1. Adam Davidson: Is Fraud the Trump Organization’s Business Model?

It is becoming increasingly clear that, in the language of business schools, the Trump Organization’s core competency is in profiting from misrepresentation and deceit and, potentially, fraud.

This month, two incredible investigative stories have given us an opportunity to lift the hood of the Trump Organization, look inside, and begin to understand what the business of this unusual company actually is. It is not a happy picture. The Times published a remarkable report, on October 2nd, that showed that much of the profit the Trump Organization made came not from successful real-estate investment but from defrauding state and federal governments through tax fraud. This week, ProPublica and WNYC co-published a stunning story  and a ‘Trump, Inc.’ podcast that can be seen as the international companion to the Times piece. They show that many of the Trump Organization’s international deals also bore the hallmarks of financial fraud, including money laundering, deceptive borrowing, outright lying to investors, and other potential crimes. https://www.newyorker.com/news/swamp-chronicles/is-fraud-part-of-the-trump-organizations-business-model

2. Kalena Thomhave: Trump’s big metaphorical wall

The midterm elections are quickly approaching, and the Trump administration is busily constructing policy levees in hopes to stave off a blue wave. With seemingly no time for nuance, they're hitting the big selling points of why Trump voters love the president, like his promise to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. But since we're almost two years into the Trump presidency and the wall still hasn't been built (and probably never will be), the administration is proposing new obstacles to limit immigration and excite their base.

Up first: keeping out the tired, poor, huddled masses. Although Republicans claim to favor immigration as long as it's legal, the White House has chosen to introduce new hurdles to it — based on wealth. A new rule proposed by the administration would make it more difficult for poorer immigrants to come to the U.S. legally and also penalize immigrants who use public assistance programs. If the rule is enacted, low-income people who are already here may find it difficult to get green cards, incentivizing them to forego public assistance for which they're eligible and advancing hunger, sickness, and further poverty.

At the heart of the rule is redefining what it means for an immigrant to be a public charge, that is, reliant on the government. In the past, you were a public charge if the government provided more than half of your income through a program like cash welfare, which was exceptionally rare for immigrants (and in general). But in order to paint as many immigrants as possible as welfare moochers, the administration is broadening the scope of who they consider a public charge. Now, it could apply to any immigrant who uses — or is even deemed likely to use — virtually any public benefit, like food stamps, housing assistance, and Medicare's prescription subsidies. That means if you're hoping to come to the U.S. but aren't rich, your application might be rejected merely because an immigration official doesn't think you'd be able to afford medical care as soon as you step off the plane. http://theweek.com/articles/798321/trumps-big-metaphorical-wall

3. William Falk: When amoral becomes immoral

Morality is such an encumbrance. Once any shame is shed, dilemmas dissolve; everything gets so much easier. Take the quandary presented by Saudi Arabia. For decades, U.S. presidents have resorted to extreme realpolitik in order to treat the Saudis as a valued ally — a status bestowed on the sheikhs by the billions of barrels of oil under their sands, and the broad influence their enormous wealth has purchased. The oilmen of the Bush family treated the Saudis like cousins, even after 9/11; President Barack Obama irritated the Saudis with talk of human rights and democracy, but in the end backed their brutal war against Yemen and offered to sell them $115 billion in arms. President Trump has taken realpolitik to a new level. Virtually no one believes the Saudi royals' risible claim that they didn't know about the 15-member Saudi hit team that murdered and dismembered dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But the president says it's possible "rogue killers" committed this atrocity. "The king firmly denied any knowledge of it," Trump helpfully explained.

Problem solved. Punishing the Saudis for kidnapping and executing a journalist living and working in the U.S. would be highly inconvenient. Trump has sold millions of dollars of real estate and hotel rentals to the Saudis, wants the U.S. to sell them billions more in weapons, and needs their help (and their oil) in his struggle to subdue Iran. If King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman insist they had nothing to do with Khashoggi's regrettable demise, why quibble? Trump's eagerness to swallow the Saudi cover story prompted Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to say this week: "At some point, an amoral foreign policy becomes an immoral foreign policy." Just think, though, how many "great deals" we can cut with Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and other murderous tyrants if we dispense with morality and human rights entirely. http://theweek.com/articles/802635/when-amoral-becomes-immoral

4.  Maureen Dowd: Step Away From the Orb

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, presidential libraries and foundations, politically connected private equity groups, P.R. firms, think tanks, universities and Trump family enterprises are awash in Arab money. The Saudis satisfy American greed, deftly playing their role as dollar signs in robes.

Donald Trump, who may be the only person more fond of lavish displays of arriviste gilt than the Saudis, is bedazzled by a Saudi pledge to buy billions worth of American weapons, just as he was flattered by the Saudi sword dance and weird luminescent orb séanceon his visit to the kingdom.
Image

Even before the bloodcurdling execution of Jamal Khashoggi for his just criticism of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, it was clear that the chump Trump and jejune Jared had bet their entire Middle East strategy on a chillingly autocratic and reckless person.

The prince was easing up on the draconian restrictions on women to get a gloss as a liberal visionary. But he was simultaneously jailing women activists, imprisoning and torturing royals and top businessmen and making America an accomplice in a grotesque war in Yemen, dropping bombs supplied by the U.S. with little care about whether civilians died, including in an attack on a school bus, killing dozens of children. This, as the self-styled children’s advocate Ivanka was out on the town, talking about the fabulous “deliverables” she and Jared were bringing to their BFFs in Riyadh. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/opinion/sunday/saudi-arabia-united-states.html

5. Joel Mathis: Trump is planting the seeds for a new age of nuclear terror

But Trump is reversing the work of a generation of American leaders who advocated drawing down, not building up, the world's nuclear forces. The INF Treaty was an important symbol of that commitment. The president, whose bigger-is-better beliefs about power have long been his calling card, is recommitting the United States to the logic of nuclear terror.

"We'll have to develop those weapons," the president told reporters in Nevada. "We're going to terminate the agreement and we're going to pull out."

For those opposed to Trump's move, the equation is simple: The more weapons that exist, the more likely it is one will be used. If even one is used, it is much more likely that others will be used. It's difficult to envision a "limited" nuclear war. The logic of deterrence has always been that such weapons, once used, will lead to a full-scale conflict. Why would anybody gamble on the possibility?

"A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought," Reagan said in his 1984 State of the Union address. "The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?"

Trump doesn't follow such logic. He instead is planting the seeds for a new age of nuclear terror. New generations of Americans — and people all around the globe — have new cause to worry about the end of the world. The shadow has returned. http://theweek.com/articles/803112/trump-planting-seeds-new-age-nuclear-terror

6. Jelani Cobb: Voter-Suppression Tactics in the Age of Trump

The events in Georgia are part of a broader political project. The xenophobia and the resentment that Donald Trump stirred up during the 2016 election are fundamentally concerns about the future of the American electorate. (His reported comment that too many people are immigrating from “shithole countries” in Africa and the Caribbean was paired with a lament that not enough are coming from Europe.) He has repeatedly stated that he lost the popular vote because non-citizens voted for Hillary Clinton. Last Thursday, at a rally in Montana, he suggested that Democrats were responsible for a caravan of migrants now heading north from Honduras, because they “figure everybody coming in is going to vote Democrat.” Kemp, likewise, claimed that Abrams wants to let undocumented people vote in Georgia. The suppression of minority votes is the homegrown corollary of this strategy—an attempt to place a white thumb on the demographic scale.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, ninety-nine bills designed to diminish voter access were introduced last year in thirty-one state legislatures. Many of the recent Republican-led efforts stem from the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder. In an opinion that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that discrimination still exists, but not sufficiently to warrant the “extraordinary” remediation measures that the act imposed on the states of the former Confederacy. That argument is roughly equivalent to saying that a decline in the prevalence of an infectious disease means that we should stop vaccinating against it. Within hours of the decision, Texas announced a strict new voter-I.D. law. Mississippi and Alabama shortly afterward began enforcing similar laws that previously had been barred. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/voter-suppression-tactics-in-the-age-of-trump

7. Matthew Yglesias: The hack gap: how and why conservative nonsense dominates American politics

The hack gap explains why Clinton’s email server received more television news coverage than all policy issues combined in the 2016 election. It explains why Republicans can hope to get away with dishonest spin about preexisting conditions. It’s why Democrats are terrified that Elizabeth Warren’s past statements about Native American heritage could be general election poison in 2020, and it’s why an internecine debate about civility has been roiling progressive circles for nearly two years even while the president of the United States openly praises assaulting journalists.

The hack gap has two core pillars. One is the constellation of conservative media outlets — led by Fox News and other Rupert Murdoch properties like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but also including Sinclair Broadcasting in local television, much of AM talk radio, and new media offerings such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller — that simply abjure anything resembling journalism in favor of propaganda.

The other is that the self-consciousness journalists at legacy outlets have about accusations of liberal bias leads them to bend over backward to allow the leading conservative gripes of the day to dominate the news agenda.

Journalists take their cues about what’s important from partisan media outlets and partisan social media.

Thus, the frenzies of partisan attention around deplorables and lock her up served to focus on controversies that, while not objectively significant. are perhaps particularly resonant to people who don’t have firm ideological convictions.

Meanwhile, similar policy-neutral issues like Trump’s insecure cellphone, his preposterous claim to be too busy to visit the troops, or even his apparent track record of tax fraud don’t get progressives worked into a lather in the same way.

This is a natural tactical advantage that, moreover, serves a particular strategic advantage given the Republican Party’s devotion to plutocratic principles on taxation and health insurance that have only a very meager constituency among the mass public. https://www.vox.com/2018/10/23/18004478/hack-gap-explained

8. LA Times Editorial: Tearing up a nuclear arms treaty with Russia would be catastrophic

President Trump has made a habit of repudiating international agreements negotiated by Barack Obama, his Democratic predecessor. Now he seems to be on the verge of withdrawing the United States from a landmark arms control agreement signed more than 30 years ago by a Republican president, Ronald Reagan.

Trump’s stated reason for abrogating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty — that Russia is violating its terms — seems superficially plausible. But withdrawal would still be a catastrophic mistake.

A U.S. repudiation of the INF treaty also would also further damage relations with America’s closest European allies already dismayed by Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement and the Paris climate accord. On Monday a spokeswoman for the European Union, while calling on Russia to address concerns about its compliance, said: “We also expect the U.S. to consider the consequences of its possible withdrawal from the INF on its own security, on the security of its allies and of the whole world. The world doesn’t need a new arms race.”

In addition to complaining about Russian violations, Trump has pointed out that China is not bound by the INF treaty. “If Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it, and we’re adhering to the agreement, that’s unacceptable,” he said. Some arms-control experts have spoken about “globalizing” the INF treaty to add China and other Asian nations. But the idea that the U.S. needs to be freed from the treaty’s restrictions to deter China isn’t serious given this country’s other military assets not constrained by the agreement.

On too many occasions this administration has acted impulsively on the world stage and scrambled to contain the damage later. Trashing the INF treaty would be another such blunder. The president should pull back from the precipice. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-trump-inf-201810223-story.html

9. David Leonhardt: What if the Republicans Win Everything Again?

If Republicans do manage to keep both chambers of Congress, it would cause a political shock. So far, much of the speculation has focused on what a Democratic House takeover might mean — attempts to rein in Trump’s executive actions, subpoenas, investigations, maybe even impeachment. But it’s important to understand that a Republican victory would also change Washington.

It would be validation for Trump, who could then brag that he had defied the experts once again. It would mean he had outperformed Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman, all of whom suffered drubbings in the first midterm election of their presidency. It would embolden Trump to push even harder toward the America he wants — where corporate oversight is scant, climate change is ignored, voting rights are abridged, health care is a privilege, judicial independence is a fiction and the truth is whatever he says it is.

I obviously find this prospect alarming. I’d much rather spend time imagining the ways the Congress could act as a check on Trump after the Democrats gain some control. And the polls say that’s still likely. The political website FiveThirtyEight put the Democrats’ odds at around 84 percent on Friday. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/19/opinion/sunday/midterm-elections-republican-party-trump-senate-house.html

10. Bess Levin: White House Staff Can Barely Keep Up With Trump’s Stream Of Bulls--t

As you’ve probably noticed by now, Donald Trump has a penchant for saying things that are not true, or what laymen would call “lying through his caps.” Having a compulsive liar as president would be hard enough for the staff of any administration to contend with. But in Trump’s case, the problem is compounded by the fact that he routinely and publicly spews such falsehoods wherever he sees fit (rallies, Twitter, Rose Garden press conferences), and then, because he essentially lives in a parallel universe, believes them to be true. When confronted by reporters about these claims, another administration might say, “Well, that‘s not entirely the case,” or, “What the president meant was . . . ” But this is no such administration! Instead, Trump’s staff—and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill—have scrambled to support his bogus talking points after the fact.

Moreover, at least some of Trump’s staffers are fully aware that they’re bullshitting the American people—they just don’t seem to care. “It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 percent accurate,” a senior Trump administration official told the Daily Beast of the president’s immigration fear-mongering. “This is the play.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/white-house-staff-can-barely-keep-up-with-trump-lies

11. Jonathan Bernstein: The Republicans Are Running on a Fictional Platform

Here’s a puzzle: Why are Republicans running on fictional versions of their own platform? And how big of a deal is it?

On health care, Republicans from Donald Trump down say they are protecting people with pre-existing conditions. In reality, as Jonathan Cohn explains, the administration is in court to wipe out protections for those people, and Trump supported both repeal of Obamacare and replacement bills that would do little or nothing about the problem. 

At the same time, Trump is pretending that he’s about to slash middle-class taxes. He’s not. Had Republicans wanted to do that, they could have included the measure in their previous tax cut. Or they could have passed it this year. Or Trump could at least have put forward a plan. Or at least the White House or Treasury would be working on a plan, perhaps in conjunction with the House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance Committees. But the president is just saying stuff that sounds good to him, or perhaps stuff that gets positive responses at his rallies, without any sign there will be any real policy follow-up.

Trump makes up stuff because, well, he’s a person who makes up stuff. But one important reason why Republicans tolerate him is because so many of them simply don’t care very much about what their elected officials do, at least beyond judicial selections and lower taxes for the rich, as long as they stick to partisanship. Yes, this tends to make actually governing quite difficult. But it sure does free the party’s politicians to say all sorts of nutty things on the campaign trail, and Republican-aligned media to support whatever that might be.   https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-24/on-obamacare-trump-and-republicans-run-on-a-fictional-platform

12. Ed Kilgore: The Right’s ‘Caravan’ Panic

Last week Donald Trump launched a tweetstorm over the gradual approach to the U.S. border of a “caravan” of Central Americans (a few thousand people at the most):

I am watching the Democrat Party led (because they want Open Borders and existing weak laws) assault on our country by Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, whose leaders are doing little to stop this large flow of people, INCLUDING MANY CRIMINALS, from entering Mexico to U.S.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2018

....In addition to stopping all payments to these countries, which seem to have almost no control over their population, I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught - and if unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2018

...The assault on our country at our Southern Border, including the Criminal elements and DRUGS pouring in, is far more important to me, as President, than Trade or the USMCA. Hopefully Mexico will stop this onslaught at their Northern Border. All Democrats fault for weak laws!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2018

At some point, we have to take people seriously when they treat migrants as an existential threat to civilization, and the use of force against them as a sad but necessary measure of self-defense. Yes, it requires an unusual combination of paranoia and racism to view a few thousand poor people fleeing violence as justifying a panic. But the president of the United States has no compunctions about it:

Sadly, it looks like Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States. Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in. I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy. Must change laws!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 22, 2018

What’s a little excessive violence when it’s needed to make a point and win an election? http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/is-the-caravan-panic-a-reenactment-of-a-racist-novel.html

13. Windsor Mann: Trump can horrify us, annoy us, embarrass us — but he cannot shock us

No one was surprised when President Trump called Stormy Daniels Horseface on Twitter. After all, this is the man who called Hillary Clinton a nasty woman, Arianna Huffington a dog, Bette Midler an extremely unattractive woman, and Rosie O'Donnell a disgusting pig with a fat, ugly face.

The only shocking thing about Trump's Horseface tweet was how unshocking it was. We know he sleeps with porn stars, disparages women's looks, and can't spell horse face properly. We know we're supposed to be shocked by these things, but it's hard to remain shocked when you're shocked all the time — not just daily, but hourly. It's shocking when good people do bad things, not when bad people do bad things.

After a rumor spread that there might be a tape of Trump saying the N-word, people were more surprised by the absence of the tape than by the rumor itself. Of course Trump said the N-word was the operating premise.

Regarding The New York Times' investigation into the dubious tax schemes of Trump's family over decades, almost no one cared. The story was, as Politico's Jack Shafer put it, a bombshell that bombed. It bombed because it was predictable. It's not a surprise when a newspaper finds out that a guy who won't release his tax returns has a shady reason for keeping them secret. http://theweek.com/articles/802346/trump-horrify-annoy-embarrass--but-cannot-shock