👑 Portrait of a President

[dragonfly9]

Can’t take it…leaves. rating are going to be sky high for 60 Minutes.

The Washington Post: Trump, unhappy with questions from ‘60 Minutes’ host Lesley Stahl, threatens to release interview himself

Trump, unhappy with questions from ‘60 Minutes’ host Lesley Stahl, threatens...

According to a person with knowledge of what happened during the interview, Trump was unhappy that Stahl asked him tough questions regarding his rhetoric about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the size of the crowds at his rallies and his disputes with Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert. Stahl also told him during the interview that allegations about Biden’s son Hunter were not verified and that the Obama administration did not spy on the Trump campaign. Many of the questions were about the coronavirus pandemic and his handling of it, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the interview frankly.

When Trump first walked in, Stahl looked at him and said, “Are you ready for a tough interview?” The president believes “60 Minutes” will cut the interview in an unflattering way and has been talking all afternoon about how to preempt the footage, said the person familiar with the circumstances.

After 45 minutes, Trump looked at staff members and said, “I think we’re done, do you guys agree?”

Philip Rucker (PhilipRucker)

NYTimes: Trump cuts a ‘60 Minutes’ interview short, and then taunts Lesley Stahl on Twitter.

Trump Taunts Lesley Stahl of ‘60 Minutes’ After Cutting Off Interview

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Tucson Mayor Calls Out Trump Over $80,000 Rally Debt Before New Superspreader Event

Regina Romero also called on the self-proclaimed “law and order” candidate to follow the Arizona city’s mandatory mask and social distancing requirements.

Tucson Mayor Calls Out Trump Over $80,000 Rally Debt Before New Superspreader...

The mayor of Tucson, Arizona, fired off a letter to President Donald Trump pointing out that his campaign still owes her city $80,000 for his last rally four years ago — even as he heads to his next potential superspreader event there on Monday.

Democrat Regina Romero — the first Latina to become mayor of one of the largest 50 cities in the nation — also urged Trump to adhere to Tucson’s mask mandate and follow social distance requirements to help stem the spread of COVID-19. Few masks and packed crowds are the hallmarks of a Trump rally.

“We do not want a superspreader event in our city,” Romero told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi in a Sunday interview, which can be seen above. “Tucsonans have worked too hard to bring down COVID-19 numbers.”

Romero’s letter, sent Friday, called on Trump to “ensure that our local ordinances are respected and followed during your event.” It would be “deeply unfortunate if one gathering jeopardizes all of the progress we have made thus far” in limiting the spread of the disease, she added.

“As elected officials, we have both the distinct opportunity and the responsibility to set an example for our constituents, especially when it comes to protecting public health,” she said.

There’s also the not-so-little matter of the $80,000 the Trump campaign still owes the city from a 2016 rally, Romero noted. In addition, the estimated cost of “public safety response services” for Monday’s rally is $50,000, she wrote.

Regina Romero (TucsonRomero)

Regina Romero (TucsonRomero)

Trump’s rally is “not an official visit; it’s a campaign visit,” and shouldn’t use taxpayers’ money, Romero told Velshi on Sunday. “We’re asking him to pay his bills.”

Trump’s campaign owes 14 cities across the nation some $1.82 million in unpaid bills for MAGA rallies stretching back to 2016, according to a report earlier this year from the nonprofit news operation Center for Public Integrity and NBC.

Local officials have complained that the Trump campaign’s unpaid bills are an especially difficult burden now as they grapple with the extra cost of battling COVID-19 as well as aiding residents suffering financial hardships due to the pandemic.

Though Trump won Arizona in the last election, his Democratic opponent Joe Biden currently has an edge in the polls. Arizona Sen. Martha McSally ® is in a tough race against her Democratic rival, former astronaut Mark Kelly.

Romero told Velshi: “Latinos in Arizona will not forget” that the last time around, Trump “declared his candidacy by insulting Mexican Americans, by insulting immigrants and Latinos. We’re not going to forget that he called us rapists and murderers … We’re not going to forget that he had children in cages 45 minutes away from us,” she said. “We’re very excited to vote this time around.”

City leaders to Trump: help us fight the coronavirus by paying your bills

City leaders to Trump: help us fight the coronavirus by paying your bills –...

Fourteen city governments say the president’s campaign now owes them a collective $1.82 million. The campaign says it’s not responsible.

Here’s how some city leaders say President Donald Trump could immediately help them grapple with the coronavirus crisis: Pay bills they already sent his campaign committee months or years ago.

Fourteen municipal governments — from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Wildwood, New Jersey — want Trump’s campaign committee to clear a combined $1.82 million worth of public safety-related debt connected to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign rallies, according to interviews with local officials and municipal records obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

The Trump campaign’s tab is now more than double what Public Integrity first reported in June.

Cities are girding for a coronavirus-induced financial disaster, with a new study from the National League of Cities and U.S. Conference of Mayors indicating more than 2,100 U.S. cities are anticipating significant budget shortfalls and widespread cuts to local government programs and staff. These cuts are likely to fall hardest on low-income residents, people of color, the homeless and the disabled, who are suffering disproportionately from the pandemic.

Campaigns should always reimburse already cash-strapped cities for police and public safety costs, argued Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, whose city wants the Trump campaign to pay nearly $543,000 stemming from an Oct. 10 rally.

“But during this crisis, that loss is even more pronounced — $150,000, for instance, could pay for emergency rental assistance for 100 Minneapolis families,” Frey told Public Integrity this week.

“Without this money, we cannot help our most vulnerable, and I guarantee we do not have enough money to prevent lives lost and homes lost,” said Kate Burke, a city council member in Spokane, Washington, which has been waiting since 2016 for the Trump campaign to pay more than $65,000.

“Any revenue received would be helpful to our general fund, which supports the majority of our operating costs,” said Rebecca Fleury, city manager of Battle Creek, Michigan, which billed the Trump campaign more than $93,000 for public safety services related to a Trump campaign rally in December.

Trump frequently touts his support for law enforcement.

“I love you guys, whether you’re cops, police officers, law enforcement — I’ll call you whatever you want, it doesn’t matter. You are so great, so respected,” Trump said during his rally in Minneapolis.

“Nobody appreciates you more than the president of the United States,” Trump told law enforcement officials on Law Enforcement Appreciation Day in January.

But in a statement to Public Integrity, the Trump campaign indicated it’s not responsible for reimbursing cities for police and public safety costs associated with its spirited, and sometimes boisterous rallies — the president’s favored venue for connecting with supporters.

“It is the U.S. Secret Service, not the campaign, which coordinates with local law enforcement. The campaign itself does not contract with local governments for police involvement. All billing inquiries should go to the Secret Service,” the statement said.

Secret Service officials, however, said that they receive no funding from Congress to reimburse municipal governments for the local public safety protection they request.

The Trump campaign did not say whether it supports Congress appropriating federal tax dollars to reimburse municipal governments for protecting people at future presidential campaign rallies.

In the meantime, Trump’s campaign should both pay Tucson, Arizona, the nearly $82,000 for a March 2016 campaign rally and prioritize helping all cities contend with coronavirus-ravaged budgets, Tucson spokesperson Lane Mandle said.

“What the City of Tucson needs, like every major municipality, is a direct infusion of cash from the federal government that can be put toward our general fund to offset the millions currently being lost in sales tax revenue,” Mandle said.

“We’re a small, seasonal resort. It’s all a scary proposition,” said Wildwood Mayor Pete Byron, whose city of about 5,000 residents is invoicing the Trump campaign for $33,900 following a campaign rally on Jan. 28. “The president could help now.”

Some candidates pay — others don’t

Following his inauguration in January 2017, Trump immediately launched his 2020 re-election effort. No other president has started so early.

Trump has since conducted nearly 90 large-scale campaign rallies — although both Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden have suspended in-person campaign events since mid-March, when states began limiting the sizes of public gatherings in response to spiking COVID-19 infections.

Many cities that hosted Trump rallies chose not to bill his campaign for police and public safety costs, explaining they have policies against doing so or didn’t bother because of Trump’s history of nonpayment.

Alternatively, several — including Nashville — required the Trump campaign to sign a contract and prepay police costs because Trump planned to appear at a city-owned facility.

But Trump often gathers his political flock at private venues. And if city officials want to recoup often significant costs associated with protecting these rallies, they must bill the Trump campaign after the fact and hope it will pay.

When the Trump campaign does not pay, local taxpayers are left to absorb costs they effectively cannot avoid, as municipal leaders say they are duty bound to secure and protect any large gathering within their cities’ limits.

Some recent presidential candidates, including Republican Ted Cruz in 2016 and Democratic also-rans Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg in 2020 routinely paid police bills municipal governments sent their campaigns. They argued it was the right thing to do, even if their campaigns weren’t legally obliged.

President Barack Obama and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton paid some police bills, but not others. Likewise, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who dropped out of the 2020 race this week, has a checkered history of paying such bills.

For example, both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns of 2016 still have pending invoices from Spokane, said Marlene Feist, the city’s public works director of strategic development.

Biden’s campaign, which has primarily conducted small-scale political events during the 2020 campaign, has paid several municipalities and school districts several thousands of dollars during the past year for “event security,” Federal Election Commission records indicate. The Biden campaign has also paid New York-based private security firm T&M Protection Resources more than $312,000, according to federal records.

The Biden campaign did not respond to requests for comment about whether it will honor public safety-related invoices it receives from municipalities that host Biden’s general election campaign events.

Such gatherings — if they’re allowed to occur — will likely be notably larger, and demand significantly more public safety presence, than Biden’s primary events.

Moe Vela, who served in the White House as Biden’s vice presidential senior adviser and director of management and administration, said both the Trump and Biden campaigns should pay police bills sent by municipalities.

“No double standards,” Vela said.

Forcing Trumps hand?

Politicians at all levels of government are now attempting to compel the Trump campaign specifically — and presidential campaigns generally — to pay their bills.

Officials in El Paso, Texas, which initially billed the Trump campaign for more than $470,000 in police bills following a campaign rally in February 2019, have prodded Trump with late fees — to no avail.

Several state lawmakers in Wisconsin grew so perturbed with deadbeat presidential candidates that they introduced legislation in January that would deny rally permits to presidential campaigns that owe Wisconsin municipalities money.

The bill, which has not become law, also authorizes local governments to require presidential campaigns to make advance payments covering estimated police and sanitation costs related to their rallies.

Trump has yet to pay four-year-old bills from Eau Claire, Wisconsin ($47,398) and Green Bay, Wisconsin ($9,380), city officials there confirmed last week.

“That kind of money could be the difference between hiring another police officer or not,” said state Rep. Amanda Stuck, a Democrat and the bill’s co-sponsor, who’s also running for Wisconsin’s 8th District U.S. House seat. “This should be a bipartisan issue, and this really should be on campaigns to pay. I don’t expect taxpayers to pay for my campaign events.”

In Washington, D.C., Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., filed a complaint with the FEC against the Trump campaign, in part accusing it of violating a provision in federal election law that requires candidate committees to report its debts, including disputed debts.

The Trump campaign has not publicly disclosed any of the police and public safety bills it’s received as debt, disputed or otherwise.

The FEC, however, cannot act on the complaint because it doesn’t have enough commissioners to enforce federal campaign finance laws — and hasn’t since Sept. 1.

If the Trump campaign decided to pay the $1.82 million in police and public safety bills it’s received, it’d have no trouble doing so: Trump’s own campaign committee, combined with Republican National Committee entities, this week announced they had begun the month with more than $240 million in reserve.

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Trump Called The $10 Million A Loan. His Campaign Called It A Donation. Who Paid It Back, And How?

Trump boasted about self-funding his 2016 campaign, but in its tense final moments, his advisers could only get him to agree to a loan. “It was like a cash advance.”

Trump Called The $10 Million A Loan. His Campaign Called It A Donation. Who...

As the 2020 presidential campaign hurtles toward a close, questions remain about a last-minute $10 million lifeline Trump threw to his previous campaign, the one that catapulted him into the presidency.

Speculation has swirled around the source of that money, with one report suggesting Trump might have gotten the funds from a casino magnate looking for help building a bullet train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Another report pointed to the possibility of a shadowy foreign donation funneled through an Egyptian bank.

But nothing is known about whether the $10 million loan — which the campaign however appears to have reported as a contribution — was ever repaid, who might have repaid it, and whether it would even be legal to do so. The very existence of the loan was a closely guarded secret until this month, when a newly unsealed document indicated that Trump’s closest advisers convinced him to let the campaign borrow the money from him after he refused to just write a check.

While the Trump campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment on this story, the president and his advisers have always maintained his finances are above board. But now, with his 2020 run under fire for a lack of financial transparency, and once again short on cash, significant questions remain about the mysterious 4-year-old loan and what it might say about the frothy final days of the 2016 election.

“If this was a loan, it should have been reported as a loan,” said Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center, which monitors money in politics. If it were a loan, he said, the transaction should also have been recorded on financial disclosures Trump was required to file, along with details of how the money was repaid. “If there is some off-the-books mechanism that Trump is using to get repaid for his loans, that should be disclosed,” Fischer added.

AN URGENT REQUEST

It was late in the second presidential debate, and Trump was on the back foot. In the wake of the Access Hollywood tape, released just three days earlier, he was forced to defend what he referred to as “locker room talk,” while separately acknowledging that he did not pay income tax. But he found something to brag about when it came to campaign financing.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, he said, he couldn’t be bought by powerful corporate interests, because he was using his own money rather than taking big donations.

“By the time it’s finished, I’ll have more than $100 million invested,” he claimed, adding that the campaign by that point was “pretty much self-funding.”

Federal Election Commission data, however, shows that Trump had by then put up barely half that amount — $56.1 million. Records show that the campaign would return more than $12 million through payments for use of Trump’s hotels, restaurants, golf resorts, and an airline he owns, and also through reimbursements to his children for their travel during the campaign.

Meanwhile, the campaign had been vastly outspent by Clinton, who was leading in most opinion polls. In the face of so many challenges, it was proving increasingly difficult for Trump’s campaign to raise funds, and it was spending money far faster than it could raise it. By the third debate, on Oct. 19, his war chest had dwindled to just $16 million, less than half of what it had been at the beginning of the month. That day, Reuters released data suggesting that Clinton had a 95% chance of winning the electoral college.

Despite all that, a few hours before the debate, Steve Bannon, the campaign’s CEO, said Trump was confident: “Right now he really, really thinks he’s going to win.”

But behind the scenes, Bannon would later tell the FBI, the campaign was imploding.

Not long after the debate, Bannon, Jeff DeWit, the campaign’s chief operating officer; Brad Parscale, its digital media director; and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, put their heads together to discuss finances, according to the FBI’s account of a 2018 interview with Bannon that BuzzFeed News published this month. Bannon told investigators that it became apparent that if the campaign was going to make it over the finish line, Trump was going to have to write a very big check.

Kushner said “that was not going to happen,” according to the account of Bannon’s interview. Trump liked to back winners, Bannon recalled Kushner saying, adding that his father-in-law was “a probability guy” who “was not a guy who while six to eight points down, was going to write $25 million checks.”

Bannon said they figured that $10 million would at least allow them to get out the final television advertisement they had planned.

That’s when, Bannon said, Steve Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs banker who was then Trump’s national finance chair, put forward a novel solution. In a meeting in the 26th-floor offices of the Trump Tower in Manhattan, Mnuchin proposed that Trump put forward $10 million immediately. The campaign could repay him down the line with the small donations that were still coming in. It would be structured like a loan, complete with paperwork like a term sheet. According to the FBI document, “Mnuchin called it a cash advance.”

Federal records show that Trump had made his first loan to the campaign in April 2015, several months before he formally declared his candidacy. Eventually, he loaned a total of $47.5 million to the effort. But in July 2016, at almost the same time he accepted the Republican nomination for president, he formally forgave all those previous loans, converting them to outright donations.

At $10 million, the new loan Trump was being asked to make would be the single largest chunk of money he’d put into his campaign, and, based on Bannon’s recollections, the candidate was far from convinced.

Although federal campaign finance laws put strict limits on how much individuals can donate to politicians, there are no such caps for candidates who choose to donate to their own campaigns. By the time billionaire Michael Bloomberg dropped out of the Democratic primary this past March, he had contributed nearly $900 million of his own money to his campaign, putting him atop a long list of self-funded efforts that fell short.

Candidates are also free to loan money to their campaigns, and many do. But there are more stringent rules about those transactions when it comes to repayment, particularly for loans that come late in the campaign cycle.

Campaign finance law states that such loans may be repaid only with campaign contributions made on or before Election Day, and that any contributions coming in after the election can be used to pay only up to $250,000 of the loan. Anything beyond that is considered a donation.

According to Bannon, he, Mnuchin, and Kushner had a five-hour conversation with Trump that started in the Trump Tower and continued onto the Boeing 757, dubbed “Trump Force One,” that he flew to campaign stops. “They kept working on Trump until he couldn’t take it anymore,” investigators said that Bannon told them. Finally Trump agreed to the plan.

Mnuchin had prepared the documents in advance and pulled them out as soon as he got a yes — including a term sheet and information on how to wire the money into the campaign’s accounts, the FBI document says. Last week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin acknowledged the loan had been made and the fact that he helped convince Trump to execute it, but provided no other details and did not respond to a request for comment.

“Trump was convinced the cash would be there,” the FBI document continues. “Trump understood the logic of it.”

During the final 20 days of a race for federal office, campaigns are required to file notice of any contributions or other deposits of $1,000 or more within 48 hours of receiving the funds. So on Oct. 28, 2016, just 11 days before the election, the $10 million was duly reported to the Federal Election Commission — but not as a loan. It was reported as a “candidate contribution.”

To Fischer, of the Campaign Law Center, the idea that Trump would write a large check, sign documents characterizing it as a loan, then almost immediately recast it as a donation, “just doesn’t add up.”

One of the people present during the negotiations with Trump who agreed to speak to BuzzFeed News only on condition of anonymity said it wasn’t until after the election that Trump was persuaded to forgive the loan. (According to this source, his advisers told him “it would look bad” to insist on repayment.)

If so, Trump waited at least two weeks to reverse course and donate the money, which would mean that at the time the campaign reported it, the $10 million donation should still have been characterized as a loan.

On the same day the money was reported to election officials, Trump appeared on Fox News and mentioned the $10 million. When asked whether he’d come through with his pledge to put a total of $100 million into the race, he hedged. “We’ll see what’s needed,” he said. Other than some in-kind contributions for rent and payroll, records show Trump did not donate again, meaning his total contributions for the cycle fell about $33 million short of his pledge.

Bannon, who was indicted on fraud and money laundering charges in August, did not respond to requests for comment on the loan, and the White House referred requests to the campaign, which did not respond to multiple messages seeking clarification.

Meanwhile, the most recent filings from the 2020 race show that Trump — once again lagging in the polls — has taken a different approach this time around. Other than a $5,000 donation to his own super PAC in October 2017, he hasn’t donated or loaned a dime.

“I would raise a billion dollars in one day, if I wanted to,” said Trump, campaigning Monday in Prescott, Arizona. “I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to do it. I put in a lot of money when I ran originally, I put in a lot of money into this campaign, my primary campaign. And I never thought it was appreciated. They never gave me credit for it.” ●

[dragonfly9]

Another big Trump tax story from the folks at NYT which describes T’s charitable giving as not developing land that he owns.

Trump’s Philanthropy: Big Tax Write-Offs and Claims That Don’t Always Add Up

Susanne Craig (susannecraig)

In President Trump’s telling, he is a committed philanthropist with strong ties to many charities. “If you don’t give back, you’re never ever going to be fulfilled in life,” he wrote in “Trump 101: The Way to Success,” published at the height of his “Apprentice” fame.

And according to his tax records, he has given back at least $130 million since 2005, his second year as a reality TV star.

But the long-hidden tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show that Mr. Trump did not have to reach into his wallet for most of that giving. The vast bulk of his charitable tax deductions, $119.3 million worth, came from simply agreeing not to develop land — in several cases, after he had shelved development plans.

Three of the agreements involved what are known as conservation easements — a maneuver, popular among wealthy Americans, that typically allows a landowner to keep a property’s title and receive a tax deduction equal to its appraised value. In the fourth land deal, Mr. Trump donated property for a state park.

The New York attorney general is investigating whether the appraisals on two of Mr. Trump’s easement donations were improperly inflated to win larger tax breaks, according to court filings.

Mr. Trump’s pronouncements of philanthropic largess have been broadly discredited by reporting, most notably in The Washington Post, that found he had exaggerated, or simply never made, an array of claimed contributions. His own charitable foundation shut down in 2018 amid allegations of self-dealing to benefit Mr. Trump, his businesses and his campaign.

But the tax data examined by The Times lends new authority and far greater precision to those findings. The records, encompassing his reported philanthropic activity through 2017, reveal not only its exact dimensions; they show that much of his charity has come when he was under duress — facing damage to his reputation or big tax bills in years of high income.

Of the $7.5 million in business and personal cash contributions reported to the Internal Revenue Service since 2005, more than 40 percent — $3.2 million — came starting in 2015, when Mr. Trump’s philanthropy fell under scrutiny after he announced his White House bid. In 2017, his first year in office, he declared $1.9 million in cash gifts. In 2014, by contrast, he contributed $81,499.

And his first two land-easement donations were made in what the tax records show was a period of significant taxable income — 2005 and 2006, prime time for his reality TV fame.

The president’s Trump Organization biography says he is “involved with numerous civic and charitable organizations.” When he announced his campaign in 2015, he said he had given more than $102 million to charity over the previous five years.

While it is possible that he chose not to report some of his giving, his tax records for 2010 to 2014 reflect far less than he claimed — $735,238 in cash and $26.8 million in land easements and other noncash gifts. Six months into the campaign, in December 2015, another easement, valued at $21.1 million, was completed.

In response to questions from The Times, Amanda Miller, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, said: “President Trump gives money privately. It’s impossible to know how much he’s given over the years.”

The tax information analyzed by The Times includes annual totals for business and individual giving but lists only certain corporate donations.

The single largest cash donation he reported for his businesses, made to his own foundation, was the $400,000 he received in 2011 for being roasted on Comedy Central. In 2014, his Virginia winery contributed a glass sculpture valued at $73,600 to a small historical society in Pennsylvania. And in 2016, another one of his companies gave $30,000 to the American Hotel & Lodging Education Foundation.

Even without the details of Mr. Trump’s individual giving, The Times was able to identify public philanthropic promises that appear either to have been exaggerated or to have never materialized. In each case, the size of his pledge exceeded what he told the I.R.S. he had given in a particular year.

In 2009, for example, he agreed to rent his Seven Springs estate in Westchester County, N.Y., to the Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who hoped to stay in a tent on the grounds during a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

Though the plans fell apart when local residents objected, Colonel Qaddafi made a payment of $150,000, which Mr. Trump told CNN in 2011 that he had given to charity. His 2009 tax returns, however, reported only $22,796 in business and personal cash gifts.

In 2015, Mr. Trump promised to donate the earnings from his book “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again.’’

“The profits of my book? I am giving them away to a lot of different — including the vets,” he said at a news conference.

The tax records show that Waxman Leavell Literary Agency, which represented Mr. Trump’s book, made two payments to him in 2015 and 2016, totaling roughly $4.5 million. In those years, Mr. Trump reported giving a total of $1.3 million in cash to charity.

Many wealthy individuals create their own foundations, often as a way to have greater control over their philanthropy. While Mr. Trump’s foundation, started in 1988, gave millions to charity before shutting down in 2018, most of it was other people’s money. Mr. Trump himself donated $5.4 million to the foundation, with the last contribution in 2008, according to the organization’s tax filings.

The vast bulk of the president’s philanthropy, though, has been the four land deals with conservation groups or the government.

His first easement donation, which yielded a tax deduction of $39.1 million in 2005, involved a parcel of land at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

The next year, he donated 436 acres of land for a state park in Westchester and Putnam Counties in New York after development plans ran up against tough regulatory restrictions. While the precise value of the easement is not clear, he reported noncash charitable contributions of $34 million that year.

Mr. Trump had bought the property in the 1990s for $2 million, according to numerous published reports. Today the property is overgrown and has few facilities or visitors.

The two most recent easement deductions are being examined by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, part of a broader investigation into whether the Trump Organization inflated the value of assets to get loans and tax benefits.

In 2014, after abandoning plans to develop an 11.5-acre property being used as a driving range at his Los Angeles golf club, Mr. Trump received a $25.1 million tax deduction for an easement agreement with a land conservancy. Few details of the inquiry into the deal have emerged.

Court papers shed more light on the other easement under investigation.

In late 2015, Mr. Trump got a $21.1 million tax break for 158.6 acres of land at the Seven Springs estate, after years of unsuccessful attempts to build a golf course on it.

The attorney general’s court filing says that after Mr. Trump abandoned plans to develop Seven Springs, he asked Sheri Dillon, a tax lawyer at Morgan Lewis who had advised him in the past, to have the land appraised.

Ms. Dillon told Cushman & Wakefield, the firm that did the appraisal, that “the client blew up at her,” and she leaned on the appraisers to take steps that would push the value up, according to the court filing.

Several weeks ago, after months of delays, Mr. Trump’s son Eric gave a deposition in the case.

Mr. Trump has denied any wrongdoing. “President Trump was not involved in the appraisals mentioned, which were done by the most respected appraisal and brokerage company in the country,” said Ms. Miller, the Trump Organization spokeswoman.

[dragonfly9]

Trump’s campaign made stops nationwide. Coronavirus cases surged in his wake...

As President Donald Trump jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake.

The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA TODAY analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.

Together, those counties saw 1,500 more new cases in the two weeks following Trump’s rallies than the two weeks before – 9,647 cases, up from 8,069.

Public health officials additionally have linked 16 cases, including two hospitalizations, with the rally in Beltrami County, Minnesota, and one case with the rally in Marathon County, Wisconsin. Outside of the counties identified by USA TODAY with a greater case increase after rallies, officials identified four cases linked to Trump rallies.

Note: Analysis includes data from 14 days before and 14 days after the rally. If 14 days hasn’t passed since rally, data as of October 19.

SOURCE Johns Hopkins University, USA TODAY analysis

CREDIT Carlie Procell/USA TODAY

USA TODAY reviewed coronavirus case counts in the counties where Trump attended rallies starting from mid-August through mid-October. The news organization examined the rate of increase in virus cases for the two weeks before and after campaign events. For rallies occurring within the past two weeks, not enough time has passed to draw conclusions.

[dragonfly9]

There is waaaay too much written about T. But here’s some more on his character (or lack of) and what his constraints will be learning of the results of the election.

'Deep down, he's a terrified little boy': Bob Woodward, John Bolton and...

Bob Woodward: ‘I can’t think of a time I’ve felt more anxiety about the presidency’

Bob Woodward is associate editor of the Washington Post and the author of 20 books on American politics. In 50 years as a journalist he has covered nine presidents. His reporting on the Watergate break-in and cover-up with his colleague Carl Bernstein helped bring down Richard Nixon and won the Post a Pulitzer prize. His latest book about Donald Trump , Rage , is based on 10 hours of interviews, spread over 19 taped phone calls, often initiated by the president himself, in which Trump proved “only too willing to blow the whistle on himself”, as the Observer ’s review noted.

There is an atmosphere in Washington of high anxiety. Trump is melting down, to put it charitably. His campaign has been about lashing out, about wanting his former political opponents – President Obama and Joe Biden, who’s now running against him, of course – to be indicted then charged. Then there was his announcement that he is not necessarily going to accept the electoral result against him. The idea that the president would put in doubt the basic process of democracy and voting is not only unacceptable, it is a nightmare.

Now you have the added factor that Trump’s also had Covid-19 and he’s on steroids, saying things like, “It is a blessing from God that I got the virus”. [quote="matt, post:1, topic:1465, fFor the president of the US to talk like that is unbelievable, but I think people have become numb to it. The outrages pile up, in a way. People have forgotten the risks. I think Kamala Harris put it very well in the vice-presidential debate: what’s happened in the US with Covid-19 is the biggest failure of the president to exercise his responsibilities, perhaps in the history of the US.

This is a really dangerous period before the election. I got to know Trump very well in hours and hours of interviews I did with him for my book, Rage , and I think if there were to be some accident, some problem, during the final campaign weeks, he would capitalise on it. Henry Kissinger, of all people, was warning recently that we should worry about some sort of crisis, and reminded people that the first world war started because of an accident. Probably no one’s wanting to start a war right now, but we have a climate in the Middle East, and in the South China Sea, which China has really militarised, where you could have some spark trigger a mild confrontation – not that I think Trump’s going to manufacture that.

Trump is not sufficiently tuned into the attitudes and experiences of other people, which is an essential requirement of a leader. After George Floyd was killed, I asked him about the tensions ignited in this country not seen since the heights of the civil rights movement. I said we were men of white privilege, that we’ve got to understand the pain and anger black people feel in this country. That’s when he said something that astonished me: “Wow, you sure drank the Kool-Aid! I don’t feel that at all.” He just rejected the idea that somehow white people have to understand the pain and anger of others. I think that’s one of his chief problems. He thinks in terms of his own pain and anger, and what he wants to do, which is to be re-elected.

Trump also told me the US has nuclear weapons that are so devastating even President Putin and President Xi of China don’t know about them. I’m not exactly sure even today whether he was exaggerating or talking about something real. But what’s a really important question to consider here is how much power is in the presidency: when we decide to go to war, whether you look at Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq, it’s all been led by the president, essentially, as commander in chief. As we’ve gone into a media environment of impatience and speed because of the internet, the president is also in this position to seize the airwaves. As his son-in-law Jared Kushner said, the news is going along and then Trump tweets something and everyone drops whatever it is. Trump realises this. He uses it. He has that power. He loves being in control. He loves the spectacle. The circumstances have all converged here to give him extraordinary power.

…

Mary Trump: ‘If he wins, it’s over. Democracy is over’

Mary Trump is a psychologist and the niece of Donald Trump. Her father, Fred Trump Jr, the president’s older brother, died when she was 16. Her tell-all book about the president and the Trump family, Too Much and Never Enough : How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man , sold almost 1m copies on the first day it was published in July this year.

My theory about the way Donald has run his campaign is that he knows he’s in desperate shape, so he’s going to burn it all down, sow more chaos and division, because that’s where he succeeds. He knows that he’s losing – he’ll deny it mightily – and at some level he understands what’s at stake. If he loses, he’s probably going to prison. So, if he’s going down, he’s going to take us all down with him.

I’ve always believed that deep down Donald is a terrified little boy. The amount of fear he’s feeling now has got to be unhinging him. Not only did he get sick with the virus, there’s the tax story and his prospects in the election looking really bad right now. He’s got to be absolutely panicked.

Throughout the campaign I thought that the absolute worst scenario would be for him to get the virus and then get well. I know that sounds awful. He’s ignored the severity of the pandemic all year because the idea of illness as weakness is so deeply ingrained in my family, that even an association with it is unacceptable, and that’s why now we’ve got 210,000 Americans dead. But now his statement – you can beat it, don’t be afraid of it – is going to result in more people becoming sick, and many of those will die. Even before he said that, I believed he was engaging in mass murder, but that sealed it for me. Anybody who’s capable of putting hundreds of millions of people at risk to avoid looking bad doesn’t care about you.

Since Donald was elected, I’ve been surprised by nothing he’s done or said. But I have been shocked by the wholesale abdication of responsibility by the Republican party during this election campaign and throughout the past four years. I didn’t understand the extent to which they would be willing to enable him in Congress and in his cabinet. If they had done their job and acted as a separate branch of government, he would have been contained. By siding with him 100% of the time, they have ensured we are now faced with several concurrent disasters that are getting exponentially worse.

No other president in history has been able to push the envelope the way Donald does. He’s always trying to see what he can get away with and, as I have seen through the course of his life, he’s always got away with everything. No one holds him accountable. He constantly gets rewarded for failing. The Republicans understood what he was capable of and have allowed him to push through an agenda that is completely at odds with what the majority wants.

In Donald, I see somebody who is afraid, lonely, desperate, unloved. I hesitate to paint a compassionate portrait of him because he’s so culpable. However, I do have compassion for the three-year-old who was without his mother for a whole year when she was sick. That loss of affection and having no one to soothe him was deeply harmful. And when she recovered to the extent that she did, she did nothing to heal the wounds of that separation, and that’s before we get to my grandfather, who was always an awful person, capable of such abject cruelty and sadism. So now we have an adult Donald who is sad, lonely, ignorant but who also has immense power – and that is a terrifying prospect.

People need to stop worrying about what might happen if he loses but doesn’t accept the results and laugh in his face. That’s the best way to undermine him. If he wins, it won’t be legitimate. He’s already using the powers of his office to shake people’s confidence in mail-in voting at a time when people want to be voting by mail during the pandemic. He’s telling his followers if Biden wins it will have been rigged, telling them to show up at the polls to make sure there’s no fraud, which is voter intimidation. If you’re a black person in America and a bunch of white guys with automatic weapons are standing outside the polling station you won’t want to vote, which is exactly what Donald wants to happen.

If he stays in the Oval Office, I’m going to try to get a British passport because I don’t think I’ll fare well. He’s an extraordinarily vindictive person surrounded by people who are willing to help him be vindictive. But that’s personal: in terms of the country, if he wins, it’s over. Democracy is over. The western alliance is over. We’ll be entering an incredibly dark period of autocracy on a global scale. JR

…

John Bolton: ‘He was envious of leaders like Putin, Xi Jinping and Erdoğan’

John Bolton was US national security advis er under Donald Trump from 2018 to 2019 . Having started his career as a lawyer, he held senior roles in the state department and justice department during the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush, who appointed him 25th US ambassador to the United Nations. His book about the Trump presidency, The Room Where It Happened , was published in June this year.

People complain that Trump has a short attention span, myself included. But when it comes to his own re-election he has an infinite attention span. Decisions are made not on the basis of the pros and cons of the policies being debated but on what the domestic political blowback could be. Every president takes politics into account but with Trump it’s qualitatively different. It’s not just a factor. It’s the factor.

Everything is a distinct transaction – maybe that’s how you’re successful in the real-estate business. If he doesn’t see the immediate bottom line impact, he wants to move on to something else. For example, with our close allies, he says things like: “Here we are defending you and you don’t pay for our bases and you have trade surpluses with us.” Well, we’re not there to defend them. We’re there because we have a mutual defence alliance. We think it’s in our interest as much as the allies’ interest to be forwardly deployed. We’re not there as mercenaries. And we wouldn’t want to be there as mercenaries. But he doesn’t get that.

I think his election campaign is in deep trouble. Because of what happened in 2016, when everybody thought Hillary was going to win, he can say the polls are fake news and that he’ll win anyway. And he’ll say that right up to election night and probably after it. But unless the pollsters have done absolutely nothing to try to fix their methodology since 2016, you have to say that he’s in trouble. Each day you get closer to the election, by definition it’s that much harder to make up the gap. Nothing in life is certain but it looks like he’s heading for a pretty substantial defeat.

He’s trying to turn his Covid-19 infection to his advantage. I assume that’s what he thought he was doing with his grand entrance to the White House, posing on the balcony like Il Duce. I think it had the opposite effect. One thing I’ve been waiting for is the wave of sympathy that you would expect from the American people when their leader is taken ill. Maybe it’s out there but there isn’t any evidence of it at this point.

I had certainly heard all the criticisms of Donald Trump before I took the job of national security adviser but I felt that the gravity of the presidency, the weight of the responsibility, would have an effect on him the way it’s had on every contemporary American president once they took office. It turned out I wasn’t right.

…

I don’t think he has the character or fitness to be president. I once said to a psychologist that Trump doesn’t have character and the psychologist said, sure he does, he has a character defect. So I’ll leave that to the shrinks. We never should have nominated him. Nobody ever said that politics ends up with the best people for government. But there’s something wrong when someone like this can prevail.
…

…

Anthony Scaramucci: ‘He’s out there doing ridiculous things and I fear for the world’

Anthony Scaramucci was a little-known New York financier when Donald Trump made him the White House director of communications in July 2017 . He was fired just 11 days later after a string of public relations gaffes but remained a vocal Trump loyalist for the next two years. However, the president’s racist attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of colour led Scaramucci to withdraw his support. Since then he has become an outspoken critic of Trump, who frequently lashes out at Scaramucci on Twitter. His book, Trump: The Blue-Collar President , was published in 2018.

The move back to the White House, after hospital, tried to create these optics that he’s a superman. But you’ve got 210,000 Americans dead, so if you do a matrix, there’s about 9 million Americans who have had family or friends hurt by the virus, so that’s not going to play with them. He’s a minority politician, he’s a minority president. He’s never had the popular vote; he will have won the electoral college twice, and lost the popular vote twice.

The fact is he’s an idiot. He’s unfit to serve in the office of the president. He doesn’t have the management capability. He doesn’t have the ability to empathise. He’s not a leader. He’s an un-American bully. You could say he had a lot of those attributes as a candidate in 2016 so why did I support him? And I would say, yes, I chose to overlook that because I was trying to be loyal to my party and its nominee.

I started out disliking him. Then I thought, OK, I’m in the Republican party, he’s going to be the Republican candidate and now he’s won the presidency, so he’s going to be the first Republican president since George W Bush, let me figure out a way to like him. I worked for him and I have to own that for the rest of my life.

…

I don’t think most of his supporters think he’s the best man for the job. They see him as a culture warrior, though. The conservative news outlets have told them that we have a full-on culture war going on in the United States, and he is the last white man standing to protect America from the black and Hispanic latte-drinking transvestites who are going to take over their government and culture.

The president’s strategy is let’s see if I can turn out every racist in America, and he hopes there are enough to beat the non-racists. The secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s supporting him because Pompeo looks in the mirror and sees a future president.

We have 63 million people in the US who have voted for Trump for one reason or another, and what I can do is explain my change of heart. We now have almost four complete years of data on his ineptitude. It’s nothing personal, he’s not the right person to be president of the United States. AA

[dragonfly9]

Another installment from NYT - More on T’s taxes and what he owes

David Enrich (davidenrich)

How Trump Maneuvered His Way Out of Trouble in Chicago

How Trump Maneuvered His Way Out of Trouble in Chicago - The New York Times

The financial crisis was in full swing when Donald J. Trump traveled to Chicago in late September 2008 to mark the near-completion of his 92-floor skyscraper.

The fortunes of big companies, small businesses and millions of Americans — including the Trumps — were in peril. But the family patriarch was jubilant as he stood on the terrace of his gleaming glass tower.

“We’re in love with the building,” Mr. Trump gushed. “We’re very, very happy with what’s happened with respect to this building and how fast we put it up.”

He and his family hoped the Trump International Hotel & Tower would cement their company’s reputation as one of the world’s marquee developers of luxury real estate.

Instead, the skyscraper became another disappointment in a portfolio filled with them. Construction lagged. Condos proved hard to sell. Retail space sat vacant.

Yet for Mr. Trump and his company, the Chicago experience also turned out to be something else: the latest example of his ability to strong-arm major financial institutions and exploit the tax code to cushion the blow of his repeated business failures.

The president’s federal income tax records, obtained by The New York Times, show for the first time that, since 2010, his lenders have forgiven about $287 million in debt that he failed to repay. The vast majority was related to the Chicago project.

How Mr. Trump found trouble in Chicago, and maneuvered his way out of it, is a case study in doing business the Trump way.

When the project encountered problems, he tried to walk away from his huge debts. For most individuals or businesses, that would have been a recipe for ruin. But tax-return data, other records and interviews show that rather than warring with a notoriously litigious and headline-seeking client, lenders cut Mr. Trump slack — exactly what he seemed to have been counting on.

Big banks and hedge funds gave him years of extra time to repay his debts. Even after Mr. Trump sued his largest lender, accusing it of preying on him, the bank agreed to lend him another $99 million — more than twice as much as was previously known — so that he could pay back what he still owed the bank on the defaulted Chicago loan, records show.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s lenders forgave much of what he owed.

Those forgiven debts are now part of a broader investigation of Mr. Trump’s business by the New York attorney general. They normally would have generated a big tax bill, since the Internal Revenue Service treats canceled debts as income. Yet as has often happened in his long career, Mr. Trump appears to have paid almost no federal income tax on that money, in part because of large losses in his other businesses, The Times’s analysis of his tax records found.

Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, said the company and Mr. Trump appropriately accounted for and paid all taxes due on the forgiven debts.

“These were all arm’s length transactions that were voluntarily entered into between sophisticated parties many years ago in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis and the resulting collapse of the real estate markets,” Mr. Garten said.

On television back in those heady Chicago days, the future president was playing a wildly successful real estate developer, and the shimmering new skyscraper became part of that mystique.

It was the biggest thing Mr. Trump ever built. It was also the last.

The Money Behind the Project

Since at least the 1990s, Mr. Trump had dreamed of erecting a skyscraper in the Windy City. “I had hoped to build something fantastic in Chicago for some time,” Mr. Trump would later write in The Chicago Tribune.

He selected a riverside plot of land that was home to the squat, seven-floor Sun-Times building. In 2001, he unveiled plans for what would be the tallest high-rise built in the United States since the 110-story Sears Tower was completed in Chicago in 1973.

The Trump International Hotel & Tower would include 486 condominium units, 339 hotel rooms, restaurants, a bar, two parking garages, a health club, a spa, and tens of thousands of square feet in retail space and conference facilities.

The condos, some priced at more than $4 million, would have sweeping views of Chicago and Lake Michigan. Rooms in the hotel, occupying lower floors of the building, would be for sale, too. Mr. Trump’s company would make money from selling the units (and parking spaces) and operating the building.

To pay for the construction, Mr. Trump arranged for two of his L.L.C.s, 401 North Wabash Venture — named for the project’s address — and its parent company, 401 Mezz Venture, to borrow more than $700 million.

Mr. Trump went to his longtime lender, Deutsche Bank, for the bulk of the money. Since 1998, he had borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars from the German bank. It had been so eager to establish a foothold in the United States that it had overlooked his history of defaults.

This time, Mr. Trump assured Deutsche Bank officials, including Justin Kennedy, the son of the now-retired Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy, that the Chicago development was a guaranteed moneymaker. In a sign of the Trump family’s commitment to the project, Mr. Trump told his bankers that his daughter Ivanka would be in charge. (Mr. Trump also appointed the 2004 winner of “The Apprentice” as the development’s “president.”)

Deutsche Bank agreed to lend $640 million to 401 North Wabash Venture. Mr. Trump agreed to personally guarantee $40 million of the loan. If his L.L.C. were to default, Deutsche Bank could collect that money directly from Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump also went to Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund and private equity company, for $130 million. This was a so-called mezzanine loan, which meant that it would be repaid only after the Deutsche Bank debt had been satisfied. Because of the greater risk, the Fortress loan came with a double-digit interest rate. The agreement with Fortress also required Mr. Trump’s 401 Mezz Venture to pay a $49 million “exit fee” when it repaid the loan.

If Mr. Trump defaulted, his lenders could seize the building.

Deutsche Bank and Fortress both planned to chop up the loans and sell at least some of the pieces. Deutsche Bank sold them mostly to American, European and Asian banks, Fortress mostly to private equity and hedge funds, including Dune Capital Management, which had recently been co-founded by Steven Mnuchin, the future Treasury secretary.

The loans were due in May 2008. By then, the proceeds from selling condos, hotel units and parking spaces were projected to generate enough cash for Mr. Trump to repay what he owed.

Using a thick black pen, Mr. Trump signed the loan agreements on Feb. 4, 2005. A month later, construction began.

Lenders Come Calling

Work on the project went more slowly than planned, and the residential portion was still under construction as the loans came due.

With the financial crisis enveloping the world, finding buyers for multimillion-dollar apartments suddenly became much harder. In the spring of 2008, Mr. Trump asked Deutsche Bank to delay the loan’s due date. The bank gave him an extra six months.

In mid-September, the crisis crescendoed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Financial markets went haywire. The economy was on the precipice of a depression.

About a week later, Mr. Trump showed up in Chicago for the ceremony to mark the skyscraper’s near-completion.

After addressing the small crowd, Mr. Trump and three of his adult children — Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric — placed their hands in wet cement rectangles to commemorate the day. “I don’t want to tell you what that feels like,” Mr. Trump cracked, before waving his cement-caked hands for the cameras.

At that point, at least 159 units in the building were still unsold, and many more were under contract but hadn’t closed, according to New York court records. That meant hundreds of millions of dollars that Mr. Trump and his family had counted on to repay Deutsche Bank and Fortress hadn’t yet materialized. And the loans were due in barely six weeks.

Mr. Trump sought another extension. This time, Deutsche Bank said no.

Mr. Trump’s company still owed Deutsche Bank about $334 million in principal and interest, and Fortress $130 million, not including interest and fees.

Mr. Trump went on the offensive. In a letter to Deutsche Bank on Nov. 4, he accused it of helping ignite the financial crisis. This was important, because Mr. Trump went on to claim that the crisis constituted a “force majeure” — an act of God, like a natural disaster — that entitled him to extra time to repay the loans.

A few days later, Mr. Trump and his companies sued Deutsche Bank and Fortress, along with the other banks and hedge funds that had purchased pieces of the loans.

The suit accused Deutsche Bank of engaging in “predatory lending practices” against Mr. Trump. He sought $3 billion in damages.

Deutsche Bank soon filed its own lawsuit, accusing its longtime client of being a habitual deadbeat and demanding immediate repayment of the now-defaulted loans.

Inside Deutsche Bank, angry executives and lawyers vowed to never again do business with Mr. Trump, according to senior executives.

With the litigation pending (the parties soon entered into a series of “standstill agreements” that paused hostilities), the Trump family kept trying to find buyers for the condos.

“As it nears completion, it’s time for you to take your place in the one-of-a-kind Trump lifestyle this building offers,” Ivanka Trump said in an April 2009 sales video. “And you can be living it, right here, very soon.”

Turning Unpaid Debt Into Canceled Debt

Why didn’t the lenders seize the building?

Going to court to take over the unfinished skyscraper promised to be a costly, yearslong process, especially given Mr. Trump’s reputation for using the legal system to drag out fights and grind down opponents. It seemed simpler to resolve the dispute.

On July 28, 2010, lawyers for Mr. Trump, Deutsche Bank and Fortress notified the court that they had reached a private settlement. The terms weren’t disclosed.

But Mr. Trump’s federal tax returns, as well as loan documents filed in Cook County, Ill., provide clues to what happened: Mr. Trump was let off the hook for about $270 million. It was the type of generous financial break that few American companies or individuals could ever expect to receive, especially without filing for bankruptcy protection.

Before Mr. Trump defaulted, Fortress had expected to receive more than $300 million from his company: the $130 million in principal and roughly $185 million in anticipated interest and fees.

But Fortress and its partners — including Mr. Mnuchin’s Dune Capital, as well as Cerberus Capital Management, whose co-chief executive, Stephen A. Feinberg, would become a major Trump fund-raiser and go on to lead a White House advisory panel — quickly realized they wouldn’t ever collect that full amount.

Ultimately, Fortress settled for $48 million, which Mr. Trump wired to the firm in March 2012, according to people familiar with the deal.

The forgiven debts showed up in Mr. Trump’s tax returns. For 2010, Mr. Trump’s 401 Mezz Venture reported about $181 million in canceled debts. Two years later, DJT Holdings, an umbrella company that the Chicago project had been folded into, reported that another $105 million of debt had been forgiven. Most of that appears to reflect the unpaid Fortress sum.

In many ways, it repeated a pattern that had played out more than a decade earlier at Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos: a cycle of defaulting on debts and then persuading already-burned lenders to cut him a break.

The Last $99 Million

Mr. Trump’s companies got a pass on the money they owed on the Deutsche Bank loan, too.

The 2010 settlement gave Mr. Trump a couple of years to sell hotel units, condos and parking spaces to repay that loan, according to Steven R. Schlesinger, a lawyer who represented the Trump Organization in the Chicago litigation.

By 2012, the Trump Organization had drummed up about $235 million to repay the financial institutions to whom Deutsche Bank had sold pieces of the original loan. They included banks and asset managers in the United States, Germany, Ireland and China, according to court records.

But Mr. Trump still owed $99 million, according to people familiar with the debt. Where would he come up with that money?

Though Deutsche Bank had vowed to do no more business with Mr. Trump, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, introduced him to his personal wealth manager at the bank, Rosemary Vrablic. Ms. Vrablic, with the support of her superiors, soon agreed to restart the relationship with Mr. Trump.

In 2012, Ms. Vrablic’s division made two loans secured by the Chicago skyscraper: one for nearly $54 million, another for $45 million, according to loan documents filed with the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. Mr. Trump agreed to personally guarantee the new loans, according to several people familiar with the deal.

The funds were used to immediately repay the $99 million that Mr. Trump still owed on the original Chicago loan, the people said. In other words, one wing of Deutsche Bank was providing Mr. Trump the money to repay another division of the same bank.

The following spring, the Trump Organization repaid $54 million, according to a person briefed on the matter and Cook County records. That left $45 million outstanding. But in 2014, Deutsche Bank agreed to lend another $24 million on the property and to extend the due date until 2024, records show. Mr. Trump now owed the bank $69 million. By May 2016, he had repaid the $24 million.

At that time, the Chicago loans were only one element of the relationship between Deutsche Bank and Mr. Trump. Ms. Vrablic’s team also lent Mr. Trump’s company $125 million for work on his Doral golf resort in Florida and up to $170 million to transform the Old Post Office building in Washington into a luxury hotel. Mr. Trump personally guaranteed those loans, too.

The guarantees were advantageous for him. Because they counted as investments in his business for tax purposes, the guarantees increased the amount of losses he could use to avoid income taxes in the future. Mr. Trump’s federal tax returns show that he has personally guaranteed the repayment of $421 million in debts.

Most of that is on loans from Deutsche Bank. At the end of 2018, Mr. Trump and his companies owed the bank $330 million.

Whittling Down Tax Bills

The I.R.S. requires taxpayers to treat forgiven debts as income when calculating what they owe in federal taxes. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, is investigating whether Mr. Trump followed the law.

The tax records reviewed by The Times show that while Mr. Trump accounted for $287 million of income from his canceled debts, he managed to avoid paying income taxes on nearly all of it.

Mr. Trump reported $40 million of forgiven debt as income in 2010. But losses from his businesses — including $30.8 million in red ink on the Chicago project — meant he had no taxable income that year.

Mr. Trump avoided immediate income taxes on another $104.8 million of the forgiven loans in a way that could increase his taxes later. He would generally have been entitled to write off the total amount he spent on a building over a number of years, a process known as depreciation. Instead, he agreed to reduce those eventual write-offs by $104.8 million, an alternative allowed in tax law.

For the other $141 million, Mr. Trump took advantage of a law, passed after the 2008 financial crisis, that allowed income from canceled debts to be deferred for five years and then spread out over the next five. Each year from 2014 through 2018, Mr. Trump declared $28.2 million of canceled-debt income.

As it turned out, though, losses in other parts of his business wiped out most of his federal tax bill on that income. He paid nothing for 2014; $641,931 for 2015; and, after credits, only $750 a year for 2016 and 2017. It isn’t clear how much he paid for 2018.

Loans Coming Due

Like Mr. Trump’s other properties, the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago has benefited in some ways from its connection to the president.

Last year, for example, an aviation company that was lobbying the Trump administration for contracting work held an event there. Mr. Trump attended an October 2019 lunch fund-raiser at the hotel, which generated about $100,000 in revenue for his company, The Washington Post reported.

But the skyscraper’s fortunes have withered. Most of its retail space has never been occupied, The Real Deal reported last year. Its revenue declined from $67 million in 2014 to $50 million in 2018, while profits plunged from $16.3 million to $1.8 million over the same period.

The problems intensified in 2020, as the coronavirus forced restaurants, including Mr. Trump’s in Chicago, to close. The Trump family sought financial relief from Deutsche Bank among others.

The bank offered to let Mr. Trump’s companies pause interest payments on their loans. The Trump Organization decided the bank’s proposal was insufficiently generous and turned it down.

The loans come due in 2023 and 2024.

[dragonfly9]

Always the one who leaves when he doesn’t get soft questions…his specialty.

andrew kaczynski🤔 (KFILE)

Donald Trump walked off a 1990 CNN interview when asked tough questions about...

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Everywhere he goes, Trump leaves wreckage behind.

In Omaha, thousands of his supporters were left 4 miles from their cars in 30F weather, in the dark. Numerous elders have been hospitalized with hypothermia.

Hundreds of Trump supporters stuck in the cold for hours when buses can’t...

Omaha Trump rally attendees stranded, several taken to hospital suffering...

Hundreds of Trump supporters stuck on freezing cold Omaha airfield after rally

Thousands Of Trump Supporters Left Stranded In Freezing Weather After Omaha...

Hundreds of people waited hours in the cold for buses after Trump rally at...

I am waiting for Trump to declare something like "Omaha… it rhymes with Obama… clearly he’s responsible."

Gerry Perlman (PerlmanGerry)

Eric Feigl-Ding (DrEricDing)

Eric Feigl-Ding (DrEricDing)

Eric Feigl-Ding (DrEricDing)

Eric Feigl-Ding (DrEricDing)

Eric Feigl-Ding (DrEricDing)

Eric Feigl-Ding (DrEricDing)

Eric Feigl-Ding (DrEricDing)

Eric Feigl-Ding (DrEricDing)

Ginger Kitty (icecreamonacone)

Ginger Kitty (icecreamonacone)

MeidasTouch.com (MeidasTouch)

MeidasTouch.com (MeidasTouch)

Omaha Scanner (omaha_scanner)

Omaha Scanner (omaha_scanner)

Jeff Paul (Jeff_Paul)

---

And in other news:

Journal Sentinel (journalsentinel)

Subcontractor doing Trump voter outreach for Wisconsin Republicans fired amid...

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Citizens for Ethics (CREWcrew)

The mystery of President Trump’s consulting fee income - CREW | Citizens for...

[dragonfly9]

Max Boot (MaxBoot)

Opinion | Is President Donald Trump a Flight Risk?

Opinion | Is President Donald Trump a Flight Risk?

[dragonfly9]

Time for venting

"What Comes Next"

The cover of this coming Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine asks: “Can we ever heal?” The cover story by Gene Weingarten is simply incredible… You may love parts of it, you may hate parts of it, but you should read it until the end… Because Weingarten has a huge surprise waiting for everyone. Click here to get started… Or wait for it in print this Sunday… (form Brian Stelter’s Newsletter )

In a divided country, it feels like hatred for each other has become one more...

I am not pretending to be an honest broker here, the classic middleman role that good journalists try to adopt. I believe we are suffering through the worst presidency in American history. I believe Donald Trump is a dark malevolence, a puffed-up, jut-jawed Mussolini, a man who has no respect for — worse, no fundamental understanding of — what this grand experiment, the dream of the Founding Fathers, the deathbed legacy of Abraham Lincoln, has been all about.

I think Trump is amoral. I think he is a sociopath. I think he is a boor and a vulgarian. I think he is comically thin-skinned and vindictive. I think he is adolescently petty. Because I usually write humor columns, which confer a license to exaggerate, I have called him “America’s Chief Petty Officer.” I have noted that his supporters often argue that “Hey, at least he is not a politician,” which, I wrote, is like “putting your money on a chicken in the Kentucky Derby because at least he’s not a horse.”

I think he has no empathy for anyone’s suffering, something proven time and again: For example, he said that he didn’t worry about catching the coronavirus at a mass indoor rally because he was safely physically removed from the masses of his fans sitting out there, cheek by jowl, in chairs placed side by side, as his campaign staff had placed them, for great visuals. Then, of course, he caught the virus and imperiled others by not revealing his exposure, even telling the country, with its more than 212,000 dead, that the virus was nothing to fear.

I think he is a reflexive, congenital liar. I think his recent attempts at so-called populism — suggesting, for example, that we teach “pro-American” history — are a prehensile tactic, grabbing for a toehold from a shrinking and increasingly insipid political base.

I find myself profoundly disliking and disrespecting almost half of my countrymen and women — the group of Americans that support Trump, and it feels absolutely terrible.

I think he is emotionally wounded, a man pathetically in need not just of validation but sycophantic adoration. I think he tries to hide who he is, literally, under a preposterous comb-over and a grotesque spray-painted Kabuki tan — two absurd vanities that God exposes with the occasional gusts of wind, as though He is urging us, imploring us, to look at front and side mug shots. I think he is a tax chiseler. I find it galling that the man cannot spell or put together a coherent sentence and ebulliently flaunts that disability, as though it were some idiot sign of authenticity. I feel he is reprehensibly ignorant of the basic facts a president should have. He is so unapologetically and patently racist that some news organizations have come to simply state this as fact, unintentionally numbing the dreadful truth of it, so it comes off as one more unremarkable biographical detail, as though they were noting that he was born in 1946. I feel he embarrassed the nation by publicly mourning the death of Herman Cain, the hard-right buffoonish pizza magnate … but not the great John Lewis.

Mostly, I cannot forgive him for what he has taken from me, personally. It’s not money — with his mismanagement of the virus, eliminating my travel and restaurants, and with his tax policies that favor the economically comfortable at the expense of the poor, he probably has actually made me money.

What he has taken from me are two things: First, my genuine lifelong feeling that the United States, for all its weaknesses and failures, deserves, and has always deserved, the benefit of the doubt. Second: I find myself profoundly disliking and disrespecting almost half of my countrymen and women — that is, the group of Americans that support Trump. I have never felt such antipathy before, even in other sharply polarizing times, and it feels absolutely terrible.

Possibly history can provide some solace.

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Leaked Trump Admin Document Describes Billie Eilish as ‘Destroying Our Country and Everything We Care About’

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/leaked-trump-admin-document-describes-191559664.html

A leading Trump administration official reportedly tainted a $250 million advertising contract originally intended to “defeat despair and inspire hope” amid the pandemic by, among other sadly unsurprising things, excluding public figures they believed were not aligned with Trump or his widely panned policy attempts.

A peculiar amount of ire, per the Washington Post , was reserved for Grammy winner Billie Eilish. A document detailing the administration’s problems with an assortment of “at least” 274 artists and celebrities who were being considered for the public health campaign pointed out that Eilish is, in fact, “not a Trump supporter.” Furthermore, in the words of the document, the Trump team is convinced the 18-year-old megastar is “destroying our country and everything we care about.”

Top-ranking Democrats recently penned a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar stating that documents from the campaign showed HHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Michael Caputo trying to use the taxpayer-funded effort as a way of helping the president and failed steak salesman’s image.

Other figures who were under consideration but ultimately not approved for similar reasons include Jennifer Lopez, Judd Apatow, George Lopez, Christina Aguilera, Adam Levine, Justin Timberlake, Jack Black, and Johnny Depp.

It’s worth noting that it appears the pricey public health ad, though said to have intentionally been intended to encourage optimism during the ongoing pandemic, quickly became more of an attempt to track down virtually apolitical celebrities and/or those who would somehow manage to make Trump look good.

Ultimately, only 10 celerities—including Dr. Oz and Dennis Quaid—got the approval from the administration to be involved with the program. However, the program itself is currently under review, with none of the PSA videos having aired publicly.

Anyway, next February will bring fans the Apple TV+ premiere of Eilish’s new documentary The World’s a Little Blurry . Fans who attended Eilish’s recent Where Do We Go? livestream event were treated with a new clip from the 2021 release.

[dragonfly9]

One more whiny moment with T, and he got what he wanted - favorable tax rates for real estate investors.

NYTimes: How a Century of Real-Estate Tax Breaks Enriched Donald Trump

How a Century of Real-Estate Tax Breaks Enriched Donald Trump

Twenty-five years before he was elected president, Donald J. Trump went to Capitol Hill to complain that Congress had closed too many tax loopholes. He warned that one industry, in particular, had been severely harmed: real estate.

The recent demise of real estate tax shelters, part of a landmark 1986 overhaul of the tax code, was “an absolute catastrophe for the country,” Mr. Trump testified to Congress that day in November 1991.

“Real estate really means so many jobs,” he said. “You create so many other things. They buy carpet. They buy furniture. They buy refrigerators. They buy other things that fuel the economy.”

Mr. Trump was sounding a theme that has made real estate perhaps the tax code’s most-favored industry.

[dragonfly9]

You might be the greatest meglomaniac…maybe that is the best descriptor for you.

Zev Shalev (ZevShalev)

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Tracie Stevens (TracieLVaughn)

Trump complains his Supreme Court loss will ‘induce violence in the streets’...

Analysis: Why this race likely comes down to Arizona and Pennsylvania

Trump complains his Supreme Court loss will ‘induce violence in the streets’ in latest election threat

In an apparent new threat by President Donald J. Trump Monday night, the 74-year-old said that the Supreme Court decision in Pennsylvania would “induce violence in the streets.”

Trump’s full tweet read, “The Supreme Court decision on voting in Pennsylvania is a VERY dangerous one. It will allow rampant and unchecked cheating and will undermine our entire systems of laws. It will also induce violence in the streets. Something must be done!”

The incumbent president may need Pennsylvania in order to stop his Democratic opponent Joe Biden from getting to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the reigns of the country on Election Day.

“If former Vice President Joe Biden wins every state that 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won four years ago and flips Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — all of which Trump won four years ago — that would get him over the 270 electoral votes he needs in order to win the election,” Raw Story reported Oct. 29.

“Trump’s best path to stop Biden is for there to be a larger than average polling error in Arizona and especially Pennsylvania,” CNN reported Monday. “If Trump is able to take both Florida and North Carolina (along with Georgia, which has similar polling to Florida), then you can begin to see how Trump could pull it off. He would need to win in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Is that possible? Yes. Will it be easy? No.”

Donald J. Trump (realDonaldTrump)

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Somebody take Junior’s coloring book away please. I think he’s been sniffing the sharpies.

Donald Trump Jr brutally mocked for his geographically confused ‘world map’...

Donald Trump Jr. (DonaldJTrumpJr)

[Windthin (David Bythewood)]

Mueller, She Wrote Podcast (MuellerSheWrote)

Exclusive: Tired of Trump, Deutsche Bank games ways to sever ties with the...

Deutsche Bank has about $340 million in loans outstanding to the Trump Organization, the president’s umbrella group that is currently overseen by his two sons, according to filings made by Trump to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in July and a senior source within the bank. The three loans, which are against Trump properties and start coming due in two years, are current on payments and personally guaranteed by the president, according to two bank officials.

In meetings in recent months, a Deutsche Bank management committee that oversees reputational and other risks for the lender in the Americas region has discussed ways in which it could rid the bank of these last vestiges of the relationship, two of the three bank officials said. The bank has over the years lent Trump more than $2 billion, one of the officials said.

One idea that has come up in the meetings: sell the loans in the secondary market, two of the bank officials said. But one of the officials said that idea has not gained traction, in part because it is not clear who would want to buy the loans and the attendant problems that come with it.

While it was known that Deutsche Bank has been closely examining its relationship with Trump, including by setting up a working group in 2016 to review the bank’s relationship with him, its recent eagerness to end all ties and the contours of discussions in light of the election have not been previously reported.

Deutsche Bank declined to comment. The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment. The White House declined to comment.

WARREN’S WARNING

The German bank, which first started lending to Trump in the late 1990s, has been dragged into congressional and other investigations into the real estate mogul-turned-politician’s finances and alleged Russia connections.

The probes and the bad press, seen by one senior executive as “serious collateral damage” from the relationship, are an unwelcome distraction for the bank, the three officials said. It comes at a time when Chief Executive Christian Sewing is trying to turn Deutsche Bank around after its decades-long run at becoming a major Wall Street bank left it nursing huge losses.

Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat member of the Senate banking committee, has previously called for an investigation into Deutsche Bank over its money laundering controls and has demanded answers from the lender about its relationship with Trump and his family. She told Reuters that she intended to keep pushing for a probe in the next administration.

“You bet I’m going to continue to fight for accountability and strong enforcement of our banking laws, especially for giant institutions like Deutsche Bank,” she said.

What happens next for the bank rests on the outcome of Tuesday’s elections, according to the three bank officials.

If the Republican president loses, and Democrats take control of the White House and Congress, senior Deutsche Bank executives believe congressional investigations that have stalled amid a court battle over access to Trump’s financial records could be rejuvenated, the three bank officials said.

In this scenario, however, Deutsche Bank executives believe they will also have more freedom to deal with the loans and end their relationship with Trump, the officials said. They hope doing so might help reduce some of the scrutiny, they said.

DIFFERENT SCENARIOS

The loans, which are against Trump’s golf course in Miami, and hotels in Washington and Chicago, are such that the Trump Organization has only had to pay interest on them so far, and the entire principal is outstanding, two of the three bank officials said. They come due in 2023 and 2024, the filings show.

The businesses backing the loans face challenges. The coronavirus-driven economic slowdown has hit the travel industry, including hotels. Moreover, last month Reuters reported that Trump’s plan to make money by developing houses and hotels on his golf courses, including the one involving the Deutsche Bank loan, had not panned out so far.

The Deutsche Bank executives are not unduly concerned about Trump’s ability to repay the loans, given the president’s personal guarantees and the time left before they come due, the three bank officials said.

If Trump is not in office, Deutsche Bank executives feel that it would be easier for them to demand repayment, foreclose if he is not able to pay it off or refinance, or try to sell the loans, according to two of the three bank officials.

Since Trump has personally guaranteed all the loans, Deutsche Bank could also seize the president’s assets if he is unable to repay, two of the three bank officials said.

If Trump wins a second term, Deutsche Bank executives feel their options would be fewer, the three bank officials said. The bank wouldn’t want the negative publicity inherent with seizing assets from a sitting president and would likely extend the loans until he is out of office, two of the bank officials said.

The bottom line, the three bank officials said, is that the matter won’t be resolved until well after the election.

Robert J. DeNault (robertjdenault)

[MissJava]

Portrait of a President

Deutsche Bank has about $340 million in loans outstanding to the Trump Organization, the president’s umbrella group that is currently overseen by his two sons, according to filings made by Trump to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in July and a senior source within the bank. The three loans, which are against Trump properties and start coming due in two years, are current on payments and personally guaranteed by the president, according to two bank officials. In meetings in recent m…

Do they think that getting rid of these loans will keep them from harsher litigation results? Like, seriously, this institution is clearly protected by some very powerfully corrupt people so why the sudden attempt to cut ties?
(This is likely just a rhetorical question, I don’t actually give much more than a fraction of a shit lol.)