Got fed up. Wrote to NBC's Phil Griffin and Andy Lack about MSNBC grotesqueries

By calimary

Let me know what you think. Address included at the top here, in case you want to use it for your own letter.

Phil Griffin
NBCUniversal
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112

Dear Mr. Griffin –

Longtime loyal MSNBC viewer here. Demographically: female, white, 64, college grad, wife/mother, news/politics junkie, retired news anchor/reporter, lifelong liberal Democrat, and I vote! Honored to be a member of your loyal viewership that’s lifted MSNBC to #1 in cable news in prime time, thanks to two true gems - Maddow and O’Donnell!

First: THANK YOU for relieving us of Greta Van Susteren. I wrote you months ago to point out that such a signature Fox News name DOES NOT BELONG on a network like MSNBC. Her ratings failure proved my point. PLEASE understand your audience better. We’re home at MSNBC precisely BECAUSE it does not feature programming or on-air talent like what you’d find at Fox News. If we wanted that presentation, we’d already be watching over there.

2) WHY did you force Megyn Kelly on NBC? The ratings already prove that’s another fail. She reads ice-cold on camera. She does not, and will not, appeal at any network whose audience isn’t predominately male, old, white, conservative, and horny. Move her over to MSNBC at your peril. There are far better and smarter ways to spend $17+ million/year.

3) WHY is the #1 BEST interviewer in cable news being squandered on weekend mornings? Joy Reid deserves and has earned massively better exposure, like a Monday-through-Friday show.

4) WHY do Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle deserve so much Monday-through-Friday exposure? There are THREE shows between those two people alone. You really don’t have any other available talent? Are you planning to change the name of MSNBC into the Velshi/Ruhle network?

5) WHY is MSNBC being turned into a whites-only club? You gave up a Tamron Hall for the Alpha blonde from Fox News??? While the excellent Craig Melvin is reduced to a mere fill-in, and the brilliant Joy Reid languishes on the weekends?

6) WHY would you even consider the smug, arrogant, and obnoxious Hugh Hewitt for ANY exposure on MSNBC??? WHY does ANY conservative merit a show on MSNBC in the first place??? Do you just have a thing for a bad fit? Do you buy your suits that way?

I represent your largest and most loyal constituency. WHY do you make programming choices like you have? Unless you’re a mole for CNN (or worse, Fox)?

PLEASE consider the constituency you have, which is THE reason why MSNBC now reigns in cable news. If you continue to alienate us with your bad hires and programming decisions, you can count on legions of us finding new homes for our loyalty.

I was right about Greta. I’m right about this, too.

Signed, and CC'd to Andrew Lack

Chris Christie’s Tutorial In Hubris

By Frank Bruni  JULY 4, 2017

We can scoff and sneer at those images of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on his beachfront imperium, or we can learn from them. As he took in the sun, he doled out a lesson, the same one that Donald Trump is delivering on a daily basis and in a grander fashion:

Beware the politician who doesn’t give a damn for decorum. What he markets as irreverence can be something coarser and more perverse.

It can lead to ruin. Christie’s approval rating from New Jersey voters was just 15 percent — the lowest for any current governor in the country and the worst in his state’s history — before his weekend repose on what turned out to be quicksand. He could sink into single digits after this. Negative integers aren’t entirely out of the question.

I hope Trump is watching, but I have my doubts. The Christie family’s swimwear pageant isn’t the kind that he’s known to ogle. Plus, he surely turns the channel when the visage on the screen isn’t his own.

The stories of the disgraced New Jersey governor and the disgraceful American president overlap.

Christie was “Trump before Trump,” Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told The Washington Post’s Robert Costa in an article published late Monday. “He does what he wants to do, and his success can be traced to that. But there are consequences, of course, when you work that way.”

Steele could as easily have been talking about Trump, and when Costa referred to the “defiance that has both lifted and hobbled Christie’s political career,” he brought to mind Trump’s temperament and trajectory, whether he meant to or not.

The twins of tantrum, Christie and Trump had almost identical political appeals. They mocked propriety. They broke rules. They assertively peddled the impression that as happy as they were to make friends, they were even happier to make enemies, because that meant that they were fully in the fight.

In an era of resentment and anger, many voters thrilled to the spectacle. The problem with other politicians, these voters legitimately reasoned, was too much indulgence of vested interests and too cowardly an obeisance to convention. If you didn’t slaughter the sacred cows, you’d never get to the tastiest filet.

But Christie and Trump proved to be butchers of a more indiscriminate and self-serving sort, and both demonstrated that there’s a short leap from headstrong to hardheaded and from defiant to delusional. Bold nonconformity can be the self-indulgent egotist’s drag.

Yes, Christie called out fools in certain circumstances where they deserved it and steamrolled opponents who stood in the way of some plans that were wholly defensible. And he was seemingly immune to any of the subsequent caricatures of him as a bully.

But he was also deaf to inevitable and entirely fair questions about his behavior. As Nick Corasaniti noted in The Times this week, he was caught “using a state helicopter paid for by taxpayers to attend his son’s baseball game.” He let King Abdullah of Jordan treat him and his family to a $30,000 weekend in a posh hotel.

He was blind to how he would come across when, in his speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention, he took such a gaudy star turn that the party’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, was reduced to a cameo. Christie bucked traditional manners, all right. He bucked them all the way to jaw-dropping megalomania.

Make no mistake: For all their flamboyant pugnaciousness, the Christies and Trumps of the political world are chasing adulation every bit as much as their peers are — maybe more so. They’re just taking a deliberately muddier route, and if they don’t get there, they’re more likely to wear their failure as a badge of honor and to dig in with a destructive arrogance.

When Christie was asked whether, despite a shutdown of the state government, he would steal away to the manse on the shore that’s a perk of his office, he unabashedly answered yes.

“That’s just the way it goes,” he said. “Run for governor, and you can have a residence.”

Translation: I’m governor and you’re not. Where have we heard a formulation like that before?

Trump and Christie somehow decided that you have to govern by middle finger if you want to avoid governing by pinkie finger. But there’s a digit in between: a middle ground. It’s where real leadership and true effectiveness lie.

Christie’s disrepute and dashed ambitions confirm as much. So does the ongoing insult of Trump’s presidency. They show that if you embrace a politician who talks too frequently and proudly about not caring what anyone thinks, you’ll wind up in the clutch of a politician whose last refuge is not caring what anyone thinks. That’s a dangerous place to be.

Thomas L. Friedman is off today.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni) and join me on Facebook.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
 

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 5, 2017, on Page A19 of the New York Times edition with the headline: Chris Christie’s Tutorial In Hubris. Today's Paper|Subscribe

Declaration Of Disruption

By Peter Wehner  JULY 4, 2017

Credit Al Drago for The New York Times

ONE of the essential, if often unstated, job requirements of an American president is to provide stability, order and predictability in a world that tends toward chaos, disarray and entropy. When our political leaders ignore this — and certainly when they delight in disruption — the consequences can be severe. Stability is easy to take for granted, but impossible to live without.

Projecting clear convictions is important for preventing adversaries from misreading America’s intentions and will. Our allies also depend on our predictability and reassuring steadiness. Their actions in trade and economics, in alliances with other nations and in the military sphere are often influenced by how much they believe they can rely on American support.

Order and stability in the executive branch are also linked to the health of our system of government. Chaos in the West Wing can be crippling, as White House aides — in a constant state of uncertainty, distrustful of colleagues, fearful that they might be excoriated or fired — find it nearly impossible to do their jobs. This emanates throughout the entire federal government. Devoid of steadfast leadership, executive agencies easily become dysfunctional themselves.

Worse yet, if key pillars of our system, like our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, are denigrated by the president, they can be destabilized, and Americans’ trust in them can be undermined. Without a reliable chief executive, Congress, an inherently unruly institution, will also find it difficult to do its job, since our constitutional system relies on its various branches to constantly engage with one another in governing.

But that’s hardly the whole of it. Particularly in this social media era, a president who thrives on disruption and chaos is impossible to escape. Every shocking statement and act is given intense coverage. As a result, the president is omnipresent, the subject of endless coast-to-coast conversations among family and friends, never far from our thoughts. As Andrew Sullivan has observed, “A free society means being free of those who rule over you — to do the things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves — to exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene.”

A presidency characterized by pandemonium invades and infects that space, leaving people unsettled and on edge. And this, in turn, leads to greater polarization, to feelings of alienation and anger, to unrest and even to violence.

A spirit of instability in government will cause Americans to lose confidence in our public institutions. When citizens lose that basic faith in their government, it leads to corrosive cynicism and the acceptance of conspiracy theories. Movements and individuals once considered fringe become mainstream, while previously responsible figures decamp to the fever swamps. One result is that the informal and unwritten rules of political and human interaction, which are at the core of civilization, are undone. There is such a thing as democratic etiquette; when it is lost, the common assumptions that allow for compromise and progress erode.

In short, chaotic leadership can inflict real trauma on political and civic culture.

All of which brings us to Donald Trump, arguably the most disruptive and transgressive president in American history. He thrives on creating turbulence in every conceivable sphere. The blast radius of his tumultuous acts and chaotic temperament is vast.

Mr. Trump acts as if order is easy to achieve and needs to be overturned while disruption and disorder are what we need. But the opposite is true. “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour,” Edmund Burke wrote, “than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”

Mr. Trump and his supporters don’t seem to agree, or don’t seem to care. And here’s the truly worrisome thing: The disruption is only going to increase, both because he’s facing criticism that seems to trigger him psychologically and because his theory of management involves the cultivation of chaos. He has shown throughout his life a defiant refusal to be disciplined. His disordered personality thrives on mayhem and upheaval, on vicious personal attacks and ceaseless conflict. As we’re seeing, his malignant character is emboldening some, while it’s causing others — the Republican leadership comes to mind — to briefly speak out (at best) before returning to silence and acquiescence. The effect on the rest of us? We cannot help losing our capacity to be shocked and alarmed.

We have as president the closest thing to a nihilist in our history — a man who believes in little or nothing, who has the impulse to burn down rather than to build up. When the president eventually faces a genuine crisis, his ignorance and inflammatory instincts will make everything worse.

Republican voters and politicians rallied around Mr. Trump in 2016, believing he was anti-establishment when in fact he was anti-order. He turns out to be an institutional arsonist. It is an irony of American history that the Republican Party, which has historically valued order and institutions, has become the conduit of chaos.

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the previous three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. 

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 4, 2017, on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Our Disrupted Republic. Today's Paper|Subscribe

Jill Stein's latest victory lap demonstrates she was in favor of Trump the entire time.

By DanTex

Apparently there are still some that don't understand what the Green Party's purpose is. So let me explain.

There are two reasons, only two, that people run for federal office under the Green Party. The first is personal ego and enrichment (and free trips to Russia). The second is to help Republicans defeat Democrats. That's it.

It never has anything to do with policy. Or with giving voters another "choice". The Green Party isn't a political choice any more than a lottery ticket is a retirement plan. And the people selling you the Green Party know that, just like the ones selling you lottery tickets do. Actually that's not fair to lottery tickets. Some people have won the lottery. But in 20+ years of trying, no Green has come anywhere close to winning a house or senate seat or a single electoral vote. Blowing your money on lottery tickets is more rational than blowing your vote on the Green Party.

With Jill Stein, if she actually believed any of her own bullshit, she would be utterly devastated by the election. First, she gets about 1% of the vote. Second, the guy who wins proceeds to do the opposite of everything in the Green Platform. The Greens like to bash Dems about how bad the Dems did, but the Dems got 40 times as many votes in November. Also the Dems hold infinitely more congressional seats than the Green party ever has and ever will.

But, facing this epic defeat and humiliating showing, Stein is (still) out bragging about the "critical role" she played. This is a straightforward admission that her objective all along was not President Stein, but President Trump, and that she feels her siphoning away votes from Dems and convincing gullible alt-leftists that Trump was the lesser evil was critical to Trump's victory.

She wanted Trump to win, she helped Trump win, and now she's happy about it. She's a Trump ally, period.

Republicans Have Done Nothing For The American People Since Lincoln

Facing growing opposition from members of his own party, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has delayed the vote on the Republicans' healthcare bill until after Congress's 4 July recess.

The schedule change is another setback for Donald Trump's effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act – which he has repeatedly referred to as "dead".

Mr Trump told reporters on Wednesday that "healthcare is working along very well...we're gonna have a big surprise. We have a great healthcare package." CBO says Senate bill will cause 22m Americans to lose health insurance.

When asked what that meant, Mr Trump responded "we're going to have a great, great surprise." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is reportedly trying to revise the healthcare bill by Friday.

Full story: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/republicans-mitch-mcconnell-healthcare-suspend-vote-senate-obamacare-a7811121.html

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams pleads guilty in his federal corruption trial

By Jeremy Roebuck, Staff Writer

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams abruptly pleaded guilty Thursday, nearly two weeks into a federal bribery trial that dragged embarrassing details about his messy personal life and financial struggles out into open court.

Williams will resign as the city’s top prosecutor as part of a deal under which he pleaded guilty to one count related to accepting a bribe from Bucks County businessman Mohammad Ali.

Asked by U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond whether he intended to follow through with his resignation, Williams choked up and answered, “humbly, sincerely and effective immediately.”

Diamond said he wanted Williams’ resignation letter couriered to Mayor Kenny’s office as soon as the hearing was over.

Williams remained somber looking throughout the guilty plea hearing.

“I’m just very sorry for all of this, your honor,” he said.

At a followup hearing to determine whether Williams should be jailed immediately, defense attorney Thomas F. Burke argued the disgraced prosecutor was not a flight risk.

“He has no means as the court can see to go anywhere. He has no support. He’s deeply in debt and he doesn’t even have a car,” Burke said.

Taking the witness stand to plead with a judge not to send him directly to prison before sentencing, tears welled up in Williams’ eyes while discussing his daughters.

He acknowledged he was broke, saying he had “probably about $150 to $200” in his bank account.

In addition to accepting that he could face a maximum 5 year term when he is sentenced Oct. 24, Williams agreed to forfeit $64,878.22

While the 28 remaining counts against Williams were dismissed, he “admits that he committed all of the conduct in those 29 counts,”  Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Zauzmer said.

“Williams took benefits repeatedly from Mr. Ali knowing that those benefits were offered – at least in part – to influence him to take official actions,”  said Zauzmer.

Williams notified prosecutors he wanted to take the plea deal at 1 a.m.Thursday, said Zauzmer.

Sources close to the case say the deal is similar to one Williams was offered – and turned down – one day before his indictment earlier this year on 29 corruption-related counts including bribery, extortion and honest services fraud.

Prior to his admission, prosecutors and Williams’ defense lawyers – Thomas F. Burke and Trevan Borum – spent more than an hour huddled in quiet conversation in the courtroom, while the district attorney was nowhere to be seen.

His decision came after weeks of damaging testimony in which government witnesses characterized him a shameless beggar who repeatedly turned to the money of others to fund a lifestyle he couldn’t afford.

Two wealthy businessmen testified that they had showered the district attorney with gifts of all-expenses-paid travel, luxury goods and even cash in anticipation of the legal favors they might need from him.

And prosecutors had alleged that Williams delivered for them – writing letters to throw his weight into their legal problems and promising in one instance to intervene in a drug case brought by his office.

Additionally, Williams was accused of misspending thousands of dollars from his campaign fund on memberships to exclusive Philadelphia social clubs, misusing city vehicles as if they were his own and misappropriating money intended to fund his mother’s nursing home care.

Read a recap of Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams’ trial with our day-by-day updates and learn more with our explainer on everything you need to know about the case.

Read more by Jeremy Roebuck

Donald Trump: The Art Of The Fight

By John Dean

When Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey he made the worst mistake of his young presidency, because the ham-fisted manner in which he handled it resulted in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—who is filling in for the recused Attorney General—having no choice but to select a special counsel to continue the Justice Department’s investigation into the hacking of the 2016 presidential election by the Russians. Rosenstein, of course, selected an unusually well-qualified investigator/prosecutor, Robert Mueller, the former head of the FBI and former U.S. Attorney for San Francisco. This, in turn, has annoyed Trump to no end. He clearly feels the pressure of being under investigation by someone with both the resources and skills to uncover any wrongdoing by him or his family. Trump’s reaction suggests Mueller may find that the president is not an honest businessman, even if he does not find direct collusion by Trump himself with the Russians.

Much of Donald Trump’s life has involved being in fights—with wives, business partners, vendors, tenants, the news media, and countless others. Trump the politician expanded his fights to include political opponents, and now as president, he is in a fight with the federal intelligence community, the Washington press corps, the “deep state” (otherwise known as career government bureaucrats) and Democrats, along with a few Republicans and even some of his staff. But what is shaping up as the biggest fight of his life, because it could end his presidency and send his family to jail (if he is unable to pardon them), is the investigation (and potential prosecutions emanating from it) being undertaken by Special Counsel Mueller.

For anyone who has observed Trump in a fight—which was once to be limited to those living in New York City who read the tabloids where they were regularly front-page features but he is now on the world stage so we are all his audience, like it or not—the pattern of these brawls is very consistent. While Trump has done many deals, it seems he has done more fights, and rather than writing about deals he should have done a book titled The Art of the Fight.

Background as a Fighter

Trump’s biographers have most all noted that he displayed a pugnacious nature from an early age, but his adult mentor (and role model) in all conflicts, from squabbles to domestic disputes to business survival battles, was the infamous New York City attorney Roy Cohn. Before becoming the New York City fixer of choice, Cohn, the son of a prominent New York judge, displayed his legal acumen by graduating from law school at twenty years of age, quickly rising in the ranks of the U.S. Attorney’s office, and developing close ties to New York’s most important crime families. He became a national figure as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation of the U.S. Senate employing smear tactics that gave the world “McCarthyism.”

According to legend, Trump and Cohn met shortly after Cohn had published an op-ed in the form of a letter to Spiro Agnew in The New York Times on October 15, 1973 castigating the former vice president for pleading guilty to tax evasion, a charge Cohn had beaten on three occasions. “How could a man who made courage a household word lose his? How could one of this decade’s shrewdest leaders make a dumb mistake such as you did in quitting and accepting a criminal conviction?” Cohn asked. No more had Cohn’s letter been published than Trump encountered him at a New York night spot of the time, and Trump explained that he and his father were being sued by the Department of Justice for discrimination in one of their housing projects. Cohn encouraged the young businessman to fight the charges, and a friendship was born.

Watching Cohn, Donald Trump soon embraced his never surrender, always counterattack, philosophy, not to mention tactics not sanctioned by the Queensberry rules. Never was there a more vicious and dirty a fighter than Roy Cohn. Never was there a worse role model for anyone, not to mention a President of the United States.

Trump Tactics

Donald Trump’s tactics are conspicuous to anyone who follows his actions, and can be reduced to two overriding activities: (1) He lies consistently and persistently; (2) he cheats whenever the opportunity presents itself to do so, and (3) he tries to intimidate everyone with whom he deals. The lawsuits filed by the former students of Trump University revealed these tactics at work, where he lured them into taking courses, often beyond their means, with false statements and promises, then gave them hokum taught by people with no credentials whatsoever, constantly pushing them to take more expensive courses. All one need to do is read a few of the depositions of the students who joined in the action. Trump hires lawyers who act more like thugs than litigators to abuse those who filed against him, and forced several out of the case for they were not up for the expense of the endless fight, not to mention the nasty press leaks spread by team Trump. When Trump was elected this litigation was ready to go to trial. It was a class action RICO case accusing Trump of criminal fraud, albeit in a civil action. President-elect Trump broke his golden rule of fighting when he surrendered—settling the cases for $25 million.

Someone will undoubtedly fill a book with Trump’s business tactics, for they are found in the 3,500 lawsuits in which he has engaged. Regularly, he filed actions knowing he could not win, thus simply to intimidate his opponent. This was a favored tactic when he thought someone had defamed him by saying something he did not want said. As a public figure, who has had case after case dismissed, he knows that public people have a high standard to meet. He also understood that even answering a complaint and getting the case dismissed by the targeted defendant was expensive, so he could inflict pain even if he could not win the case. Undoubtedly some of his current frustration as president is that he cannot threaten such lawsuits at a time he is probably getting more negative press coverage than at any time in his career.

We watched Trump’s fight tactics during both the Republican primary, and the general election, campaigns. The most dominant memory most people have of his campaigning was the lying, and efforts to belittle his opponents: “Low energy Jeb,” “Little Marko,” “Lyin’ Ted,” and “Crooked Hillary.” Because Trump creates constant conflict, he is a train wreck happening, the news media has great difficulty turning away from him. He is the very definition of modern entertainment. As was true during the campaigns, it is with his presidency. Because the man cannot be shamed, and he has the largest ego ever to enter the Oval Office, all this plays in his favor—so far. But how will Trump’s fight tactics play as his campaign is being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller?

Trump in the Crosshairs of a Federal Investigation

As President of the United States, under current Department of Justice policy, Donald Trump cannot be indicted so long as he holds the office, or unless the U.S. Supreme Court rules otherwise. But make no mistake, he and his campaign to win the office are under investigation which started in July 2016, when the FBI learned the Russia government was hacking the presidential election to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump. Presidential immunity is not retroactive, thus making his campaign and his personal activities susceptible to investigation and prosecution.

The investigation that Special Counsel Mueller has taken charge of is the FBI inquiry that commenced in July 2016, not activities President Trump undertook in May 2017 in firing former FBI Director Comey, although that too is expressly included in the charter issued by the Deputy Attorney General in establishing the inquiry. Because it was issued notwithstanding the fact that it is the policy of the Department to not indict a sitting president, there is no policy not to investigate a sitting president. So, Trump is clearly subject to the special counsel inquiry—a fact of which he appears acutely aware, and has commenced fighting.

Trump is employing his standard fight tactics: lying, cheating, and seeking to intimidate. For example: He has lied about his dealing with former director Comey, not to mention tried to intimidate this potential witness against him by employing standard Trump name-calling is accusing Comey of “showboating,” concocting a false narrative via Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein about Comey’s Hillary Clinton email investigation as the reason for dismissal when later admitting to newsman Lester Holt that he fired Comey because he refused to back off the investigation of the campaign and Michael Flynn; and most recently admitting that, contrary to claiming he had tapes of conversations with Comey, he had no such tapes. One could fill pages with examples. But the point has been made and the issue is how these tactics will play with Mueller.

In business and politics, and now in government, Trump is operating at about the level of a precocious eight grader. The games he has played in the past are not going to work in the league he now finds himself. Mueller and Company are sophisticated and experienced federal prosecutors who have dealt with miscreants far more sophisticated and clever than Donald Trump. In fact, in the end Trump’s tactics, which are obvious and recorded, will be used against him. His lawyers seem unable to stop him, but they have surely told him.

Today, we are watching a very frightened Donald Trump. He knows he is in a fight way above his league, but he does not know how to play above that league. Nor does he understand Washington and the presidency sufficiently well to know how to use it—and keeping his disapproval rating at 60 percent is not effectively using the high office he holds.

Undoubtedly, Trump has never written the art of the fight, because he does not know how to fight fairly, nor well. With Special Counsel Mueller on his case there is more chance he will lose in 2020 than win reelection, unless Trump discovers that the way these fights are won is with the truth, for with the truth he might have a chance to survive. Without it, he will be a one term president, if he is lucky.

John Dean

John W. Dean, a Justia columnist, is a former counsel to the president.

Samoa Joe Vs Brock Lesnar WWE Raw 26 June 2017

T r u m p ’ s L i e s

By DAVID LEONHARDT and STUART A. THOMPSON JUNE 23, 2017

Many Americans have become accustomed to Trump’s lies. But as regular as they have become, the country should not allow itself to become numb to them. So we have catalogued nearly every outright lie he has told publicly since taking the oath of office.

Jan. 21 “I wasn't a fan of Iraq. I didn't want to go into Iraq.” (He was for an invasion before he was against it.)Jan. 21 “A reporter for Time magazine — and I have been on their cover 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine.” (Trump was on the cover 11 times and Nixon appeared 55 times.)Jan. 23 “Between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused me to lose the popular vote.” (There's no evidence of illegal voting.)Jan. 25 “Now, the audience was the biggest ever. But this crowd was massive. Look how far back it goes. This crowd was massive.” (Official aerial photos show Obama's 2009 inauguration was much more heavily attended.)Jan. 25 “Take a look at the Pew reports (which show voter fraud.)” (The report never mentioned voter fraud.)Jan. 25 “You had millions of people that now aren't insured anymore.” (The real number is less than 1 million, according to the Urban Institute.)Jan. 25 “So, look, when President Obama was there two weeks ago making a speech, very nice speech. Two people were shot and killed during his speech. You can't have that.” (There were no gun homicide victims in Chicago that day.)Jan. 26 “We've taken in tens of thousands of people. We know nothing about them. They can say they vet them. They didn't vet them. They have no papers. How can you vet somebody when you don't know anything about them and you have no papers? How do you vet them? You can't.” (Vetting lasts up to two years.)Jan. 26 “I cut off hundreds of millions of dollars off one particular plane, hundreds of millions of dollars in a short period of time. It wasn't like I spent, like, weeks, hours, less than hours, and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars. And the plane's going to be better.” (Most of the cuts were already planned.)Jan. 28 “The coverage about me in the @nytimes and the @washingtonpost has been so false and angry that the Times actually apologized to its dwindling subscribers and readers.” (It never apologized.)Jan. 29 “The Cuban-Americans, I got 84 percent of that vote.” (There is no support for this.)Jan. 30 “Only 109 people out of 325,000 were detained and held for questioning. Big problems at airports were caused by Delta computer outage.” (At least 746 people were detained and processed, and the Delta outage happened two days later.)Feb. 3 “Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters are proving the point of the millions of people who voted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” (There is no evidence of paid protesters.)Feb. 4 “After being forced to apologize for its bad and inaccurate coverage of me after winning the election, the FAKE NEWS @nytimes is still lost!” (It never apologized.)Feb. 5 “We had 109 people out of hundreds of thousands of travelers and all we did was vet those people very, very carefully.” (About 60,000 people were affected.)Feb. 6 “I have already saved more than $700 million when I got involved in the negotiation on the F-35.” (Much of the price drop was projected before Trump took office.)Feb. 6 “It's gotten to a point where it is not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it.” (Terrorism has been reported on, often in detail.)Feb. 6 “The failing @nytimes was forced to apologize to its subscribers for the poor reporting it did on my election win. Now they are worse!” (It didn't apologize.)Feb. 6 “And the previous administration allowed it to happen because we shouldn't have been in Iraq, but we shouldn't have gotten out the way we got out. It created a vacuum, ISIS was formed.” (The group’s origins date to 2004.)Feb. 7 “And yet the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years, right? Did you know that? Forty-seven years.” (It was higher in the 1980s and '90s.)Feb. 7 “I saved more than $600 million. I got involved in negotiation on a fighter jet, the F-35.” (The Defense Department projected this price drop before Trump took office.)Feb. 9 “Chris Cuomo, in his interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave ‘service’ in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!” (It was part of Cuomo's first question.)Feb. 9 Sen. Richard Blumenthal “now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?” (The Gorsuch comments were later corroborated.)Feb. 10 “I don’t know about it. I haven’t seen it. What report is that?” (Trump knew about Flynn's actions for weeks.)Feb. 12 “Just leaving Florida. Big crowds of enthusiastic supporters lining the road that the FAKE NEWS media refuses to mention. Very dishonest!” (The media did cover it.)Feb. 16 “We got 306 because people came out and voted like they've never seen before so that's the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan.” (George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all won bigger margins in the Electoral College.)Feb. 16 “That’s the other thing that was wrong with the travel ban. You had Delta with a massive problem with their computer system at the airports.” (Delta's problems happened two days later.)Feb. 16 “Walmart announced it will create 10,000 jobs in the United States just this year because of our various plans and initiatives.” (The jobs are a result of its investment plans announced in October 2016.)Feb. 16 “When WikiLeaks, which I had nothing to do with, comes out and happens to give, they’re not giving classified information.” (Not always. They have released classified information in the past.)Feb. 16 “We had a very smooth rollout of the travel ban. But we had a bad court. Got a bad decision.” (The rollout was chaotic.)Feb. 16 “They’re giving stuff — what was said at an office about Hillary cheating on the debates. Which, by the way, nobody mentions. Nobody mentions that Hillary received the questions to the debates.” (It was widely covered.)Feb. 18 “And there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing.” (Refugees receive multiple background checks, taking up to two years.)Feb. 18 “You look at what's happening in Germany, you look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” (Trump implied there was a terror attack in Sweden, but there was no such attack.)Feb. 24 “By the way, you folks are in here — this place is packed, there are lines that go back six blocks.” (There was no evidence of long lines.)Feb. 24 “ICE came and endorsed me.” (Only its union did.)Feb. 24 “Obamacare covers very few people — and remember, deduct from the number all of the people that had great health care that they loved that was taken away from them — it was taken away from them.” (Obamacare increased coverage by a net of about 20 million.)Feb. 27 “Since Obamacare went into effect, nearly half of the insurers are stopped and have stopped from participating in the Obamacare exchanges.” (Many fewer pulled out.)Feb. 27 “On one plane, on a small order of one plane, I saved $725 million. And I would say I devoted about, if I added it up, all those calls, probably about an hour. So I think that might be my highest and best use.” (Much of the price cut was already projected.)Feb. 28 “And now, based on our very strong and frank discussions, they are beginning to do just that.” (NATO countries agreed to meet defense spending requirements in 2014.)Feb. 28 “The E.P.A.’s regulators were putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands.” (There's no evidence that the Waters of the United States rule caused severe job losses.)Feb. 28 “We have begun to drain the swamp of government corruption by imposing a five-year ban on lobbying by executive branch officials.” (They can't lobby their former agency but can still become lobbyists.)March 3 “It is so pathetic that the Dems have still not approved my full Cabinet.” (Paperwork for the last two candidates was still not submitted to the Senate.)March 4 “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” (There's no evidence of a wiretap.)March 4 “How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” (There's no evidence of a wiretap.)March 7 “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!” (113 of them were released by President George W. Bush.)March 13 “I saved a lot of money on those jets, didn't I? Did I do a good job? More than $725 million on them.” (Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)March 13 “First of all, it covers very few people.” (About 20 million people gained insurance under Obamacare.)March 15 “On the airplanes, I saved $725 million. Probably took me a half an hour if you added up all of the times.” (Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)March 17 “I was in Tennessee — I was just telling the folks — and half of the state has no insurance company, and the other half is going to lose the insurance company.” (There's at least one insurer in every Tennessee county.)March 20 “With just one negotiation on one set of airplanes, I saved the taxpayers of our country over $700 million.” (Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)March 21 “To save taxpayer dollars, I’ve already begun negotiating better contracts for the federal government — saving over $700 million on just one set of airplanes of which there are many sets.” (Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)March 22 “I make the statement, everyone goes crazy. The next day they have a massive riot, and death, and problems.” (Riots in Sweden broke out two days later and there were no deaths.)March 22 “NATO, obsolete, because it doesn’t cover terrorism. They fixed that.” (It has fought terrorism since the 1980s.)March 22 “Well, now, if you take a look at the votes, when I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong — in other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly and/or illegally. And they then vote. You have tremendous numbers of people.” (There's no evidence of widespread voter fraud.)March 29 “Remember when the failing @nytimes apologized to its subscribers, right after the election, because their coverage was so wrong. Now worse!” (It didn't apologize.)March 31 “We have a lot of plants going up now in Michigan that were never going to be there if I — if I didn’t win this election, those plants would never even think about going back. They were gone.” (These investments were already planned.)April 2 “And I was totally opposed to the war in the Middle East which I think finally has been proven, people tried very hard to say I wasn’t but you’ve seen that it is now improving.” (He was for an invasion before he was against it.)April 2 “Now, my last tweet — you know, the one that you are talking about, perhaps — was the one about being, in quotes, wiretapped, meaning surveilled. Guess what, it is turning out to be true.” (There is still no evidence.)April 5 “You have many states coming up where they’re going to have no insurance company. O.K.? It’s already happened in Tennessee. It’s happening in Kentucky. Tennessee only has half coverage. Half the state is gone. They left.” (Every marketplace region in Tennessee had at least one insurer.)April 6 “If you look at the kind of cost-cutting we’ve been able to achieve with the military and at the same time ordering vast amounts of equipment — saved hundreds of millions of dollars on airplanes, and really billions, because if you take that out over a period of years it’s many billions of dollars — I think we’ve had a tremendous success.” (Much of the price cuts were already projected.)April 11 “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late. I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve.” (He knew Steve Bannon since 2011.)April 12 “You can't do it faster, because they're obstructing. They're obstructionists. So I have people — hundreds of people that we're trying to get through. I mean you have — you see the backlog. We can't get them through.” (At this point, he had not nominated anyone for hundreds of positions.)April 12 “The New York Times said the word wiretapped in the headline of the first edition. Then they took it out of there fast when they realized.” (There were separate headlines for print and web, but neither were altered.)April 12 “The secretary general and I had a productive discussion about what more NATO can do in the fight against terrorism. I complained about that a long time ago and they made a change, and now they do fight terrorism.” (NATO has been engaged in counterterrorism efforts since the 1980s.)April 12 “Mosul was supposed to last for a week and now they’ve been fighting it for many months and so many more people died.” (The campaign was expected to take months.)April 16 “Someone should look into who paid for the small organized rallies yesterday. The election is over!” (There's no evidence of paid protesters.)April 18 “The fake media goes, ‘Donald Trump changed his stance on China.’ I haven’t changed my stance.” (He did.)April 21 “On 90 planes I saved $725 million. It's actually a little bit more than that, but it's $725 million.” (Much of the price cuts were already projected.)April 21 “When WikiLeaks came out … never heard of WikiLeaks, never heard of it.” (He criticized it as early as 2010.)April 27 “I want to help our miners while the Democrats are blocking their healthcare.” (The bill to extend health benefits for certain coal miners was introduced by a Democrat and was co-sponsored by mostly Democrats.)April 28 “The trade deficit with Mexico is close to $70 billion, even with Canada it’s $17 billion trade deficit with Canada.” (The U.S. had an $8.1 billion trade surplus, not deficit, with Canada in 2016.)April 28 “She's running against someone who's going to raise your taxes to the sky, destroy your health care, and he's for open borders — lots of crime.” (Those are not Jon Ossoff's positions.)April 28 “The F-35 fighter jet program — it was way over budget. I’ve saved $725 million plus, just by getting involved in the negotiation.” (Much of the price cuts were planned before Trump.)April 29 “They're incompetent, dishonest people who after an election had to apologize because they covered it, us, me, but all of us, they covered it so badly that they felt they were forced to apologize because their predictions were so bad.” (The Times did not apologize.)April 29 “As you know, I've been a big critic of China, and I've been talking about currency manipulation for a long time. But I have to tell you that during the election, number one, they stopped.” (China stopped years ago.)April 29 “I've already saved more than $725 million on a simple order of F-35 planes. I got involved in the negotiation.” (Much of the price cuts were planned before Trump.)April 29 “We're also getting NATO countries to finally step up and contribute their fair share. They've begun to increase their contributions by billions of dollars, but we are not going to be satisfied until everyone pays what they owe.” (The deal was struck in 2014.)April 29 “When they talk about currency manipulation, and I did say I would call China, if they were, a currency manipulator, early in my tenure. And then I get there. Number one, they — as soon as I got elected, they stopped.” (China stopped in 2014.)April 29 “I was negotiating to reduce the price of the big fighter jet contract, the F-35, which was totally out of control. I will save billions and billions and billions of dollars.” (Most of the cuts were planned before Trump.)April 29 “I think our side's been proven very strongly. And everybody's talking about it.” (There's still no evidence Trump's phones were tapped.)May 1 “Well, we are protecting pre-existing conditions. And it'll be every good — bit as good on pre-existing conditions as Obamacare.” (The bill weakens protections for people with pre-existing conditions.)May 1 “The F-35 fighter jet — I saved — I got involved in the negotiation. It's 2,500 jets. I negotiated for 90 planes, lot 10. I got $725 million off the price.” (Much of the price cuts were planned before Trump.)May 1 “First of all, since I started running, they haven't increased their — you know, they have not manipulated their currency. I think that was out of respect to me and the campaign.” (China stopped years ago.)May 2 “I love buying those planes at a reduced price. I have been really — I have cut billions — I have to tell you this, and they can check, right, Martha? I have cut billions and billions of dollars off plane contracts sitting here.” (Much of the cost cuts were planned before Trump.)May 4 “Number two, they’re actually not a currency [manipulator]. You know, since I’ve been talking about currency manipulation with respect to them and other countries, they stopped.” (China stopped years ago.)May 4 “We’re the highest-taxed nation in the world.” (We're not.)May 4 “Nobody cares about my tax return except for the reporters.” (Polls show most Americans do care.)May 8 “You know we’ve gotten billions of dollars more in NATO than we’re getting. All because of me.” (The deal was struck in 2014.)May 8 “But when I did his show, which by the way was very highly rated. It was high — highest rating. The highest rating he’s ever had.” (Colbert's “Late Show” debut had nearly two million more viewers.)May 8 “Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake media already knows — there is ‘no evidence’ of collusion w/ Russia and Trump.” (Clapper only said he wasn't aware of an investigation.)May 12 “Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election.” (The F.B.I. was investigating before the election.)May 12 “When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?” (Clapper said he wouldn't have been told of an investigation into collusion.)May 13 “I'm cutting the price of airplanes with Lockheed.” (The cost cuts were planned before he became president.)May 26 “Just arrived in Italy for the G7. Trip has been very successful. We made and saved the USA many billions of dollars and millions of jobs.” (He's referencing an arms deal that's not enacted and other apparent deals that weren't announced on the trip.)June 1 “China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can’t build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement. India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020.” (The agreement doesn’t allow or disallow building coal plants.)June 1 “I’ve just returned from a trip overseas where we concluded nearly $350 billion of military and economic development for the United States, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.” (Trump’s figures are inflated and premature.)June 4 “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!’” (The mayor was specifically talking about the enlarged police presence on the streets.)June 5 “The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.” (Trump signed this version of the travel ban, not the Justice Department.)June 21 “They all say it's 'nonbinding.' Like hell it's nonbinding.” (The Paris climate agreement is nonbinding — and Trump said so in his speech announcing the withdrawal.)June 21 “Right now, we are one of the highest-taxed nations in the world.” (We're not.)

Source: Quinnipiac

David Leonhardt is a New York Times columnist. Stuart A. Thompson is the graphics director for the Opinion section.

Sources: Politifact; Factcheck.org; The Washington Post Fact Checker; The Toronto Star

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html 

TRUMP FAMILY EMPIRE BEGAN WITH A WHORE HOUSE

By Jason Markusoff

October 13, 2016

Donald Trump’s grandfather opened this hotel during the Yukon gold rush, boasting ‘every delicacy in the market’ and ‘private rooms for ladies’

Just off the shores of Lake Bennett, enjoy the best swan and caribou meat you’ll find anywhere in these mountains, and probably better than anywhere in Canada, believe me. Many people from many tents are saying the whiskey is very, very, classy. And the ladies—they’ll make your head spin, and many other things. Those other tents and hotels serve horse meat, and it’s disgusting. If you want luxury as badly as you want gold, there is only one place, and only one name.

OK, this sort of language wasn’t in recorded Klondike Gold Rush texts from 1898, at least not from the proprietor of the New Arctic Restaurant and Hotel. But his grandson, Donald Trump, might not have been positioned to dazzle and sometimes terrify America with his boastful sales pitches were it not for Fred Trump and his plucky immigrant’s story, his tasty meals and other delicacies of the flesh, and the small fortune he made in the northern wilds of this country that now has a health care system the Republican presidential candidate says is ruinous, a country that eagerly welcomes the Syrian refugees he calls terror’s Trojan Horse.

Whether Donald Trump wins or loses with his presidential bid, a monument of sorts to his paternal grandfather’s three lucrative years in Yukon and the Canadian North will open along Lake Bennett next year—although that fabled surname won’t appear anywhere near it, in five meter high letters or otherwise.

Before explaining that, let’s go back to a time long before Trump Winery’s bottles were chilled at finer Trump Hotels the world over, to a place where Trumps themselves were in the messy business of cultivating, picking and crushing grapes. Friedrich Trump was born in 1869 in Kallstadt, Germany, in the heart of a western wine making region. Friedrich was no standout among his five siblings—he was too frail to work the family vineyard, says Gwenda Blair, the chief biographer of Trump and these boughs of his family tree. Friedrich’s father died when he was eight. His mother sent Friedrich, at 14, to become a barber’s apprentice. A couple of years later, as the military draft loomed and there wasn’t much hair to cut in his village, the 16 year old Friedrich cobbled together enough Deutschmarks to buy passage on a steamship to New York City.

Frederick Trump (Wikipedia)

The land of opportunity seized him quickly; Friedrich got hired by a barbershop within hours of arriving in Manhattan. Six years on, he grew weary of the living wage work. In 1891, Donald Trump’s grandfather would be first in the chain to dream and reach for something bigger.

Friedrich left his New York enclave of fellow Germans and took his savings across the land to Seattle, a booming resource and port city. He hung his shingle as Fred Trump at the Dairy Restaurant he’d opened in Seattle’s red-light district. In keeping with the local custom, the Dairy’s predecessor eatery advertised “private rooms for ladies”—1891-speak for prostitution—and it’s likely Trump didn’t end the practice, Blair writes in Trumps: Three Generations that Built an Empire. Shortly, his interest turned to gold; namely, the town of Monte Cristo, which was showing promise for gold and silver deposits, some 110 km east of Seattle. He invested in some land there, but also stuck with plying his hospitality trade for the men doing all the digging.

In the summer of 1897, a ship of grubby and suddenly wealthy prospectors arrived with news of a big gold strike in Canada’s remote northern reaches, near Dawson in the Yukon territory. By then, Trump was already on the hunt for those riches, showing some flashes of his family’s later business savvy—and at the same time his grandson’s blundering streak. Fred Trump had sent two miners north to lay claims, and before the gold-rush headlines hit Seattle’s newspapers, they’d already staked a $15 claim in the Trump name on Hunker Creek, not far from the first strike at Bonanza Creek. A day later, Trump’s associates profited by flipping the land for $400, Blair writes. Flipping was common in the gold rush days.

“It was uncertain whether they were two cents’ worth, let alone two million,” Yukon historian Michael Gates says. Had they held it, these Washington-state miners and Trump could have made vastly more than they did. Hunker Creek claims panned out—yep, that’s where the phrase comes from—as one of the most productive creeks in the gold rush.

It’s unclear whether word of that blown opportunity reached Trump the restaurateur. He was already saving money from his restaurant till to trek north himself. In early 1898, he sailed up the Pacific Coast with gear for the long hike through Yukon, though he “had no plans to mine himself,” Blair writes.

In 1900, the Arctic Hotel moved to Whitehorse. A year later Trump split town; his partner was jailed after a hotel orgy and jewelry theft. (Provincial Archives of Alberta)

Before the train, the gold rush routes were through the Alaska and Canadian mountains. White Pass, which Trump is believed to have taken, was dubbed Dead Horse Trail, the ground a “vile slush” of animal parts, the pass walls “stained dark red from the blood,” Blair writes. Pairing up with a fellow traveler named Ernest Levin, Trump set up a tent restaurant along the route, likely serving up flash-frozen horse meat, according to The Trumps. Then in May 1898, the German-American and his partner escaped the pass and reached the new town of Bennett, a collection of tents and men building Dawson-bound boats and awaiting the ice breakup. Trump and Levin bought lumber to erect a two-story building on Main Street. The New Arctic would feed the thousands of travelers and stranded folks alike, boasting an array of fine and non-equine meats, “Every delicacy in the market,” “Fresh oysters in every style,” and yes, private rooms for ladies.

“Mining the miners was the smart thing to do,” Blair tells Maclean’s. “Where was the money to be made? It was to be made out of the guys doing the hard work, not out of the ground.” Prospectors were lucky to strike any gold, and luckier to escape the Arctic with any wealth; one of the other famed names to rise from the Klondike rush was Alexander Pantages, who started with a theater in Dawson and would later launch a network that included Pantages theaters in Toronto and Winnipeg.

The Guggenheims would find post-rush bounty with a company that dredged Klondike rivers, but already had family riches that the Trumps had yet to amass.

In Bennett came a warning about Trump and women, more than a century before Donald’s brags about groping women would echo through a presidential campaign. A letter-writer in the Yukon Sun said single men would find at the New Arctic the best food in Bennett, but he warned “respectable women” away from staying there, “as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings and uttered, too, by the depraved of their own sex,” Blair’s book records. Donald Trump, for his part, told the New York Times that reports of prostitution at his granddad’s restaurant are “totally false,” though he was born 28 years after the Yukon entrepreneur’s death.

The Klondike rush had begun its decline by the time New Arctic began in Bennett, but a train close to completion all the way from the port at Skagway, Alaska, to Whitehorse would outright kill Bennett and its businesses. Trump and Levin set their restaurant’s frame on a raft toward Whitehorse so it could open in time for the White Pass & Yukon Route’s opening in summer 1900. With a wood-framed tent and a false facade, the Arctic Restaurant opened up across Front Street from the terminal. In this fledgling city, there was competition: the Hotel Grand and White Horse Hotel on the same block dwarfed the Trump eatery. Rivals advertised fine hotels and cigars, or stabling for dogs and horses; the Arctic was more vague and braggadocious, offering itself as the “newest, neatest and best-equipped north of Vancouver,” states Trump’s ad in the Whitehorse Star.

Prospectors were struggling up north, but business remained brisk, even if winter was dreadful and dreadfully slow. “We have come to stay,” a February 1901 restaurant ad proclaimed. (Wrong!) That spring, Trump left town just as a new crackdown came on liquor and other vices. He sailed home to Germany with a nest egg of roughly $500,000 in current value, found a wife and then returned to New York, where his son would launch his family into land development.

Back in Whitehorse, Levin got into landlord troubles (with someone who didn’t actually own the land anyway) and lost control of the Arctic in 1902, when jailed after a hotel orgy and jewelry theft—a running mate who would have embarrassed a Trump, not the other way around.

This was a Trump who knew when to quit. The 1901 Canadian census counted 27,000 Yukon residents, more than Vancouver had at the time. A decade later, the territorial population plunged by two-thirds. In new hands, the restaurant burned down in the great Whitehorse fire of 1905; it was rebuilt but didn’t last long. On its site now is the low-slung Horwood Mall, full of Bernie Sanders-friendly local boutiques like Baked Café, Cultured Cheese and Climate Clothing. Trump history has little to no imprint on Whitehorse, save southerners’ mainly recent interest. “There are a lot of people who gain a piece of the action in the Yukon, make money and either never live there or only come very briefly and go on to make lives elsewhere,” says Whitehorse historian Linda Johnson.

It’s a different story down in Bennett. All that remains from the gold rush town is the vacant church.

But that’s changing, as the nearby Carcross-Tagish First Nation and Parks Canada combine to create a high-end “glamping” experience with tent-style cabins and a recreated restaurant for those shelling out $1,600 for four nights to stay at Chilkoot Trail Village. “At the heart of the village is a replica of the famous Arctic Restaurant & Hotel, that was ‘the place to be’ at Bennett City during the stampede to the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898,” states the attraction’s draft website by Nature Tours Yukon, which will market the frontier-inspired experience.

The promoters are treating the family link to the controversial politician as an awkward historical fact rather than a marketing ploy. “For us, it’s more of a campfire tall story,” says Nature Tours president Joost Van Der Putten.

Would that change if Trump wins, and this becomes part of presidential family lore? “Probably not, and you never can tell the way things work out,” Van Der Putten says. “In marketing and sales, you have to seize opportunity as it comes; that is something Mr. Trump is teaching us.”

Due to the 1918 flu pandemic that felled Fred Trump, Donald never got to hear Klondike tales from his grandfather, or learn about the hard work trudging through Yukon mountains or running an anything-goes restaurant. Fred Trump’s grandson isn’t one to tolerate a kitchen’s heat or an Arctic deep freeze. But the bold and whatever-it-takes-to-prosper steps? Those seem to be inherited traits.

Donald Trump's ancestral whore house gets a new lease on life

Health Care Solutions

America’s Last King: The Unsettling Parallels Between King George III And Donald Trump

Inexperienced authoritarian with a habit of blasting out his opinions in the wee hours of the morn? Sounds familiar.

By Willard Sterne Randall


Photo Credit: Allan Ramsay [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

When he assumed his nation’s highest office, he had no previous governmental experience. Born wealthy, he’d never worked for anyone else. Now his nation’s commander in chief, he had never served in the military.

For his every move, he relied on a secretive, eccentric advisor bent on reshaping the nation’s political order. Demanding absolute loyalty, the new ruler did not trust anyone more popular than he was, and detested all opposition.

If these facts sound familiar, they fit not only Donald Trump but America’s last king, George III.

He came to power at the moment of England’s greatest glory, its defeat of France for control of North America.

For a century after a bloody civil war that had ended with the beheading of its king, England’s monarchs had reigned, not ruled, all power vested in Parliament. Ministers backed by Parliament ruled.

Since the Restoration, monarchs had contented themselves with acquiring estates and amassing art collections — and lovers. They concentrated on maintaining a Protestant dynasty and defeating the hated French in a contest for global monopoly. Only one ever tried to turn back the clock to a powerful monarchy. He was forced to throw his mace into the Thames and flee for his life.

George III, shunned by his dissolute father, lived with his mother and eight siblings until the day he inherited the throne. Home-schooled by the reclusive John Stuart, Earl of Bute, he learned to abhor Parliament and opposition of any kind.

Still unmarried when a courier interrupted his daily ride to tell him the old king was dead, George promptly fired his brilliant and popular prime minister, William Pitt, replacing him with his tutor, a man so unpopular that crowds often attacked his carriage.

While George prided himself on being the first Hanoverian king born and bred in Britain, he feared an Englishwoman would have powerful court connections. Bute advised him to seek a bride in Germany, home of his ancestors. George never met 17 year old Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz until she arrived with her ladies-in-waiting and went right into isolation. She soon began to bear George’s 14 children.

Suffering from porphyria, a rare hereditary metabolic disorder, George took advantage of severe insomnia — he once went entirely without sleep for 72 hours — to write nocturnal notes, letters, critiques of cabinet ministers and generals, letters to citizens with complaints. Nothing was too great or trivial, from the stipends of parish clergy and the royal laundress’s pension to his comments on military campaigns.

Obsessed with time and timepieces — he gave Charlotte 24 bejeweled clocks for their bedchamber — often before five in the morning he dipped his quill, noting the minute and the hour atop each missive. Even as Parliament refused to pay for a private secretary, George advocated importing cheaper workers to drive down wages and increase employers’ profits.

Living frugally day to day, he lavished money on renovating the new royal residence, Buckingham House. In private, he entertained his queen by playing the harpsichord; they sang and conversed in German. She loved opera; he, theater. He first acted in a Roman play at 10. He roared his approval at David Garrick’s plays.

And George III chose a playwright as the commanding general of his most fateful military expedition.

At first, as Americans protested Parliamentary taxes, George wrote he believed the “mother country” should practice “moderation” and “firmness” with her recalcitrant colonies. But after the Boston Tea Party, he wrote, “The colonies must either submit or triumph. . . . We must not retreat.”

The first year of the American Revolution went badly for the British. Bloodied at Concord and Bunker Hill, stymied by Benedict Arnold’s navy on Lake Champlain, nearly losing Canada and repulsed at Charleston, the first British commanders felt the wrath of George’s disapproval.

The theater-loving king knew “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, a mediocre playwright and compulsive gambler. Illegitimate son of an earl, Burgoyne had distinguished himself in combat as the risk-taking commander of the Coldstream Guards.

Sent to America as second-in-command of the failed first invasion from Canada, he hurried back to London to draw up plans for a new invasion. On March 26, 1777, in a private audience, the King personally approved Burgoyne’s secret orders to launch a second invasion from Canada to split off rebellious New England by marching south from Montreal to Albany to link up with an army led by Sir William Howe, to march north from New York City.

In addition to taking heavy artillery, Burgoyne was to employ “savages” and “light forces” made up of German jaegers. Often misidentified as Hessians, they were schoolmasters, tavern keepers, tramps, violinists — anyone their princes could round up and pack off to fight. Rented out, they were literally owned by their prince: If they died, the prince was compensated, not their families. It was George who, against Burgoyne’s wishes, insisted “Indians must be employed.”

The plan began to fray by the time Burgoyne was ready to march. Fifteen percent of the mixed force of British, German and French-Canadian troops had to be left behind to garrison Canada. Only 400 Native Americans turned up. To drag 144 heavy cannons and haul enough provisions for 30 days for nearly 10,000 men — including 1,000 gallons of rum — Burgoyne needed 1,000 horses; he could only buy 400. The German cavalry would have to walk.

It rained for three weeks as they slogged south along the New York shore of Lake Champlain to the accompaniment of German martial tunes, soldiers and their wives struggling through the quagmire. Only officers got to sail.

Convening a “Congress of Indians,” Burgoyne threatened the Americans: “I have only to give stretch to the Indian forces under my command . . . to overthrow the hardened enemies of Great Britain.” His theatrical speech only guaranteed that thousands of American militia would turn out to oppose him.

Ordering “a reliance on the bayonet,” Burgoyne reached Ft. Ticonderoga, abandoned when the British took an undefended hill overlooking the fortress. The Americans had begun a fighting retreat.

Yet when the King heard of Ticonderoga’s fall, he exulted to the queen, “I have beat them, beat all the Americans.”

But he had not. Time became Burgoyne’s worst enemy. All night, he could hear the dull thwack of axes and the crash of trees as a growing American army blocked the only road, slowing Burgoyne to a mile a day. Rations dwindled; dragoons were still on foot. A German raid on Vermont to round up beef cattle and horses failed miserably. Burgoyne lost one-fifth of his force.

By the time he crossed the Hudson at Saratoga, he faced thousands of entrenched Americans armed with newly arrived, French-provided artillery. In two losing battles, Burgoyne’s army hemorrhaged casualties even as thousands more Americans encircled him.

Howe never arrived. He unilaterally decided to take Philadelphia and settle in for the winter.

Outnumbered three to one, Burgoyne surrendered. King George’s invasion plan did not include an exit strategy.

The greatest victory of the Revolutionary War, Saratoga convinced the French that, with enough military assistance, the United States could defeat England.

Disgraced, “Gentleman Johnny” returned to the one place he would ever receive accolades — the London stage — with the King cheering lustily in the audience. He had little else to cheer; he had lost America.

Willard Sterne Randall is the author of "Unshackling America: How the War of 1812 Truly Ended the American Revolution," a journalist and author of several biographies of Founding Fathers. He is a Distinguished Scholar in History and Professor at Champlain College. He lives in Burlington, Vermont with his wife, with whom he has co-authored multiple volumes of history.

A Bare Majority of White Voters Are the Only Ones Happy With Trump

White Americans remain the only major demographic group in which the percentage of people who think Donald Trump is doing a good job outpaces the number who think he's doing poorly. That finding comes from Pew Research Center, which polled more than 2,500 adults around the U.S. between June 8-18. While African Americans and Latinos overwhelmingly…