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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Frum
Read between
February 17 - June 30, 2018
In 2007, Jared Kushner persuaded his family group to purchase an Eisenhower-era office building on New York’s Fifth Avenue for a then record-setting $1.8 billion, financed by $1.215 billion in commercial mortgage bonds. The deal almost instantly went catastrophically wrong. Occupancy dropped in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. Rents collapsed. Things did not improve for the Kushners’ 666 Fifth Avenue property during the recovery. The business locus of New York shifted west and south, away from Fifth Avenue, and often out of Manhattan entirely.
The Kushner building lost $10 million in 2015 and was on track to lose considerably more in 2016.
By November 2016, the situation was becoming truly desperate.
To work for Donald Trump, you must ready yourself to lie and lie.
Those who work for and with Trump must accept that he reserves the right to embarrass or denigrate them at any moment for any reason, or for no reason at all, just impulsive whim.
Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, has been obliged to deliver untruth after untruth on Donald Trump’s behalf.
At the time Pence spoke, the flagrant falseness of those words was known to President Trump himself, to the
president’s son, to the president’s son-in-law, to the president’s former campaign manager, and (it seems likely) to the president’s newly designated chief of staff. Yet nobody set the poor vice president straight—and the highly forgiving vice president seems not to have objected at all to being left in the dark in this way.
Trump would not take advice. He would not behave “presidentially,” insisting rather that his behavior was perfect just as it was.
My use of social media is not Presidential—it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!
White House officials and informal advisers say the triggers for his temper are if he thinks someone is lying to him, if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something
or seeks to control him.
Trump hates criticism and expects
huge, heaping servings of flattery.
We’ll protect your business if you sign our bills. That was the transaction
congressional leaders offered Trump.
They failed to appreciate until too late that Trump, not they, had the stronger ...
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The worse Trump behaved, the more frantically congressional Republicans worked to protect him.
Republican leaders in Congress kept silent when Trump’s designated attorney general, Jeff Sessions, testified inaccurately about his Russia connections during his confirmation hearing—and silent again as it emerged that Trump’s son-in-law and most powerful aide, Jared Kushner, had lied about his Russia contacts on
his application form for a security clearance.
“I think the people who voted for Donald Trump went into it with eyes wide open,”
“He’s a businessman, not a politician,” said Mike Pence in October 2016,
“He’s learning the job,”
said Senate Majority Leader McConnell to Newsmax TV in April 2017,
“The president’s new at this. He’s new to government.”
That was Paul Ryan’s excuse for Trump’s attempt to pressure the FBI into halting its investigation into the Russia matter.
“It does no good for me to comment on his Twitter behaviors,” said Utah senator Mike Lee
Trump’s own profound and incorrigible distaste for organization. The Trump Organization had habitually lived in chaos, careening from crisis to crisis. Trump’s biographers have reported with amazement that his companies did not generate balance sheets or profit-and-loss reports, in large part because Trump could not or would not read them.62
Trump’s short attention span, weak work ethic, and ferocious demand for abject personal loyalty.
Trump the president, like Trump the businessman and Trump the candidate, plunged his working environments into chaos because he intuited that chaos enhanced his power.
Trump did not merely fail to organize his government. He actively sabotaged organization wherever it began to
take form.
paralyzing the state either by failing to staff it in the first place or else by filling its ranks with incompetents and self-seekers, by trashing ethical rules, and by abdicating the responsibility of the president and White House to set policy and then confirm that policy is in fact executed. Trumpocracy as a system of power rests not on deregulation but on nonregulation, not on deconstructing the state but on breaking the state in order to plunder the state.
No American president in history—no national political figure of any kind since at least Senator Joe McCarthy—has trafficked more in untruths than Donald Trump.
He owed the start of his political career to the Birther hoax. He
falsely insisted that he lost the popular vote only because of somewhere between three and five million ballots cast by illegal aliens. He falsely claimed that his was the largest inaugural crowd in history. He repeated false stories about New Jersey Muslims cheering the 9/11 attacks. He recited false statistics about the majority of terrorists since 9/11 entering the United States from foreign countries. He falsely denied that his campaign communicated with Russia about hacking the Hillary Clinton campaign. He falsely boasted that he enacted more bills in his first one hundred days and...
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“Paris is no longe...
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And yet at the same time as Donald Trump’s mouth and iPhone were propagating falsehoods, fictions, and fantasies to a vast global audience, he convinced himself that it was he who was the victim of a vast media campaign of defamation and falsehood. “Dishonest media says Mexico won’t be paying for the wall if they pay a little later so the wall can be built more quickly. Media is fake!” Trump tweeted those words on January 8, 2017.5 Three weeks later, Trump signed an executive order that called for funding the wall from future federal budget requests.6
June, Trump had retreated to a hope that the hypothetical wall could be paid for with revenues from solar panels on its surface.8 “Totally biased @NBCNews went out of its way to say that the big announcement from Ford, G.M., Lockheed & others that jobs are coming back . . . to the U.S., but had nothing to do with TRUMP, is more FAKE NEWS. Ask top CEO’s of those companies for real facts. Came back because of me!”9 Thus Trump tweeted January 18, 2017. But of course NBC was right. Trump was taking credit for decisions by Ford and GM to cancel planned expansions in Mexico because of waning demand
...more
to the United States. The cars were not wanted, so they would not be manufactured anywhere.10 In June, Ford would announce termination of all North American production of the Focus and the shifting of all future Focus production to China.11
A president of the United States who gratefully welcomed campaign assistance from a hostile foreign spy agency denounced America’s free press as enemies of the nation.
Politicians equivocate precisely to avoid lying. Trump lies without qualm or remorse.
If necessary, he then lies about the lie.
But whatever Trump says, he says without qualification, deceiving the inattentive into regarding him as a truthful man, rather than the most shameless liar in the history of the presidency.
The Russia-born journalist Masha Gessen has astutely noted the commonality of the dishonesty of Donald Trump and the man he admires so much, Vladimir Putin. “Lying is the message,” she wrote. “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”
The term “fake news” entered common speech to describe a very real phenomenon: manufactured disinformation then disseminated by click-maximizing hucksters, racist trolls, and foreign intelligence agencies to susceptible users of social media.
As discussed in chapter 3, the most trafficked of these stories was the claim that the pope had endorsed Donald Trump. Prominent others: that Hillary Clinton was suffering from Parkinson’s disease; that her aides were running a pedophile sex ring out of a pizzeria in northwest Washington, DC; that she was somehow responsible for the murder of a Democratic staffer victimized by an attempted robbery.
This kind of fake news was often concocted and then propagated with help from Russia’s huge social media ...
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The 2016 presidential campaign introduced Americans to fake news as a tool of power. A term that had originated to describe intentional lying was redefined by Trump to dismiss honest reporting.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s mulish denials, Sean Spicer’s guilty squirming, Kellyanne Conway’s brazen non sequiturs, made TV celebrities of each.
