It doesn't say to search out leaders who have given loads of money to office holders for favors because they know how the corrupt system works and use it for their advancement. Does it?
“When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do." Donald Trump
According to Wayne Barrett’s 1992 biography Trump, the Deals and the Downfall, Trump had boasted he could “buy” a U.S. Senator for $200,000 and gleefully recounted once how Hugh Carey, New York’s governor, would do “anything” for a campaign contribution.
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Trump has often credited his father, Fred Trump, with teaching him the ins and outs of business and life. “ My father taught me everything I know,” was how he put it at his father’s funeral in 1999.
Fred Trump’s Political Connections
Fred Trump first gained national notoriety when the Eisenhower administration investigated abuses in a program to finance housing for World War 11 and Korean War veterans. Eisenhower had been outraged bywhat he considered to be excessive profits made by developers who used taxpayer dollars. His justice department uncovered evidence that builders were sending gifts – televisions and watches were common – to bureaucrats who decided which applicants got access to cheap government construction loans.
The elder Trump, who was friends with a top federal official implicated in the scandal, was identified as a profiteer in this program and called before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1954.
Fred Trump, like the other developers who testified, said that what he did was within the letter, if not the spirit of the law. But his testimony was more entertaining than most. In a display of verbal trickery that foreshadowed his son’s presidential campaign rhetoric, Trump tied the committee in knots with convoluted, oblique answers to questions about his manipulation of the government program.
At one point the committee’s lawyer asked him why he took a 5% architect’s fee for himself when no architect was employed for a project.
“And it is provided in the regulation,” explained Trump.
“What is provided by the regulation?” asked the lawyer.
“The 5% architect’s fee.”
“Have you ever seen a regulation that says that?”
“No, I’m a builder.”
“Then how do you know these regulations provide for a 5% architect’s fee?”
“They wouldn’t have allowed it if they didn’t.”
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But in 1974, he was 27 and well schooled by his father in the ways of New York politics and real estate. When he needed to prove he had the clout to pull off his first big deal in New York City, Donald Trump called on his father’s old pal, Abe Beame.
Elected mayor in 1973, Beame was part of a Brooklyn Democratic Party organization that the elder Trump new very well. At the appointed hour he welcomed Donald Trump, his father, and Ned Eichler, who was managing the old Penn Central Railroad’s dispersal of properties in Manhattan. Donald wanted to develop them. According to Barrett, Beame announced, “Whatever Donald and Fred want, they have my complete backing.”
[ In fact, Beame made sure the young Trump got a tax abatement that has saved him over $40 million over the years. ]
As Eichler would later tell Barrett, Donald Trump informed him, "I could buy a United States senator for $200,000," and that Governor Hugh Carey would “do anything for a developer who gives him a campaign contribution.” The Trumps contributed more than $35,000 to Carey’s first campaign for governor. When Donald needed planning board approval and tax breaks as he redeveloped the old Commodore Hotel at Grand Central Terminal, he got them.
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Even while he derides Clinton as "crooked" and claims she can be bought (without providing specifics), in his own career, he has boasted about paying money in order to gain access. “When they call, I give,” he has explained. “And you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.”
The father who taught Donald Trump everything he knew was routinely asking for favors from politicians who received his financial support. And the record shows that Trump took up the practice in the 1970s and continued it ever since. Although he's occasionally b een fined for breaking the rules, most recently in the Pam Bondi case, when he used Trump Foundation charity dollars to make an illegal campaign donation, he's apparently passed on the lessons to his children, too.
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http://fortune.com/2016/09/13/donald-trump-politicians-donations/
“As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in July 2015. “As a businessman, I need that.”
What Trump needed was for Bondi to quash an investigation into Trump University. On September 17, 2013, the pro-Bondi group, And Justice for All, received a $25,000 donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Four days later, Bondi announced that the state of Florida wouldn’t pursue a legal case about Trump University or the Trump Institute, a similar but separate scheme. The donation was revealed by the Associated Press in June, but it’s under fresh scrutiny because the Trump Foundation’s gift was illegal, leading to a $2,500 fine paid to the IRS earlier this year, as The Washington Post reported last week.
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In January, Trump said, “When I want something I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass. It's true.”
Now, he insists that isn’t true—or, at least, isn’t true in a case that looks a lot like what he described. Even though a Bondi consultant confirmed that she had spoken to Trump about a donation, Trump says he did not. “Never spoke to her about that at all,” Trump told reporters during a gaggle on Monday. Bondi later endorsed Trump and spoke at the Republican National Convention this July.
In a way, it’s a he-said, she-said story—Trump says he never spoke to Bondi about the donation, her representative says he did. But more importantly, it’s a he-said, he-said story: Trump said he could buy politicians off, and now he claims that isn’t true. Which is it?
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theatlantic.com |
