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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsKurt Eichenwald's new Twitter thread re:POtuS' past is stunning. What a reporter.
Via threadreader:
I have known Donald Trump since 1987. Like everyone else who knows him well, before he became a politician, I know he is liar, a narcissist, and eventually I knew he was mentally ill. At that time, he professed to be a democrat. This had nothing to do with politics....
2...so, how long did it take to conclude all this about Trump? Three phone calls for everything but the mental illness. That took three years. But let's talk about those four experiences. About October 7, 1987, I began working on a tryout as a reporter at the New York Times....
3...in the business section. My first story was about Trump filing with the SEC to buy more of than 5% of the stock in Alexander's Dept Store. I am wrong on the date - this call was October 1, 1987. I called Trump Corp to ask a question of spokesman. Trump himself picked up....
4....I identified myself and the first words out of his mouth were, "Oh, Kurt, I love your stuff." That surprised me, since I had never written anything for him to love. But I figured this was a business guy sucking up to a Times reporter. I asked him some questions, and he....
5...asked me to go on background. He began to wax on about the prospects of Alexanders, how mismanaged it was, how he could save it. He talked about how strong the stock market was, how he believed that Alexnaders was missing out on this continued strength and that he wanted....
6...to load up on Alexanders shares partly because of that. He then told me to identify him as an analyst to explain something about his intent. I made the huge error of doing so. Problem of first day at work. I was later told, no one at the NYT allowed Trump to state....
7...something in the paper anonymously because when he asked, it was his sign he was about to lie.
A week later, my phone rings. It's Trump. "Kurt, did you see that article about me in the metro section today?" I hadn't but I had the paper next to me, and began looking for it...
8...it was on the front. It was a glowing article about Trump by a reporter named Fox Butterfield. Before we were able to discuss anything else, for his second sentence, Trump said, "Fox Butterfield is the greatest reporter in America." He then went on and on about how this....
9...story really captured who he is, and bragged about himself in a way that seemed bizarre. I couldn't understand why he had called me. I was just some reporter on a try out. And it was clear, he was behaving like a kindergartner showing daddy his crayon picture. He wanted....
10...me to reiterate how great he was, he kept asking, "Don't you think that really captures who I am? I do. He really knows me." I was not sure what to say, but I figured I would take this opportunity to do some real reporting. After five minutes of his spiel about how great....
11...he is, I said, "I was wondering about the Alexander's buy..." and he said, "Ok, well, gotta go.." and hung up. It would prove to be the strangest call of my career.
A week later, the stock market crashed, losing more than 20% of its value in a single day. Work went into....
12...overload. One day about a week in, an article appeared in the New York Post. Trump proclaimed that, he was so great, he had known the crash was coming and had already sold all of his stock. I found out he had called the Wall Street Journal and another reporter at the NYT....
13...to say this. None of them would print it because...even if it was true...who cares? But no one believed it was true.
I KNEW it was false. He had been buying up Alexander's stock. There was no new SEC filing (and there never would be) showing he had been selling his shares..
14...I couldn't understand it. Why would this man be calling around to brag how smart he was by claiming he did something that was provably false? I decided, this was an interesting story. I went to the deputy editor of the business section and spelled out what I knew....
15...and said it would be an interesting story that Trump was purposely calling people to pretend brilliance in a lie. The editor did not even look up from his computer and said the words I remember to this day: "Dog bits man. Donald Trump lies." In other words, everyone in...
16...the financial world KNEW Trump was a pathological liar, in 1987. Proving it was like proving the sun rose in the morning. I went back to work.
As for the mental illness...the story of how I concluded that I wrote in July 2016. Why? Because one of his execs told me:
17...so why am I saying all of this? Because lots of people - particularly Cult45 - think these portrayals of Trump as a disturbed liar are new. No, this is stuff that people who have covered him have known for decades. Look at the people who go on TV to discuss him. Many have...
18...worked with him. Many have covered him, know him as "Donald." We knew he was a liar and unbalanced when he was a democrat, when he was a reform party, when he was a Republican. Our position never changed. We did not engage in situational ethics....
19...an end point. A person who did business with Trump over the years told me in 2016, "If you asked him, Donald would tell you I'm his best friend." This struck me as odd, so I said, "And what would you say HE is?" A pause, then the man replied: "A clinical sociopath."
end
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1084539186571558914.html
blue neen
(12,335 posts)Why did they choose to conceal that from us in the runup to the 2016 election?
dhill926
(16,388 posts)this shit goes so deep...
blue neen
(12,335 posts)That was more important to them than the possible destruction of our country.
Mosby
(16,417 posts)Probably the 64 Billion Dollar Question.
PSPS
(13,641 posts)D_Master81
(1,823 posts)the "media" like most just underestimated the guy. They were making a killing off the ratings they got from him and I think they just assumed that Hillary would win and then things would go back to normal. Well S.O.B. wouldnt you know the guy ended up winning.
UpInArms
(51,291 posts)It was a small world back then ... there were real players in the market ... and then there was tRump ...
We all knew him as a loser ... every piece of property that he touched became a dog ... he was the literal worst in the business ... a joke ... when a property hit the market, we all looked at whose it was ... it the Dotard had had anything to do with it ... we shook our heads ... laughed ... and walked away
Sneederbunk
(14,319 posts)madaboutharry
(40,245 posts)to the building and construction business also knew this. Store owners, sales people, suppliers, contractors, sub-contractors...you name it. They all knew he was a dead beat, a liar, and a sociopath.
demtenjeep
(31,997 posts)or did they try and the media did not do their jobs?
madaboutharry
(40,245 posts)They were on television talking about how they were cheated. Trump voters didnt care.
MousePlayingDaffodil
(748 posts)Sorry, but knowing that Donald Trump is mentally ill isn't that hard a lift. Nor does it requires that one have any personal interaction with him.
Anyone who has had intimate personal experience with a malignant narcissist understands what Trump is.
catbyte
(34,542 posts)So everybody knew he was a crook, a liar, and a cheat. Why didn't they excoriate him for it? They treated him with kid gloves, like some joke. Sure, he was an entertaining buffoon and a caricature, but look where that got us. A lot of people have a lot to answer for.
dsc
(52,173 posts)how many stories did we have written about how corrupt Hillary was, those stories never seemed to get old no matter how may of them were written or how utterly wrong they were. Yet I don't recall a single solitary story about this during Trump's entire career as a businessman.
SammyWinstonJack
(44,130 posts)FakeNoose
(32,908 posts)I also believe Tony Schwartz, the true author of "The Art of the Deal."
This has been posted before on DU but in case you missed it: The New Yorker published an awesome article by Jane Mayer on July 25, 2016 entitled "Donald Trump's Ghostwriter Tells All."
Here's the link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all
It's a long read but definitely worth the time if you haven't seen this! Tony Schwartz couldn't talk about his time with Trump until a 25 year non-disclosure agreement expired, just before the election. He was finally able to open up, and this article was his first retelling. Schwartz describes Trump to a T, talking about his lack of moral character, constant lying, inability to focus for longer than 5 minutes, inability or unwillingness to read anything, etc. Could Schwartz have realized that Trump would become a Russian agent subservient to Putin? Probably not, but all of the character flaws that we're familiar with now were already part of his personality in the early 1980's.
Jane Mayer wrote this interview/article about Tony Schwartz right around the same time her book came out, "Dark Money."