1.
González:
To talk more about Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, we’re
joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who has covered
Trump off and on for 27 years. He recently wrote an article
for National Memo titled “21 Questions for Donald Trump.”
2.
Goodman:
David Cay Johnston is an investigative reporter previously with The New York
Times. He’s currently a columnist for Al Jazeera America as well as a
contributing writer at Newsweek. His latest book is Divided: The Perils of Our
Growing Inequality. David, welcome back to Democracy Now! You have been
covering Donald Trump for more than 30 years. Can you talk about who Donald
Trump is?
3.
Johnston:
Well, Donald Trump is not at all who people think he is, and I’m very surprised
that conservatives are embracing him. For example, Donald’s most famous
building, the Trump Tower, instead of building it as a steel girder building,
he chose to build it out of concrete, a 58-story—he says 68 stories—a 58-story
concrete building built by a company called A&S [S&A Concrete] construction. And
who owned [S&A]
construction? “Fat Tony” Salerno, the head of the Genovese crime family
in New York, and Paul Gambino—I’m sorry, Paul Castellano, the head of the
Gambino family. Trump used the same company for other projects that he built,
even though they were more costly than using steel girder construction. When he
tore down the Bonwit
Teller building to make way for the Trump Tower, he had about a dozen
union house wreckers on the site and about 150 Polish workers, all of them
illegally in the country, who he paid $4 to $5 an hour and who did not have hard
hats. And Trump claimed in a lawsuit that he had no idea that these workers
were there in any way other than an appropriate way. And a federal judge mocked
him, pointing out that they were easy to spot because they were the ones who
had no hard hats. Donald’s personal helicopter pilot, Joseph Weichselbaum, was a convicted
major cocaine and marijuana trafficker whose criminal case landed before, of
all people, Judge
Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s sister. Now, Judge Barry recused
herself, but she also, in the process, made every other judge in the federal
system aware of the sensitivity of this particular case. And in addition,
Donald Trump has been found in the past repeatedly to have not paid people he
owed money to. It is a standard business practice of his. He has let people
think that he fixed Wollman Rink in Central Park for free. He was paid $10
million, but some of his contractors were never paid, because he told them this
was a public service project. And he’s been sued innumerable times for racial
discrimination of his businesses. He’s been found to have engaged in racial
discrimination. He’s not at all who he appears to be.
4.
González:
Well, and, David Cay Johnston, you also note that he’s not even a billionaire,
as he so often claims, that in some years he hasn’t—
5.
Johnston:
Well, he wasn’t one in—
6.
González:
In some years, he hasn’t even paid taxes.
7.
Johnston:
He wasn’t one in 1990. Yeah, in 1990, when I revealed
that—he claimed he was worth $3 billion back then, and I got a hold of his
banker’s net worth statement that showed he was worth negative-$295 million,
and as—I was at _The Philadelphia Inquirer then. We ran across the top
of the front page, “You are Probably Worth More Than Donald Trump.” I think the
record now is pretty clear. He’s probably worth a billion or somewhat more than
a billion, but nowhere near $10 billion.
8.
But important to that is that Donald, in all
likelihood, despite claiming a $400 million annual income, probably doesn’t pay
any income taxes, because there’s a special provision in federal tax law that
if you’re a real estate developer or operator, and your losses, your paper
losses for the depreciating value of your buildings, which are really going up
in value, exceed your other income, you can live tax-free. And I have three
years of Donald’s tax returns from the late ‘70s, early ‘80s that show large
negative income and no federal income tax.
9.
González:
And you’ve challenged him to release his taxes?
10.
Johnston:
Oh, yeah. I think the likelihood that Donald will release his tax returns, even
if he’s the Republican nominee, is extraordinarily small. I mean, look how hard
Mitt Romney, who benefited from another provision of the tax code that would
have allowed him to live tax-free or virtually tax-free as the sole owner of
Bain Capital management, fought to only release two years of his tax data, even
though his father set the standard at 16 years.
11.
Goodman:
We were just talking, David Cay Johnston, about his wanting to change the Constitution
to end birthright citizenship. Your thoughts?
12.
Johnston:
Well, the racist right in this country has proposed repeal of the 14th
Amendment for a long time. You haven’t heard about it in the mainstream news,
because it seems a crazy, fringe idea. I noticed Lindsey Graham—you ran a tape
of him saying, “We have evidence of people coming here to have their babies.” I’ve
asked several politicians over the last few years, you know, “What evidence?
You know, point me to people.” Well, you don’t get anything from these folks.
But let’s assume that it’s true, somewhat true. Why would we amend the
Constitution and take away a right, a right we fought a war over, in which over
600,000 people, about 38,000 of them black Americans, fought, to take away this
constitutional right that has been now unquestioned in the law for more than a
century and a half?
13.
González:
And among the questions you raise, there’s also about Trump’s operations in
Atlantic City, with his casinos there and his questionable relationships with
possibly other mob figures in Atlantic City. Could you talk about that?
14.
Johnston:
Sure. Well, Donald never had a dollar invested in Atlantic City. And by his own account in The
Art of the Deal, he brags about deceiving his partners, the directors of
the old Holiday Inn motel company, who owned Harrah’s casinos. And he
boasts about tricking them and deceiving them. He needed to buy a particular
piece of land. And Donald always says he’s such a great negotiator. So who did
he send to negotiate with the representative of Nicky Scarfo, the head of the
Atlantic City crime family? Well, he sent his lawyer, Harvey Freeman. He didn’t
go himself. And I think that’s consistent with Donald having so assiduously
avoided the draft. Donald is not a guy to put himself in any position that he
thinks might represent any kind of physical danger to him whatsoever.
15.
Goodman:
David Cay Johnston, you also talk about how he discusses his experience as a
manager allowing him to run the federal government far better than President
Obama or Hillary Clinton. Can you talk about that?
16.
Johnston:
Oh, yes. Well, you know, Fortune magazine does these analyses of who’s a good employer. Wegmans
supermarkets, where I am here in Rochester, New York, is often cited as
a really good employer, and with good reason. So they looked at 496 major
companies, and Trump’s casino company was at the bottom or almost at the bottom
in terms of management competence, how it treated its workers, its return to
its investors—every metric they had, near the bottom. Donald is not a manager.
He is a dealmaker. And the principal elements of Trump
deals are these: You borrow a lot of money. You then arrange later to pay back
less than you owed, whether you do it through private transactions, by
threatening to go to bankruptcy court, or actual bankruptcy, in the case of his
casino company. You don’t pay people who work for you or vendors what’s
promised. And what I don’t understand, Amy, is not one major news organization
has even tried to check these things out. I got one phone call from The
Washington Post about this piece, “21 Questions for Donald Trump.” Nothing has appeared.
And that’s because, in this country, politics reporters cover the horse race,
and they do not vet the candidates the way they should. And Trump, if vetted properly, would quickly disappear from
the polls.
17.
González:
And does that go to explain why he continues to rise in the polls among
Republican voters despite this incredible record of all these years?
18.
Johnston:
Well, I think—see, I don’t think people know about his actual record. He is
appealing to the worst instincts in us. He is appealing to racial instincts.
And, you know, let’s recognize that, well, in polite society, you can’t say, “I
don’t want to sit next to a black person or a brown person or an Asian person
on the airplane or in a restaurant or at work.” You can’t say that. And so, there’s an
undercurrent of people who hate that. They want to live in a white society.
They want to imagine this is a Christian country, even though the Constitution
expressly in Article VI makes clear it’s not a religious country in any way.
And Donald has provided a way for those people who harbor these bad thoughts, I
would argue, they harbor these inhumane thoughts, to channel them through him. And
they are so enamored of this, they ignore the fact that he is proposing to
create a massive police state, to round up people, to have a—we were required
to have adjudicatory hearings, although Donald likes to think he would be
dictator—and spend enormous amounts of money on removing people from the
country, including children born here who are citizens, and erecting a wall,
which will do absolutely nothing to stop people coming here in an effort to
find a better life. So, people who harbor these awful feelings and suffer from
the social disease of white skin privilege just aren’t really thinking through
what Donald is proposing, which is a massive new government program that’s
totally contrary to the Republican promise of less government.
19.
Goodman:
David Cay Johnston, we want to thank you for being with us, Pulitzer
Prize-winning investigative reporter, previously with The New York Times,
now writing for Al Jazeera America as well as a contributing writer at Newsweek.
We’ll link to your column on
your “21 Questions for Donald Trump” at democracynow.org.
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