If on Tuesday you were standing over the grave of Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, you could have heard the sigh of contentment through six feet of soil. Justice Arthur F. Engoron issued a ruling that Donald Trump had committed fraud “persistently” by inflating the value of his real estate assets by as much as $2.2 billion in a scheme to defraud banks and insurance companies so that he would receive better loan interest rates and lower insurance premiums than he would have, had he stated his net worth accurately on his financial statements.
I've told this here before but maybe it's not a bad time for a rerun. When I was a court reporter in the beginning of my career in the 70s and 80s, I was traveling to New York a lot taking depositions of CEOs and the very tippy top guys. Trump was such a despicably gaudy character even then, remember I'm from the Deep Deep South, that I couldn't stop watching him in utter disgust, wondering why anyone would ever invite him to a "nice party." So my opportunity after depositions were over and the CEOs were hanging around to chitchat was to ask about Donald Trump, the gaudy, always in the klieg lights center of, even though he looked wormy. And to a one, they all just kind of laughed and said phony self-promoter. So for all that time, just on the periphery, I'd catch another disgusting glimpse of him. He is exactly now what he was then, a liar, a cheat, an attention grabber and maybe the greatest con man anyone has ever seen, and that should be read as so despicable, no one ever takes him seriously and that they instantly recoil in horror that it ever happened at all. So he got to gather all this wealth and pretend power, and here he is. Reports are he's soon going to have to stop paying his stragglers' legal fees because his are bringing him down. May he melt publicly and spectacularly right before our eyes. And become penniless while he is still fully conscious.
Every night, before I go to bed, I pray for that public meltdown, when his head explodes, he rants and curses and he really lets go with all the ugliness and vindictiveness inside. He’s like an old style sci-fi movie where there’s a smooth, normal looking human being and one day, the face gets peeled back and there’s an oozing disgusting lizard creature. I just keep hoping that now that he’s getting it in every direction a lifetime of karma from screwing everybody in his path will finally turn and he will blow his lid. That is my fondest dream; well that and seeing him share his cell with Bubba.
I feel the exact same about him. I like to play with my idea of karma coming to collect and my observation is you don't have to get even because karma is almost always around and when it comes time to collect, it wants more than you can afford to pay. Even more than putting him in prison would be to take away his wealth. His legal bills are growing by the minute, especially when he wants to appeal stuff. And there's a lot right now about how he's going to likely have to stop paying the legal bills of others to keep up with his own. Good. Wasted money. Also the movie A Face in the Crowd where Andy Griffith played a politician type like Trump and someone left the sound on after one of his broadcast campaign events and he was mocking his voters as stupid and dupes. Different being back then it ended his career. Trump does this to their faces and it goes over the tops of their heads.
big difference: in "A Face in the Crowd," Andy Griffith ("Lonesome Rhodes") is NEVER an actual politician himself, but someone who has lots of power in terms of which politician he feels like endorsing.
those guys (Kazan and--I THINK--Schulberg) would NEVER have been so outrageously over-the-top to think that somebody like THAT could ever attain national office himself. and hasn't that live mike thing already happened over-and-over again?
as I keep saying...life and politics in this century is a lot weirder than in the last one.
You are so right. Thanks for the correction. I obviously didn't check it thoroughly and I remember watching it years and years and years, decades ago. It is a big difference but it so reminds me of Trump, even down to making me think of Trump hugging the flag with that particular idiot look he puts on his face so often, that also makes him look like one of the versions of The Joker. And who knew that we would enter and dwell in outrageous over-the-topness.
I hold Mark Burnett, the producer/creator of The Apprentice, very responsible for the greatest sociopathic con man ever to shit on our democracy. He has many tapes in his possession that are emblematic of the scumbag, phony, racist, stupid, toupee wearing orange clown. Burnett could help us out of this dangerous catastrophe but instead he stays silent in his fake Christianity. He contributed to the ultimate propaganda that supported this hateful, rageful, anti-Christian, mob-like criminal, Hitler wannabe. Where is he? Where are his tapes?
Amen, from another court reporter, long retired from SDNY in Manhattan, where I once encountered him and never in a million years thought he would end up in the Oval Office. Which goes to show, shit floats.
Martha! Buddy. See, we're his vintage and have gotten the long show on this guy. The South for eons would have considered him "one of them Yankee carpetbagger types." So it wasn't shocking just that Trump has lived this out so long but that the South has embraced the worst kind of carpetbagging repulsive character ever to come down the pike.
Raising a glass to Wayne Barrett, the Village Voice and you. Vindication after the screaming sycophants are finally shutting up, hopefully feeling the humiliation they deserve. Here’s to honest journalism, the death of bothside-ism when covering blatant degeneracy.
Praying the didactic lesson of shame emerges, a nod to knowing right from wrong.
All of us who were from Southwestern Connecticut knew of tRump's proclivities, lies, cheating, fraud, racism and hubris. Small business contractors knew to steer clear after some were unpaid and bankrupted. This is a man who never should have risen to the top executive of the land - he is grossly unqualified and maximally incompetent to be entrusted with any position of requiring honesty and unselfishness. I am ashamed he was elevated to such an office and afraid of how long, or if, we can recover as a nation.
I live in New Orleans and I knew, way back then. It's amazing to get to be an old person and see that he was able to pull this off and grow it spectacularly all that time. It's scary now when you look at his base.
It does prove one thing, however, and that is that t-Rump was not and Is not stupid. Too many of those who encountered him mistook his crudeness and corruption for stupidity. He’s not a “f*cking moron” —he’s a f*cking MONSTER!
You're right, although Trump is ALSO a "forking moron" about some topics that were raised during his years in the WH, that is, he completely misunderstands - or has only the vaguest glimmer of any grasp at all about - some basic powers assigned and NOT assigned in the U.S. Constitution as interpreted over decades by the SCOTUS, but bloviated and blustered as IF he understood them, to pick one germane set of examples.
But that by itself can coexist with a kind of rat-like cunning, so he is not "stupid" in that sense.
One reason he is so ignorant is because he doesn’t/can’t read. And he thinks the Constitution says he could do whatever he wanted to do because he is king, I mean, was king (according to Dumpster, isn’t President the same as king?)
It's like savant, Judith. In actuality he is not a good businessman. He's got more bankruptices in his history than just about anybody, failure after failure. The money people all say if he'd just done safe stocks, he would be a multibillionaire. And now we see his legal bills are going to go way beyond his fortune of today. He's still cashing in parts of his inheritance, probably the parts he stole from his siblings., to keep up his lavish lifestyle.
that somebody can beat me in a game of Monopoly doesn't make him smart. of course, in my own actual case, EVERYBODY beats me in ANY given Monopoly game, but that's not the point. a tarantula might be able to kill me, but that doesn't mean I want it in my book club.
I pray to any gods who may be listening that this trial, along with many others, induces enough stress in the Orange Dumpster to send him into acute cardiac arrest. We really, really need to be rid of this walking, talking disaster.
How nice, even posthumously, for your colleague at The Voice to have been right on the money. Nicer, still, that the thinking person’s saturated fat torment is on his way to destruction. And humiliation. And maybe ... penury.
"All of the newspapers and TV stations and talk shows that promoted Trump for so many years without lifting the rock that he lived under should take a look in the mirror" not that it would cause them to reflect on how completely and utterly they've effed everything up but yes!
Sep 29, 2023·edited Sep 29, 2023Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
I want to see 45 in an orange jumpsuit as much as the next person, but I won't be satisfied until his legions of enablers are parading in sackcloth and ashes down 5th Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, or the Main Street nearest you. Because no one pulls this off all by himself, and if we don't call the enablers to account, it's gonna keep happening. (My town doesn't have a Main Street, but both of the two neighboring towns do, and I think something could be arranged.)
Lucian, I could see your inner smile from 2700 miles away.
If there were only a real-life Guy Grand (the billionaire in The Magic Christian who sowed delightful disorder), we would see this week a statue added to the clock on the sidewalk outside Trump Tower (a clock installed, naturally, without a city permit) of Wayne Barrett, in the exact, famous, glorious pose of Gene Kelly hanging off a lamppost in "Singing in the Rain." Instead of holding an umbrella in his free hand, the Barrett likeness would be holding a reproduction of the Village Voice cover we see with your piece. Of course, if (WHEN) Trump's name is blasted off the building, another location will have to be found. Might depend on where Trump will be placed in one or another government housing program.
That next jumbo bucket of chicken which Defendant Trump will stuff into his considerable middle? KFC, all right: Karma Finds Conman.
Oh, yes, *that.* For younger readers, or those who managed to ignore Defendant Trump until, say, 2015 (rejoice in how many fewer times you had to flush your moral toilet), Desecrator Donny bought that failed department store building on Fifth Avenue. New York's Metropolitan Museum asked that he preserve two 15-foot-tall limestone relief panels on the facade of the building, both showing nearly nude woman dancing, and donate them to the museum. Sure, said Desecrator Donny. Apparently he then found it would cost him some money, and so he imported Eastern European laborers (without work permits) who jackhammered the panels.
As for Desecrator Donny thinking the building would be a "monument" to himself, the only thing which ties just another New York glass skyscraper to his name are the five letters RUTPM (pronounced like REDRUM in "The Shining") on its facade and elsewhere. Once Defendant Trump loses control of his properties, and those letters are removed, probably by a union crew, they will be replaced. Wouldn't it be great if some of the money that's been secretly smuggled out of the country to which Defendant Trump pledges his true allegiance would be used to buy the building and rename it PUTIN PLACE?
The Village Voice brings back good memories. I babysat the son of the editor and lived around the corner, newly married, in a six-floor walk-up and lived on the sixth floor.
I'm simply going to take Mr. Truscott's comments section and congratulate myself. Before the election in 2016, I told everyone close to me that if Trump was elected, it would be his ruin and an end for his "business" empire. My own sister said, "I'll believe it when I see it," when I claimed Trump would wind up in prison. Now, I'm still waiting on that, but I'm grudgingly getting a lot of "you were rights." The classified documents at Mar-a-lago were completely unshocking to me, as well. I simply knew that his idea of the Presidency was not at all what the position of President actually is.
Me too. Everyone either mocked me for my naivete, or simply insisted it will never happen. But tyrants always go down. Sad that he’s taking so many down with him. Including a million dead Americans due to his insane approach to the COVID epidemic, and so many others bankrupted by doing “biz” with him. And the trust of the American people in what is and is not truth.
Me, too. But I thought the FBI would frog-march him off the WH property with all the Russian involvement that belatedly came to light. Nope. Instead, much, MUCH later, an FBI report squeaked out, revealing that they didn’t do a full and thorough background check on tRump. So here we are, and he is STILL walking free, inciting violence and sedition, indicted on charges that spell out T-R-E-A-S-O-N. We can’t even get a comprehensive gag down his throat.
in that case, DK, you deserve a prescient post pat on your back.
well deserved.
too bad that tfg couldnt have had that same foreseer advice and instead of riding down that escalator he couldve just gone on sleazing and petty criming his way around his home town with nobody seriously caring.
I believe the defining event for many New Yorkers, including myself, was after the central park five were acquitted, because the real rapist confessed and DNA tests proved that those five poor kids who were browbeaten all night by scumbag police were innocent. And Trump continued to rail that they should be put to death. He was no longer a clown at that point. We couldn’t sit back and just watch the circus performance of a man who thought he was a real operator work the city. He is an evil evil man and we all knew it and nobody was amused by him. Do you know who the real culprit here is? Mark Burnett, who pulled the fat orange bastard out of financial doom and created the Apprentice, and made a big fat, ignorant loser appear to be a dealmaker, a big success. I’ve read reports that the stupid bastard couldn’t stay on script, and they would have to scramble to justify these completely erratic decisions he made on the show If Burnett had just let Trump fall in the gutter at that point, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
i concur with absolutely everything you said here, AJB, *except for* the real culprit.
after the run of that show (which i had nary caught a single episode), trump couldve drifted back into his scummy life of criming and disappeared from our conciousness.
but no. with the help of cambridge analytica, scl group, and complicitly willing media both social and mainstream, putin saw his opportunity to capitalize on his years of grooming and have his puppet putin the White House.
In his deposition Trump stated that a property of his could not be overvalued because a Saudi prince would pay any price he asked for it. That is naked corruption, not smart business.
I've told this here before but maybe it's not a bad time for a rerun. When I was a court reporter in the beginning of my career in the 70s and 80s, I was traveling to New York a lot taking depositions of CEOs and the very tippy top guys. Trump was such a despicably gaudy character even then, remember I'm from the Deep Deep South, that I couldn't stop watching him in utter disgust, wondering why anyone would ever invite him to a "nice party." So my opportunity after depositions were over and the CEOs were hanging around to chitchat was to ask about Donald Trump, the gaudy, always in the klieg lights center of, even though he looked wormy. And to a one, they all just kind of laughed and said phony self-promoter. So for all that time, just on the periphery, I'd catch another disgusting glimpse of him. He is exactly now what he was then, a liar, a cheat, an attention grabber and maybe the greatest con man anyone has ever seen, and that should be read as so despicable, no one ever takes him seriously and that they instantly recoil in horror that it ever happened at all. So he got to gather all this wealth and pretend power, and here he is. Reports are he's soon going to have to stop paying his stragglers' legal fees because his are bringing him down. May he melt publicly and spectacularly right before our eyes. And become penniless while he is still fully conscious.
Every night, before I go to bed, I pray for that public meltdown, when his head explodes, he rants and curses and he really lets go with all the ugliness and vindictiveness inside. He’s like an old style sci-fi movie where there’s a smooth, normal looking human being and one day, the face gets peeled back and there’s an oozing disgusting lizard creature. I just keep hoping that now that he’s getting it in every direction a lifetime of karma from screwing everybody in his path will finally turn and he will blow his lid. That is my fondest dream; well that and seeing him share his cell with Bubba.
I feel the exact same about him. I like to play with my idea of karma coming to collect and my observation is you don't have to get even because karma is almost always around and when it comes time to collect, it wants more than you can afford to pay. Even more than putting him in prison would be to take away his wealth. His legal bills are growing by the minute, especially when he wants to appeal stuff. And there's a lot right now about how he's going to likely have to stop paying the legal bills of others to keep up with his own. Good. Wasted money. Also the movie A Face in the Crowd where Andy Griffith played a politician type like Trump and someone left the sound on after one of his broadcast campaign events and he was mocking his voters as stupid and dupes. Different being back then it ended his career. Trump does this to their faces and it goes over the tops of their heads.
big difference: in "A Face in the Crowd," Andy Griffith ("Lonesome Rhodes") is NEVER an actual politician himself, but someone who has lots of power in terms of which politician he feels like endorsing.
those guys (Kazan and--I THINK--Schulberg) would NEVER have been so outrageously over-the-top to think that somebody like THAT could ever attain national office himself. and hasn't that live mike thing already happened over-and-over again?
as I keep saying...life and politics in this century is a lot weirder than in the last one.
You are so right. Thanks for the correction. I obviously didn't check it thoroughly and I remember watching it years and years and years, decades ago. It is a big difference but it so reminds me of Trump, even down to making me think of Trump hugging the flag with that particular idiot look he puts on his face so often, that also makes him look like one of the versions of The Joker. And who knew that we would enter and dwell in outrageous over-the-topness.
I hold Mark Burnett, the producer/creator of The Apprentice, very responsible for the greatest sociopathic con man ever to shit on our democracy. He has many tapes in his possession that are emblematic of the scumbag, phony, racist, stupid, toupee wearing orange clown. Burnett could help us out of this dangerous catastrophe but instead he stays silent in his fake Christianity. He contributed to the ultimate propaganda that supported this hateful, rageful, anti-Christian, mob-like criminal, Hitler wannabe. Where is he? Where are his tapes?
I like your description of Trump as "despicably gaudy." I've always thought him as a fraud and a mobster.
Amen, from another court reporter, long retired from SDNY in Manhattan, where I once encountered him and never in a million years thought he would end up in the Oval Office. Which goes to show, shit floats.
Martha! Buddy. See, we're his vintage and have gotten the long show on this guy. The South for eons would have considered him "one of them Yankee carpetbagger types." So it wasn't shocking just that Trump has lived this out so long but that the South has embraced the worst kind of carpetbagging repulsive character ever to come down the pike.
It takes a diet high in animal fat to produce shit that floats itself into the White House.
Dead broke and SOL!!
Raising a glass to Wayne Barrett, the Village Voice and you. Vindication after the screaming sycophants are finally shutting up, hopefully feeling the humiliation they deserve. Here’s to honest journalism, the death of bothside-ism when covering blatant degeneracy.
Praying the didactic lesson of shame emerges, a nod to knowing right from wrong.
You beat me to it, but what I'm lifting is a stein.
All of us who were from Southwestern Connecticut knew of tRump's proclivities, lies, cheating, fraud, racism and hubris. Small business contractors knew to steer clear after some were unpaid and bankrupted. This is a man who never should have risen to the top executive of the land - he is grossly unqualified and maximally incompetent to be entrusted with any position of requiring honesty and unselfishness. I am ashamed he was elevated to such an office and afraid of how long, or if, we can recover as a nation.
I live in New Orleans and I knew, way back then. It's amazing to get to be an old person and see that he was able to pull this off and grow it spectacularly all that time. It's scary now when you look at his base.
It does prove one thing, however, and that is that t-Rump was not and Is not stupid. Too many of those who encountered him mistook his crudeness and corruption for stupidity. He’s not a “f*cking moron” —he’s a f*cking MONSTER!
You're right, although Trump is ALSO a "forking moron" about some topics that were raised during his years in the WH, that is, he completely misunderstands - or has only the vaguest glimmer of any grasp at all about - some basic powers assigned and NOT assigned in the U.S. Constitution as interpreted over decades by the SCOTUS, but bloviated and blustered as IF he understood them, to pick one germane set of examples.
But that by itself can coexist with a kind of rat-like cunning, so he is not "stupid" in that sense.
“Rat-like cunning” — good one!
One reason he is so ignorant is because he doesn’t/can’t read. And he thinks the Constitution says he could do whatever he wanted to do because he is king, I mean, was king (according to Dumpster, isn’t President the same as king?)
He's canny as hell, but as I noted elsewhere no one gets this far without lots and lots of support.
And rubles.
I dunno -- not sure I'd be counting on rubles at this point. Putin is probably paying in dollars. ;-)
It's like savant, Judith. In actuality he is not a good businessman. He's got more bankruptices in his history than just about anybody, failure after failure. The money people all say if he'd just done safe stocks, he would be a multibillionaire. And now we see his legal bills are going to go way beyond his fortune of today. He's still cashing in parts of his inheritance, probably the parts he stole from his siblings., to keep up his lavish lifestyle.
sorry, Judith...he really IS a fucking moron.
that somebody can beat me in a game of Monopoly doesn't make him smart. of course, in my own actual case, EVERYBODY beats me in ANY given Monopoly game, but that's not the point. a tarantula might be able to kill me, but that doesn't mean I want it in my book club.
Roy Cohn (and his slimeball father) taught him well how to get away with it...he's used and abused every law and every trick in the book.
I pray to any gods who may be listening that this trial, along with many others, induces enough stress in the Orange Dumpster to send him into acute cardiac arrest. We really, really need to be rid of this walking, talking disaster.
If only Covid had gotten him.
Oh I’m so glad to hear you think the same thing I do!
I have visions. I think of a band of rabid bears catching him and shredding him.
I have a mental picture of his head exploding, with an orange jello-like substance splattering all over.
And an excellent mental image that is!!😁
me,
i'd like that too, but maybe with a decent dose of shaming thrown in sonewhere would be nice
Lucian - you're our kind of muckraker.
Good call. A perfect word for Lucian, honorable. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and a number of others that we really need to rewatch right now.
Just did and it's because of that Frank Capra kind of happy ending, we can't believe the bad guy is 'winning'....soon to come to an end, I pray!
How nice, even posthumously, for your colleague at The Voice to have been right on the money. Nicer, still, that the thinking person’s saturated fat torment is on his way to destruction. And humiliation. And maybe ... penury.
"All of the newspapers and TV stations and talk shows that promoted Trump for so many years without lifting the rock that he lived under should take a look in the mirror" not that it would cause them to reflect on how completely and utterly they've effed everything up but yes!
Here's to Wayne Barret. I still like to think that everything is not a transaction.
I want to see 45 in an orange jumpsuit as much as the next person, but I won't be satisfied until his legions of enablers are parading in sackcloth and ashes down 5th Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, or the Main Street nearest you. Because no one pulls this off all by himself, and if we don't call the enablers to account, it's gonna keep happening. (My town doesn't have a Main Street, but both of the two neighboring towns do, and I think something could be arranged.)
I’m thinking Rudy and the two Stephan’s.
They've got plenty of competition, but I'm putting Mark Meadows at the top of the list.
Lucian, I could see your inner smile from 2700 miles away.
If there were only a real-life Guy Grand (the billionaire in The Magic Christian who sowed delightful disorder), we would see this week a statue added to the clock on the sidewalk outside Trump Tower (a clock installed, naturally, without a city permit) of Wayne Barrett, in the exact, famous, glorious pose of Gene Kelly hanging off a lamppost in "Singing in the Rain." Instead of holding an umbrella in his free hand, the Barrett likeness would be holding a reproduction of the Village Voice cover we see with your piece. Of course, if (WHEN) Trump's name is blasted off the building, another location will have to be found. Might depend on where Trump will be placed in one or another government housing program.
That next jumbo bucket of chicken which Defendant Trump will stuff into his considerable middle? KFC, all right: Karma Finds Conman.
And to think that he destroyed the beautiful old Bonwit Teller building to create that 'monument' to himself!
Oh, yes, *that.* For younger readers, or those who managed to ignore Defendant Trump until, say, 2015 (rejoice in how many fewer times you had to flush your moral toilet), Desecrator Donny bought that failed department store building on Fifth Avenue. New York's Metropolitan Museum asked that he preserve two 15-foot-tall limestone relief panels on the facade of the building, both showing nearly nude woman dancing, and donate them to the museum. Sure, said Desecrator Donny. Apparently he then found it would cost him some money, and so he imported Eastern European laborers (without work permits) who jackhammered the panels.
As for Desecrator Donny thinking the building would be a "monument" to himself, the only thing which ties just another New York glass skyscraper to his name are the five letters RUTPM (pronounced like REDRUM in "The Shining") on its facade and elsewhere. Once Defendant Trump loses control of his properties, and those letters are removed, probably by a union crew, they will be replaced. Wouldn't it be great if some of the money that's been secretly smuggled out of the country to which Defendant Trump pledges his true allegiance would be used to buy the building and rename it PUTIN PLACE?
omg
This may be the worst
Thanks, another great article.
The Village Voice brings back good memories. I babysat the son of the editor and lived around the corner, newly married, in a six-floor walk-up and lived on the sixth floor.
That is a delightful and very touching and wistful remembering.
i betcha had nice well toned legs and your newlywed husband appreciated his new trim wife ;)
I'm simply going to take Mr. Truscott's comments section and congratulate myself. Before the election in 2016, I told everyone close to me that if Trump was elected, it would be his ruin and an end for his "business" empire. My own sister said, "I'll believe it when I see it," when I claimed Trump would wind up in prison. Now, I'm still waiting on that, but I'm grudgingly getting a lot of "you were rights." The classified documents at Mar-a-lago were completely unshocking to me, as well. I simply knew that his idea of the Presidency was not at all what the position of President actually is.
I, too, realized that becoming POTUS
would be his undoing, which, if you think about it, is quite strange, not to mention ironic.
He thought he was king, hence his repeated insistence, “I’m allowed to do it!!”
Yes, yes, I know that also means that he never let anyone tell him what the job was. He had no intention of actually DOING THE JOB.
I still scream at the television entirely too much. I can’t help it.
Me too. Everyone either mocked me for my naivete, or simply insisted it will never happen. But tyrants always go down. Sad that he’s taking so many down with him. Including a million dead Americans due to his insane approach to the COVID epidemic, and so many others bankrupted by doing “biz” with him. And the trust of the American people in what is and is not truth.
Me, too. But I thought the FBI would frog-march him off the WH property with all the Russian involvement that belatedly came to light. Nope. Instead, much, MUCH later, an FBI report squeaked out, revealing that they didn’t do a full and thorough background check on tRump. So here we are, and he is STILL walking free, inciting violence and sedition, indicted on charges that spell out T-R-E-A-S-O-N. We can’t even get a comprehensive gag down his throat.
Those are the best compliments, "you were right," because usually people aren't that generous.
in that case, DK, you deserve a prescient post pat on your back.
well deserved.
too bad that tfg couldnt have had that same foreseer advice and instead of riding down that escalator he couldve just gone on sleazing and petty criming his way around his home town with nobody seriously caring.
Wayne Barrett’s investigations are spot on!
I believe the defining event for many New Yorkers, including myself, was after the central park five were acquitted, because the real rapist confessed and DNA tests proved that those five poor kids who were browbeaten all night by scumbag police were innocent. And Trump continued to rail that they should be put to death. He was no longer a clown at that point. We couldn’t sit back and just watch the circus performance of a man who thought he was a real operator work the city. He is an evil evil man and we all knew it and nobody was amused by him. Do you know who the real culprit here is? Mark Burnett, who pulled the fat orange bastard out of financial doom and created the Apprentice, and made a big fat, ignorant loser appear to be a dealmaker, a big success. I’ve read reports that the stupid bastard couldn’t stay on script, and they would have to scramble to justify these completely erratic decisions he made on the show If Burnett had just let Trump fall in the gutter at that point, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
i concur with absolutely everything you said here, AJB, *except for* the real culprit.
after the run of that show (which i had nary caught a single episode), trump couldve drifted back into his scummy life of criming and disappeared from our conciousness.
but no. with the help of cambridge analytica, scl group, and complicitly willing media both social and mainstream, putin saw his opportunity to capitalize on his years of grooming and have his puppet putin the White House.
100%!!
My sister, who has lived in Manhattan over 40 years, is thrilled about Trump’s properties being handled by receivers and not his family.
Barrett, Jack Newfield, and other hero journalists at the Voice knew the truth and told it.
In his deposition Trump stated that a property of his could not be overvalued because a Saudi prince would pay any price he asked for it. That is naked corruption, not smart business.