RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tim O’Brien did not set out to write a conclusive assessment of Donald Trump’s wealth. But it was those three pages in a 275-page book that occasioned what is, even in the annals of frivolous Trump lawsuits, a special display of petty, thin-skinned litigiousness.

In October 2005, O’Brien, then a business reporter for the New York Times, published a book about Donald Trump, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald. The book was not a hatchet job. Not only did O’Brien interview friends and employees and business associates and political rivals and much of the rest of the Who’s Who of the World of Donald, he also chatted with the man himself — repeatedly. They met for formal interviews in Trump’s various homes and offices. Trump drove O’Brien around in his Ferrari and in his Mercedes. They watched Pulp Fiction together on Trump’s gold-laden private jet. It all went into the book, from which emerges a portrait of a complex, fickle, charming, self-obsessed, cinematic American original.

Of course, no book about Trump can avoid the quasi-impenetrable question of his wealth. In 2004, O’Brien had co-authored a piece for the Times detailing Trump’s financial woes — he had recently filed for the third of what would be four Chapter 11 bankruptcies — and quoted anonymous sources who reported that Trump’s wealth was not nearly what he claimed; in fact, it was in the hundreds of millions, they said. (Contemporaneous reports in the Washington Post and Time magazine suggested the same.) Trump, meanwhile, notoriously unreliable in his own estimates, offered figures ranging from $1.7 billion to $9.5 billion. In TrumpNation, O’Brien cited those numbers, alongside “three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances” who estimated his wealth was “somewhere between $150 million and $250 million.” Trump denied it, in his usual colorful fashion: “You can go ahead and speak to guys who have four-hundred-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I’m a great builder.”

Despite his having included all of this information, including Trump’s denial, Trump accused O’Brien of cherry-picking his information to hurt Trump’s reputation. He sued him for $5 billion in damages.

Surprise! Or not.

For months, Donald Trump has claimed that he opposed the Iraq War before the invasion began — as an example of his great judgment on foreign policy issues.

But in a 2002 interview with Howard Stern, Donald Trump said he supported an Iraq invasion.

In the interview, which took place on Sept. 11, 2002, Stern asked Trump directly if he was for invading Iraq.

“Yeah I guess so,” Trump responded. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he was against the Iraq War before it began, despite no evidence of him publicly stating this position. On Meet the Press, Trump said there weren’t many articles about his opposition because he wasn’t a politician at the time.

“Well, I did it in 2003, I said it before that,” Trump said of his opposition to invading Iraq. “Don’t forget, I wasn’t a politician. So people didn’t write everything I said. I was a businessperson. I was, as they say, a world-class businessperson. I built a great company, I employed thousands of people. So I’m not a politician. But if you look at 2003, there are articles. If you look in 2004, there are articles.”

Trump’s comments on Stern are more in line with what he wrote in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, where he advocated for a “principled and tough” policy toward “outlaw” states like Iraq.

Donald Trump is a habitual liar, and the thing about habitual liars is that they lie habitually.

In a testy exchange with former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Trump insisted that he’d never gone bankrupt, and that claims to the contrary are a lie. That’s the Trump magic right there: Lying about your business history is one thing, lying that your critics are lying about it is another.

Trump has a peculiar way of speaking about bankruptcy: He has a deep aversion to the word itself. He speaks of “putting a company into a chapter” without ever answering the implicit question: “Chapter of what? Moby-Dick?” The answer, of course, is the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, to which Trump has taken recourse at least four times over the course of his business career. The chapter in question is the famous Chapter 11, which applies to business bankruptcies. Trump proudly insists that he never has had recourse to Chapter 13, the personal bankruptcy code. This is his apparent justification for saying that he’s never been bankrupt. But of course one of the purposes of Chapter 11 bankruptcy is to keep men such as Donald Trump out of Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

Trump’s first bankruptcy was in 1991 after he borrowed a stupidly irresponsible amount of money to finance that monument to excruciatingly bad taste known as the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Trump is such a good manager that the casino’s slot machines began failing during its first week of business. Never one to let reality stand in the way of his confidence, Trump had financed the $1 billion project largely with junk bonds, which meant very high interest payments. Trump did not make enough money to meet his interest payment and so was forced into bankruptcy. His ownership of the casino was diluted, and he ended up having to give back 500 slot machines to the company that had provided them.

Socialist Bernie Sanders is lying about the crushing cost of his quixotic government-run universal health care scheme because he can.

Sanders and the true-believers who surround him claim implausibly that BernieCare will save America $6 trillion over a decade. Forbes, on the other hand, asserts that BernieCare could lead to an astonishing $44 trillion in new federal spending over a decade.

Of course, facts are malleable things to the Left.

The insurgent candidate for the Democrats’ presidential nomination will never admit just how damaging his totalitarian approach to health care delivery would be to America. That’s because Sanders is a Marxist ideologue to whom money isn’t something real. Sanders and the other small-c communists who dominate today’s Democratic Party regard people as playthings, and they don’t care about the laws of economics, which they regard as obstacles to be overcome in the furtherance of social progress. And the mainstream media, for the most part, is in no hurry to hold the Independent senator from Vermont to account.

To some, single-payer health care seemed like a good idea around World War Two.

The denouement of my appearance on the ABC’s Q&A echoes on. Chris Kenny writes in The Australian:

In the final minute, US-based Canadian commentator Mark Steyn was summing up the prospects of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US presidential race. He quipped that Guardian journalist Lenore Taylor might get her wish — a socialist president. The audience burst into spontaneous applause, welcoming the prospect of a socialist president of the US. Steyn was flabbergasted.

“That’s not an applause line,” he admonished the crowd.

Host Tony Jones suggested it might have been a “laugh” line while a bemused Steyn suggested he might as well get a taxi to the airport. Then the insight of the moment seemed to dawn on Jones: “Well, it wasn’t the entire audience,” he protested.

Perhaps he was right. Maybe there were a few non-socialists in the ABC audience.

Speaking of Bernie, because of the openly corrupt nominating process in the Democrat Party, he’s getting stiffed in the delegate count by the so-called “super-delegates” who are pre-pledged to Hillary. So, even though he tied her in Iowa and whumped her 60-38 in the New Hampshire primary, she’s leading with 468 delegates to 53. The slugs who run the party loathe their voters and rig the system to render it a sham. Sporadic reader Bill Tomlinson proposes a solution:

Hi Mark

I have been a sporadic fan of yours for years, and I particularly enjoyed your “The March of Trump, and the Feel of Bern”.

But here’s a thought. Suppose Bernie wins the popular vote for the Democrat nomination, but Hillary leapfrogs him using her super-delegates. Bernie will be mad, but his supporters will be madder still.

If you need further evidence that Donald Trump is running for president in order to serve the best interests of Donald Trump, here it is from the Associated Press:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Monday offered rival Ted Cruz an ultimatum, threatening to sue Cruz over his eligibility to serve in the White House unless the Texas senator stops airing what Trump calls “false ads” and apologizes for what the billionaire real estate mogul called a series of lies about his positions.

… Trump saved the bulk of his criticism for Cruz. “If he doesn’t take down his false ads and retract his lies,” Trump said in a statement bashing Cruz, he will immediately file a lawsuit challenging Cruz’s eligibility to serve as president.

Trump has previously said a federal court should decide whether Cruz meets the constitutional requirement of being a “natural-born citizen” to serve as president. Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother, and many legal experts have said he meets that test.

Ask yourself, does Trump really care whether or not Ted Cruz is eligible to be president of the United States? If so, by presenting this ultimatum, hasn’t he effectively agreed to let Cruz’s eligibility go unchallenged in exchange for favorable treatment? If Cruz’s qualifications are truly in doubt, shouldn’t his eligibility be challenged regardless?

In The Race Card, a book examining the influence of racial stereotypes in manipulating election results, Tali Mendelberg’s analysis applies as well to voting patterns in general. “Norms and consciousness,” she explains, are the “necessary and missing factors” in shaping electoral response. The extent to which the individual feels that his self-understanding or desired identity resonates with the party’s implicit message and nature significantly conditions the way he votes. In other words, it is not only a question of policy compatibility but of an internal norm, a tacit or latent identification of the voter’s ideal self with the party’s, and its representative’s, manifested character.

This is why many potential Republican voters may sit out an election or, from a reaction of frustration or resentment, cast their ballots for the opposition. For they do not see their self-image reflected in the stance of the Republicrat who advances such policies as amnesty for illegals, entitlement spending, pro-choice abortion, hospitality for unvetted refugees, green energy boondoggles, carbon taxes to combat non-existent global warming, and the social leprosy of Islamic accommodation. Blue Republicans only kindle a feeling of disappointment or betrayal in those who would in optimal circumstances be natural constituents.

What most politicians forget is that the voter essentially votes for himself. Regarding himself as insightful, trustworthy and unafraid, his candidate must strike him as replicating these qualities. Thus, a Republican campaigner who fearlessly embraces the core tenets—what we might call the intrinsic platform—of his party’s history, or at the very least is not reluctant to be upfront, vocal and vigorous in disseminating his message despite the dead hand of political correctness, stands a good chance of succeeding.

In the course of his mercurial rise to national prominence, Senator Bernard Sanders has diligently affixed the adjective “democratic” to the “socialism” that is the name of his desire for America. Unlike the semi-educated “millennials”and historical amnesiacs who now flock to him, he is old enough and smart enough to recall such monstrosities as Germany’s “National Socialism,” the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (and its numerous Eastern European satellites), and — lest we forget — the Oceania of Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, where Ingsoc, (Newspeak for English socialism) is the political ideology of totalitarianism. With that single adjective, Sanders seems to align himself (but only up to a point) with such estimable figures as Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, who founded Dissent magazine in 1954 primarily to declare their severing of ties to Bolshevism. They also made, in Howe’s words, “the indissoluble connection between democracy and socialism a crux of our thought.”

If, however, the connection is really indissoluble, why did Howe, and why does Sanders, find it necessary, compulsively, always to insert the qualifier “democratic”? Does this not suggest that socialism is inherently undemocratic? At least the socialist George Orwell recognized that in societies like the Russia and China of his day, where there is no private property and therefore no separate economic power, the ruling class looks upon political power as its essential and exclusive end; in a thoroughly socialist society, all jobs come under the direct control of political authorities. Orwell understood that a free market is the necessary, although not sufficient, condition of a free society. But Senator Sanders gives no indication that he comprehends how a free market keeps the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority and thus severely limits the coercive power of the state. (What Sanders does understand very well is that, to quote Orwell himself: “The mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist. . .” )

Railing against corporations that leave America to relocate to another country is a winning tactic. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has fully endorsed this strategy during his stump speeches. When speaking about American business expats, he recently told supporters at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, “You can tell them to go f*** themselves.”

Many economic factors, stretching from labor costs to regulatory burdens to foreign demand, have led U.S. companies to move some or all of their operations out of America. But one of the main causes, especially when it comes to relocating a corporation’s headquarters abroad, is America’s internationally uncompetitive corporate-tax system.

The fault lies with the federal government, not corporate managers fulfilling their legal duties. Despite Trump’s rather heated rhetoric, his own tax plan shows that he fully understands this cause when he is not tossing applause lines to his supporters.

America’s combined federal and average state corporate-tax rate of 39 percent is the highest in the developed world. But it was not always this way. America missed the global party when it came to lowering corporate tax rates.

Since 1988, the average corporate-tax rate for 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries has fallen from 44 percent to 25 percent. Over that time, the U.S. rate actually increased. Even the Nordic countries that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders so admires have lower corporate-tax rates than America does. Finland has a corporate tax rate of 20 percent, Sweden’s is 22 percent, and Denmark’s is 24 percent.

American companies also have to pay federal taxes on the income that they earn overseas if they bring that money back to America. This is the case even though these earnings were already taxed by another country. Besides the United States, only five other OECD countries tax corporate income earned outside their borders, down from 19 in the 1990s.