Trump Card, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

May 9, 2016 Victor El-Khouri 4 Comments

Donald Trump is, sort of, my neighbor.

No, not literally.  He lives in Trump Tower, three miles away.  That’s really far by New York City standards, and even pretty far by Ohio standards.

Still, he’s someone who has been on the local radar for nearly 40 years.  I’ve seen him at events.  New Yorkers have a sense of who Trump is as a person that, it seems, the rest of America does not.

He’s not a nice man.  And he’s not a nice man in a way that, in my opinion, means he is not qualified to be president.

This isn’t going to be a partisan rant.  I’m not going to talk about issues or policies.  I’m going to talk about the way Trump does business, and how that won’t cross over to the world of politics or government.  You can say what you want about Hillary Clinton (but please don’t, at least not now, because that is not the subject of this column and we’ll get off-track), but you have to acknowledge that she knows how government works.

For example, a friend told me a story about a friend of hers who did a printing job for The Donald.  Trump instructed his accounting department to wait six months after the invoice arrived, and then offer the printer fifty cents on the dollar.

Illegal?  No.  A shitty thing to do to a small business?  Absolutely.

If we look at things that are more legally questionable, we get into matters of life and death, and also neighborliness.  Years ago, Trump made a deal to build a condo hotel in my neighborhood.  It violated all sorts of zoning restrictions as far as height was concerned, but New Yorkers are used to big developers stomping all over the rules.  The building was granted a variance after it started.  That was awful. but the worst part was the quality of work that Trump tolerated.  People died because of his sloppy standards.  To quote:

“At the time of the 2008 tragedy, Trump said he had little to do with the project, explaining that he’d simply licensed his name to it — an arrangement he’s made with numerous developers.  But a deposition obtained by the Daily News shows he may have been much more involved and even may have reviewed the contract of the firm that was ultimately cited in the fatal accident.”

And that all happened before he bilked his investors and customers on the deal.

If this was a one-off, an example of a business person trying something new and getting in over his head, that would be terrible but it would be understandable.  Unfortunately, it is not.  He has a long record of treating his employees badly.  He hires undocumented immigrants and pays them below the minimum wage.  He steals tips.

Defending himself, Trump often says that he is not personally involved in a lot of these businesses, that he just licenses his name.  As you can see in the links above, this isn’t necessarily true.  Even if it were true, it’s not an excuse we would tolerate from a President of the United States.

I take this a little bit personally.  My dad was a real estate developer.  He didn’t make Trump money (although, unlike Trump, he didn’t start out with $100 million from his dad), but he did well.  And he did it with honor and righteousness and by treating his colleagues and employees with fairness and justice.

And he didn’t have to lie about it.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases has now blown three deadlines in a row, and is very very sorry.