Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?
By Paul Waldman September 5 at 1:57 PM
washingtonpost.com
excerpt:
The end result of this process is that because of all that repeated examination of Clinton’s affairs, people become convinced that she must be corrupt to the core. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of negative coverage of Trump, because of course there is, but it’s focused mostly on the crazy things he says on any given day.
But the truth is that you’d have to work incredibly hard to find a politician who has the kind of history of corruption, double-dealing, and fraud that Donald Trump has. The number of stories which could potentially deserve hundreds and hundreds of articles is absolutely staggering. Here’s a partial list:
Trump’s casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money
Trump’s habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for him, many of whom are struggling small businesses
Trump University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into Trump U was quashed.
The Trump Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which Trump allowed a couple of grifters to use his name to bilk people out of their money
The Trump Network, a multi-level marketing venture (a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins
Trump Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did
Trump’s employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work
Trump’s use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work
Trump’s history of being charged with housing discrimination
Trump’s connections to mafia figures involved in New York construction
The time Trump paid the Federal Trade Commission $750,000 over charges that he violated anti-trust laws when trying to take over a rival casino company
The fact that Trump is now being advised by Roger Ailes, who was forced out as Fox News chief when dozens of women came forwardto charge him with sexual harassment. According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.
And that last one is happening right now. To repeat, the point is not that these stories have never been covered, because they have. The point is that they get covered briefly, then everyone in the media moves on. If any of these kinds of stories involved Clinton, news organizations would rush to assign multiple reporters to them, those reporters would start asking questions, and we’d learn more about all of them.
more at the link |
