll find out it’s not good for him.” .... People are dispensable and disposable in Trump’s world.” If Trump is elected President, he warned, “the millions of people who voted for him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what anyone who deals closely with him already knows — that he couldn’t care less about them.” (End excerpts)
3. Stephan Richter, from Berlin, Germany, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Globalist, the daily online magazine on the global economy, politics and culture, which he founded and launched in January 2000. He also is the President of The Globalist Research Center, the online think tank — as well as the creator of The Globalist Quiz, a weekly feature exploring the global agenda in an innovative fashion that is syndicated to newspapers around the world. He is a frequent guest on leading radio and television programs, including CNN, PBS Newshour, Germany’s ARD and ZDF and National Public Radio. The following are excerpts from Stephan Richter's March 13, 2018 article headlined "Donald Trump’s Women and Global Trade" at https://www.theglobalist.com/donald-trump-united-states-women-trade/ (Begin excerpts) The purpose of the steel tariffs is motivated by the same political force that drives Trump – playing blame games. After Obama and Hillary, now it’s the entire world’s turn. Donald Trump is the master of playing blame games. He is keener than any politician anywhere in modern memory to deflect from his own failings and shortcomings by opening up ever new avenues of distraction. Alas, his battle cry “Crooked Hillary” – Trump’s key slogan from the 2016 campaign and the epitome of misogyny – is getting very tired. Much worse, as it stands, Trump is being abandoned by the key women in his life. His favorite daughter Ivanka is no longer his darling, now that he is getting under ever more prosecutorial pressure. His wife Melania, for her part, is showing signs of severe spousal indignation.... Now that neither questioning former President Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship nor “Crooked” Hillary can be blamed that effectively anymore, Trump and his coterie of frustrated old men need a new whipping boy to compensate for the de facto loss of their favorite piñatas. That’s where the world outside enters into the equation. That is the real political context in which the indiscriminate imposition of those steel tariffs is significant. To rebuild their political Viagra, Trump and his advisors have now chosen to blame the world outside. They always need someone else to blame – not just to get themselves excited, but also to systematically divert their supporters’ attention from one little fact: Under Trump, the billionaire class is getting away with financial murder by hollowing out America’s “Treasury” in the pursuit of yet more shameless self-enrichment. Blaming other countries for American woes plays directly into many lower-class white Americans’ sense of isolationism. It also detracts from the very real culpability and acts of betrayal that truly hollow out the United States: The hyper-rich of the United States, not foreigners, helped themselves to virtually all the wealth the country has generated in recent decades. And the domestic gazillionaires aren’t being held responsible. Little wonder: Through the mechanism of campaign finance, they literally own the politicians of both parties. (End excerpts)
4. Uwe Bott is the Chief Economist of The Globalist Research Center. From 1996 to 2001, he was managing director and head of country risk at the Structured Finance Group (SFG), a unit of GE Capital Services. Before that, he was senior analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, covering the creditworthiness of more than 30 countries and a number of financial institutions. He received degrees in law and economics from the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, Germany. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University. He is based in New York. The following are excerpts from Uwe Bott's May 11, 2018 article headlined "The New Age of American Imperialism" at https://www.theglobalist.com/united-states-donald-trump-iran-nuclear-deal-imperialism/ (Begin excerpts) ...If Donald Trump’s reckless withdrawal from the Iran deal makes one thing plain, then it is that we live in a new age of American imperialism.... Far from serving any higher principle or noble cause, it is a world of vitriolic, nay-saying men that are hell-bent on destroying whatever glue of cooperation exists in the world today. They know to destroy, but not to build.... Unfazed by such concerns, with every act of pure destruction, Donald Trump’s political base feels more cult-like dedication to its leader. As for the Republican Party itself, it is determined to sell even its last remaining principles for more ways to lute the country’s treasury. For a native German, this dangerous mix of American totalitarianism, authoritarianism and populism raises painful memories of Germany’s darkest period. It was then that military intervention by the United States saved the world from Germany and Germans from themselves. It was then that American post-war generosity helped rebuild a country that was bankrupt and destroyed, both physically and morally. It was then that the American example served Germans to establish a strong and resilient democracy. Thanks to those American gifts, Europe today, with all its problems and challenges, is a peaceful place. And German democracy is one of the pillars of European unity. It is to this end that “Trump’s madness” and the madness of his followers is not just a threat to the national security of the United States as former CIA Chief Joe Brennan publicly stated, but a threat to global security and to democracy as we love and cherish it. To light the world on fire, Trump’s America does not need to cross any borders. America’s military supremacy and economic power are sufficient to serve as incendiary devices, once that they fall into the hands of a madman and willing accomplices like John Bolton, an inveterate warmonger now serving as National Security Advisor. While America saved the world from Germany and Germans from themselves, Europeans must now try to save the world from America and Americans from themselves. Undoubtedly, Europe has a much bigger challenge at hand because it lacks military power to rein in the American threat to global security. But that does not mean that Europe does not have any means to accomplish this admittedly Herculean task. The European signatories to the Iran deal must make it clear at home and in the United States that the United States has violated the Iran agreement, while Iran is actually in full compliance with all conditions set in the agreement.... The United States under Donald Trump has degenerated to a banana republic which only complies with agreements that the leader himself approves of. He makes a complete mockery of international treaties or agreements to which his country already is a party and hence does his utmost to shred the international rule of law. The EU countries must make clear that any sanctions implemented by the Trump Administration against European companies that exercise their rights of doing business with Iran under the conditions as prescribed in the agreement will lead to direct retribution by Europe. In other words, any sanctions against European firms will be answered in kind with sanctions against U.S. corporations without delay. The European countries must further explain to the American people that their persistence in U.S. compliance with international agreements is a matter of principle. The Trump Administration is recklessly putting at risk global peace and no matter what the economic sacrifice for Europe, peace is an overriding concern. This is a tall order, but Europe must go further. It has to explain to the American people that Iran is not the primary enemy of the United States and has not committed one single terrorist act on American soil. Regardless of Iran’s involvements in Syria and Yemen and its support for Hezbollah, the attacks on American and on European cities that have led to thousands of deaths in terrorist suicide attacks were never directed by Iran or other Shia nations. Not one Shiite has been involved in attacks on New York, Boston, and countless other U.S. cities or London, Paris, and Berlin. Not one! … A world without moral compass is a world at war. The Trump version of the United States has relinquished its leadership and torn apart the map following this compass. It is Europe’s responsibility, even its destiny, to step in. Europe cannot outgun America, but it can out-inform it. Europe too must be willing to sacrifice. It must stop the madness of Donald Trump and it must then help America re-discover its democracy. (End excerpts)
5. The following are excerpts from the August 18, 2018 AFP news report headlined "Ex-CIA directors issue unprecedented Trump condemnation". (Begin excerpts) Washington (AFP) - Former CIA directors and another half dozen of America's most senior spies have issued an unprecedented condemnation of President Donald Trump, after his decision to blacklist their colleague John Brennan. In a statement, ex-CIA bosses appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents -- including Robert Gates, George Tenet, Porter Goss, Leon Panetta and David Petraeus -- denounced Trump's decision to strip Brennan of his security clearance. Dozens of other former spies signaled their support for the statement. "The president's action regarding John Brennan and the threats of similar action against other former officials has nothing to do with who should and should not hold security clearances -- and everything to do with an attempt to stifle free speech," the statement read. Describing Trump's move as "inappropriate and deeply regrettable," they insisted "we have never before seen the approval or removal of security clearances used as a political tool, as was done in this case." Two of those who signed the statement -- former director of national intelligence James Clapper and former CIA director Michael Hayden -- have been cited by Trump as on a list of people who could lose their clearance.... The White House said Brennan -- a notable Trump critic -- had been stripped of clearance due to his "erratic" behavior. But in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump admitted his decision on Brennan's clearance was linked to the ongoing federal probe into possible collusion between his campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election. "I call it the rigged witch hunt, [it] is a sham," Trump was quoted as saying in the interview. "And these people led it!" "So I think it's something that had to be done," he added. Trump's actions have been widely condemned, including by respected former admiral William McRaven, the commander of the US Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden. "Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation," he said.... On Friday, Trump said he would likely remove the security clearance of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, who has been targeted by Trump supporters, in part because his wife worked for a company that produced a dossier alleging Russia had incriminating evidence against the now president. "Bruce Ohr is a disgrace. I suspect I'll be taking it away very quickly," Trump told journalists. The Washington Post, citing senior administration officials, reported that the White House has drafted documents revoking the clearances of officials, both current and former, who have criticized Trump or been involved in the Russia probe. The newspaper added that aides have also discussed the best times to release them in order to distract attention from negative news. (End excerpts) Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-cia-directors-issue-unprecedented-trump-condemnation-142601454.html
6. David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers U.S. politics and global news. He previously edited The Atlantic's politics section and has reported for Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The National. He lives in Durham, North Carolina. The following are excerpts from his August 10, 2018 article headlined "Why the Space Force Is Just Like Trump University" with the subheading "The gap between the hype and the reality of the proposed new branch of the military makes the project almost entirely an exercise in misleading branding". (Begin excerpts) ....The Space Force and the White House’s rollout for it are the most focused exercises in Trumpian branding the nation has seen since the president took office, a project reminiscent of Trump University. Trump is selling the public one idea—a glitzy, pathbreaking new wing of government—and giving it instead a potentially kludgy reorganization of existing government functions. Trump first announced the Space Force, which he says will be a sixth, co-equal branch of the military, in June, when he signed a space-policy directive. But that directive didn’t even mention the Space Force, nor was it totally clear how it would work. As my colleague Marina Koren has reported, many top commanders in the military (including Secretary of Defense James Mattis) opposed the plan, arguing that the Pentagon already had the right infrastructure in place to achieve what Trump wanted: the ability to defend American interests in space. There’s even an existing Air Force Space Command.... When Pence complained Thursday that “while our adversaries have been busy weaponizing space, too often we have bureaucratized it,” he was protesting too much. Even though what Trump is proposing is basically a reorganization of existing systems, he has treated it as if he is launching something unprecedented. (The Space Force also can’t go forward unless Congress authorizes it.) Later on Thursday, the Trump reelection campaign sent an email inviting supporters to vote on a logo for the Space Force... Once people have voted in the poll, naturally, they are invited to donate to Trump’s reelection. That leads to a natural complaint: The Trump campaign appears to be selling the logo rights to the Space Force in exchange for campaign donations, turning the government into a tool for Trump’s own political enrichment. The reality is much more pedestrian, and more characteristically Trump-y. What the campaign email is selling is not access and influence, but the illusion of access and influence—an even better scheme, since it demands nothing real in return. The vote will likely have no effect on the eventual logo of the Space Force, should Congress approve it. That’s only fitting for a president who campaigned as a populist but has governed by, and to the benefit of, the wealthy and powerful. Such salesmanship is not new for Trump. The branding of the Space Force resembles nothing so much as Trump University. In that program, Trump gussied up a series of drab, clichéd get-rich-quick real-estate seminars by giving it the name and crest of a full-fledged university and promising “handpicked” instructors. It was not a university, nor were the instructors handpicked. In depositions about the project, Trump proved far removed from any of the actual operations, repeatedly saying lieutenants had dealt with this or that matter. Overpromising and underdelivering were staples of Trump’s business career—see all the allegedly sold-out luxury buildings that turned out to be undersubscribed or dubiously constructed. Those have become signature moves during his presidency, too. Take his summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, which produced tremendous fanfare but, as becomes clearer each day, little in the way of concrete agreements, despite the president’s claims. The same goes for Trump’s border wall, which is the subject of repeated announcements of new construction, even though none has started. But the Space Force is the purest expression of the branding maneuver, given the mismatch between the hype (“Mars Awaits”) and the reality (“It is imperative that the United States adapts its policies, doctrine, and capabilities to protect our interests,” as the new report put it). Anyone tempted to get excited about the Space Force would be well advised to keep the Trump University precedent in mind. The seminars were a short-term success: Thousands of people signed up, creating a new revenue stream for Trump. But they eventually wised up that they weren’t buying real-estate secrets so much as a bill of goods, and some of them sued him, resulting in a $25 million settlement. Eventually, misleading branding schemes have a tendency to fall back down to Earth. (End excerpts) Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/the-space-force-branding-trump-logos/567173/
