Trump's Prior Restraint Dreams Shattered Again
Another day, another attempt to halt publication on an unflattering book about President Trump failed, as a judge has dismissed a Trump family bid to block the president's niece's memoir.
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and
Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with
third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by
its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER.com
Peter Schweizer, author of “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class
Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,”
#1 New York Times Bestseller!
Peter Schweizer
has been fighting corruption―and winning―for years. In Throw Them All Out, he
exposed insider trading by members of Congress, leading to the passage of the
STOCK Act. In Extortion,
he uncovered how politicians use mafia-like tactics to enrich themselves. And
in Clinton Cash,
he revealed the Clintons’ massive money machine and sparked an FBI
investigation.
Now he explains
how a new corruption has taken hold, involving larger sums of money than ever
before. Stuffing tens of thousands of dollars into a freezer has morphed into
multibillion-dollar equity deals done in the dark corners of the world.
An American bank
opening in China would be prohibited by US law from hiring a slew of family
members of top Chinese politicians. However, a Chinese bank opening in America
can hire anyone it wants. It can even invite the friends and families of
American politicians to invest in can’t-lose deals.
President Donald
Trump’s children have made front pages across the world for their dicey
transactions. However, the media has barely looked into questionable deals made
by those close to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Mitch McConnell, and
lesser-known politicians who have been in the game longer.
In many parts of
the world, the children of powerful political figures go into business and
profit handsomely, not necessarily because they are good at it, but because
people want to curry favor with their influential parents. This is a relatively
new phenomenon in the United States. But for relatives of some prominent
political families, we may already be talking about hundreds of millions of
dollars.
Deeply researched and packed with shocking revelations, Secret Empires identifies
public servants who cannot be trusted and provides a path toward a more
accountable government.
Kushner, Inc.: Greed.
Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Hardcover – March 19,
2019
·
Hardcover: 304 pages
·
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
(March 19, 2019)
·
Language: English
·
ISBN-10: 1250185947
·
ISBN-13: 978-1250185945
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are the
self-styled Prince and Princess of America. Their swift, gilded rise to
extraordinary power in Donald Trump’s White House is unprecedented and
dangerous. In Kushner, Inc., investigative journalist Vicky Ward
digs beneath the myth the couple has created, depicting themselves as the
voices of reason in an otherwise crazy presidency, and reveals that Jared and
Ivanka are not just the President’s chief enablers: they, like him, appear
disdainful of rules, of laws, and of ethics. They are entitled inheritors of
the worst kind; their combination of ignorance, arrogance, and an insatiable
lust for power has caused havoc all over the world, and may threaten the
democracy of the United States.
Ward follows their
trajectory from New Jersey and New York City to the White House, where the
couple’s many forays into policy-making and national security have mocked
long-standing U.S. policy and protocol. They have pursued an agenda that could
increase their wealth while their actions have mostly gone unchecked. In Kushner,
Inc., Ward holds Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump accountable: she unveils
the couple’s self-serving transactional motivations and how those have
propelled them into the highest levels of the US government where no one, the
President included, has been able to stop them.
ANN COULTER - SWAMP KEEPER DONALD TRUMP AND HIS
PARASITIC FAMILY
One cautionary example is
President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose ticket into Harvard,
according to the 2006 book The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys
Its Way into Elite Colleges,
was his father’s $2.5 million dollar gift to the university. Jared got his
Harvard degree, but he has been the butt of social-media taunts precisely
because his daddy had to pay a fortune to get the school to admit him. The cost
of a brag-worthy degree? Millions. The cost of the right- and left-brain stuff?
Priceless.
THE TRUMP
FAMILY FOUNDATION SLUSH FUND…. Will they see jail?
VISUALIZE
REVOLUTION!.... We know where they live!
“Underwood is a Democrat and is seeking millions of dollars in
penalties. She wants Trump and his eldest children barred from running other
charities.”
Coulter:
All Hail President Javanka!
ANN COULTER
10 Apr 2019111
2:52
While other
reporters waste their time examining Donald Trump’s public statements,
interviewing his high school classmates and poring over legal filings,
investigative reporter Vicky Ward has produced the definitive book on our
current president.
For example, did you know our president got breast implants in
high school (Ivanka claimed she was just “curvy”), bought his way into Harvard
(Jared is even dumber than you thought), and together have no books in their
New York apartment? (Some dispute that there are no books,
citing “a few art books” or “decorator-curated books.”)
Ward’s recently released blockbuster, Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, tells you all this and more about our actual commander in chief: President Javanka.
On the bright side, Jared has stopped rolling his eyes so much about his father-in-law now that Trump is president, er, “president.” Until Trump’s nomination was a virtual lock, Jared was back in New York pretending not to be related to him.
Only after Trump had racked up a slew of primary wins did a lightbulb go on in Jared’s head: Hey! This presidential campaign could be great for business! According to a close associate, Jared viewed the campaign as a terrific “networking opportunity.”
In short order, Jared moved himself in, and moved campaign manager Corey Lewandowski out.
Ward’s recently released blockbuster, Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, tells you all this and more about our actual commander in chief: President Javanka.
On the bright side, Jared has stopped rolling his eyes so much about his father-in-law now that Trump is president, er, “president.” Until Trump’s nomination was a virtual lock, Jared was back in New York pretending not to be related to him.
Only after Trump had racked up a slew of primary wins did a lightbulb go on in Jared’s head: Hey! This presidential campaign could be great for business! According to a close associate, Jared viewed the campaign as a terrific “networking opportunity.”
In short order, Jared moved himself in, and moved campaign manager Corey Lewandowski out.
Trump’s loyal campaign manager had been with
him through the “Mexican rapists” speech, Macy’s dumping Trump’s ties, the
“McCain isn’t a war hero” controversy, the Muslim ban, the “hand size”
embarrassment, and on and on and on. But when all was said and done and Trump
was still cruising to victory, Jared and Ivanka walked in and delivered an
ultimatum to Trump: “It’s Corey or us.”
Jared would later shyly cop to being “[The Man Who] Won Trump the White House,” as a Forbes magazine cover story put it.
And who understood the beating heart of the Trump voter like Jared and Ivanka? With Javanka in charge, the campaign schedule was soon bristling with such items as “women’s empowerment week,” “education week” and “entrepreneur week.”
In no time, Trump was 16 points down and sinking fast. Steve Bannon was brought in, whereupon he promptly threw out all the Working Women’s Intersectional Global Warming weeks and got back to Trump’s issues.
Jared assured Bannon that the campaign had $25 million on hand. That’s when Bannon had to explain “debits” to Kushner. The campaign had $25 million — provided you didn’t count all the unpaid expenses. When those were included, it turned out the campaign was in debt.
As the SAT board had discovered, math wasn’t Jared’s strong suit.
Although it has been well reported that Jared’s Harvard admission was purchased for him by his father, Ward produces a shocking new detail. Of the five tracks at Jared’s high school, he wasn’t at the bottom of track one, perhaps suitable for a lesser Ivy League with solid SAT scores. He wasn’t even in track two. Jared was in track three. But now he has co-opted the Make America Great Again movement for his own personal advancement. I guess that makes him smarter than Trump.
Apart from staging photo-ops, including her “princess moment” at the inaugural ball (her words), Ivanka’s first order of business upon winning the presidency was assigning White House office space. Her map showed a big office for her, a big office for Jared — and also a nice corner office, which was designated “Trump family office.”
Transition officials, Ward reports, “were surprised that the first lady did not appear to have an office. So, too, was Melania Trump, who quickly put an end to Ivanka’s scheming.”
Jared’s BFF, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Muhammad bin Zayed (MBZ), refer to Jared as “the clown prince.” Bone-cutter MBS assured those around him that he had Jared “in my pocket.”
MBS and MBZ derided Jared’s Middle East peace plan as infantile, while using him to achieve their objective: war with Qatar. According to an American businessman’s leaked emails, their attitude was, “Nobody would even waste a cup of coffee on him if it wasn’t for who he is married to.”
As one former top White House official explained: “Jared never understands the details of anything. He’s just impressed by names.”
Following meetings at the White House and also with the Kushners over their 666 Fifth Avenue property, former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim reported back to the emir that “the people atop the new administration were heavily motivated by personal financial interest.”
After Ivanka’s speech introducing her father at the Republican National Convention — rivaled only by Billy Carter’s introduction of his brother, Jimmy! — she tweeted from her personal account: “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech.”
After the Trump family was interviewed on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Ivanka’s company emailed out a “style alert” advertising the $10,800 diamond bracelet she’d worn on the show — “available from Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry.”
Ivanka has managed to win a slew of trademarks in China since her father became the Figurehead President, with several approvals being fast-tracked at about the same time Trump was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago.
Instead of “Make America Great Again,” the motto of the Trump presidency is, as one of Trump’s legal spokesmen put it: “The advance team for Jared and Ivanka.”
This is not what anyone voted for.
Jared would later shyly cop to being “[The Man Who] Won Trump the White House,” as a Forbes magazine cover story put it.
And who understood the beating heart of the Trump voter like Jared and Ivanka? With Javanka in charge, the campaign schedule was soon bristling with such items as “women’s empowerment week,” “education week” and “entrepreneur week.”
In no time, Trump was 16 points down and sinking fast. Steve Bannon was brought in, whereupon he promptly threw out all the Working Women’s Intersectional Global Warming weeks and got back to Trump’s issues.
Jared assured Bannon that the campaign had $25 million on hand. That’s when Bannon had to explain “debits” to Kushner. The campaign had $25 million — provided you didn’t count all the unpaid expenses. When those were included, it turned out the campaign was in debt.
As the SAT board had discovered, math wasn’t Jared’s strong suit.
Although it has been well reported that Jared’s Harvard admission was purchased for him by his father, Ward produces a shocking new detail. Of the five tracks at Jared’s high school, he wasn’t at the bottom of track one, perhaps suitable for a lesser Ivy League with solid SAT scores. He wasn’t even in track two. Jared was in track three. But now he has co-opted the Make America Great Again movement for his own personal advancement. I guess that makes him smarter than Trump.
Apart from staging photo-ops, including her “princess moment” at the inaugural ball (her words), Ivanka’s first order of business upon winning the presidency was assigning White House office space. Her map showed a big office for her, a big office for Jared — and also a nice corner office, which was designated “Trump family office.”
Transition officials, Ward reports, “were surprised that the first lady did not appear to have an office. So, too, was Melania Trump, who quickly put an end to Ivanka’s scheming.”
Jared’s BFF, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Muhammad bin Zayed (MBZ), refer to Jared as “the clown prince.” Bone-cutter MBS assured those around him that he had Jared “in my pocket.”
MBS and MBZ derided Jared’s Middle East peace plan as infantile, while using him to achieve their objective: war with Qatar. According to an American businessman’s leaked emails, their attitude was, “Nobody would even waste a cup of coffee on him if it wasn’t for who he is married to.”
As one former top White House official explained: “Jared never understands the details of anything. He’s just impressed by names.”
Following meetings at the White House and also with the Kushners over their 666 Fifth Avenue property, former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim reported back to the emir that “the people atop the new administration were heavily motivated by personal financial interest.”
After Ivanka’s speech introducing her father at the Republican National Convention — rivaled only by Billy Carter’s introduction of his brother, Jimmy! — she tweeted from her personal account: “Shop Ivanka’s look from her #RNC speech.”
After the Trump family was interviewed on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Ivanka’s company emailed out a “style alert” advertising the $10,800 diamond bracelet she’d worn on the show — “available from Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry.”
Ivanka has managed to win a slew of trademarks in China since her father became the Figurehead President, with several approvals being fast-tracked at about the same time Trump was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago.
Instead of “Make America Great Again,” the motto of the Trump presidency is, as one of Trump’s legal spokesmen put it: “The advance team for Jared and Ivanka.”
This is not what anyone voted for.
One
cautionary example is President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose ticket
into Harvard, according to the 2006 book The Price of Admission:
How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges, was his
father’s $2.5 million dollar gift to the university. Jared got his Harvard
degree, but he has been the butt of social-media taunts precisely because his
daddy had to pay a fortune to get the school to admit him. The cost of a
brag-worthy degree? Millions. The cost of the right- and left-brain stuff?
Priceless.
A VERY STABLE GENIUS
“This taut and terrifying
book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trump’s shambolic
tenure in office to date.” - Dwight Garner, The
New York Times
Read
an excerpt:
‘You’re a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals
‘You’re a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals
THE BOOK
Washington
Post national investigative reporter Carol Leonnig
and White House bureau chief Philip Rucker, both Pulitzer Prize winners,
provide the definitive insider narrative of Donald Trump’s unique presidency
with shocking new reporting and insight into its implications.
“I
alone can fix it.” So went Donald J. Trump’s march to the presidency on July
21, 2016, when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland,
promising to restore what he described as a fallen nation. Yet over the
subsequent years, as he has undertaken the actual work of the commander in
chief, it has been hard to see beyond the daily chaos of scandal,
investigation, and constant bluster. It would be all too easy to mistake
Trump’s first term for one of pure and uninhibited chaos, but there were
patterns to his behavior and that of his associates. The universal value of the
Trump administration is loyalty - not to the country, but to the president
himself - and Trump’s North Star has been the perpetuation of his own power,
even when it meant imperiling our shaky and mistrustful democracy.
Leonnig
and Rucker, with deep and unmatched sources throughout Washington, D.C., tell
of rages and frenzies but also moments of courage and perseverance. Relying on
scores of exclusive new interviews with some of the most senior members of the
Trump administration and other firsthand witnesses, the authors reveal the
forty-fifth president up close, taking readers inside Robert Mueller’s Russia
investigation as well as the president’s own haphazard but ultimately
successful legal defense. Here for the first time certain officials who have
felt honor-bound not to publicly criticize a sitting president or to divulge
what they witnessed in a position of trust tell the truth for the benefit of
history.
This
peerless and gripping narrative reveals President Trump at his most unvarnished
and exposes how decision making in his administration has been driven by a
reflexive logic of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement - but a logic
nonetheless. This is the story of how an unparalleled president has scrambled
to survive and tested the strength of America’s democracy and its common heart
as a nation.
Melania Trump in new book: A sphinx with a rubber eraser in
place of a tail
The Art of Her Deal by Washington Post
reporter Mary Jordan is about the US first lady’s life
about
an hour ago
Dwight
Garner
US
first lady Melania Trump. File photograph: Julien De Rosa/Pool/AFP/Getty
To the Secret Service, he is “Mogul” and
she is “Muse.” Donald Trump and Melania Knauss met in Manhattan, New York, in 1998 and married seven
years later. He was a real estate guy and she had curb appeal. In a new book
about Melania Trump’s life, The Art of Her Deal, Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan suggests Melania kept her mogul’s
flickering interest by being an apt pupil of his literary output, which now
runs to nearly 20 titles.
In The Art of the Comeback (1997),
written with Kate Bohner, Trump said about women: “There is high
maintenance. There is low maintenance. I want no maintenance.” Melania took
notes. She is a sphinx, with a rubber eraser in place of a tail. She didn’t
keep friends as she moved through the stages of her life: her childhood in the
former Yugoslavia, her years as a model in Milan, Paris and New York. There
were no bridesmaids at her wedding. She has declined to talk about her past
except in generalities. She is so camera-ready at all moments that a friend
tells the author, “I don’t even know if she goes to the bathroom.”
Melania’s remoteness prompts a cri de
coeur from the author. “In three decades as a correspondent working all over
the world, I have often written about the reluctant and the reclusive,
including the head of a Mexican drug cartel and a Japanese princess, but
nothing compared to trying to understand Melania,” Jordan writes.
“Most people I spoke to would not speak
on the record. Many in the Trump world are governed by NDAs (nondisclosure
agreements). Some had been warned by lawyers, family members and others close
to Melania not to speak publicly about her, and many would talk only on the
same encrypted phone apps used by spies and others in the intelligence
community. Old photos that were once an easy Google search away no longer pop up online.”
As a result, The Art of Her Deal, a
well-reported book, can’t help but seem lopsided. Trump-world stalwarts such as
Corey Lewandowski (“She has amazing political instincts”), Roger Stone (“There’s nothing dumb about
her”), Chris Christie (“If she’s developed a trust for
you, she is an extraordinarily warm person”) and Sean Spicer (“She lets the president know what
she thinks”) are quoted fulsomely. The less obsequious comments mostly come
from unnamed sources.
Jordan has drilled down, though, and
brings new information about this unconventional first lady to the surface.
Jordan writes that Melania was renegotiating her prenuptial agreement during
the 2016 campaign, and her husband’s “Access Hollywood” debacle almost surely
gave her leverage. These negotiations, Jordan says, and not the need to remain
in Manhattan for their son’s schooling, were why Melania and Barron delayed
moving to the White House.
There is news on the tensions between
Melania and Ivanka Trump. Melania has been overheard referring
to Ivanka as “The Princess,” Jordan writes. Ivanka, when younger, called
Melania “The Portrait” because she spoke as often as one. Jordan underlines how
fiercely Melania embraces her Slovenian roots. She spends much of her time with
Barron and her parents. Barron speaks Slovenian and, like his mother, is a dual
citizen – he carries a Slovenian as well as a US passport. “Trump has
complained to others,” Jordan writes, “that he has no idea what they are
saying.”
About Melania’s own visa and citizenship
issues, and how she brought her parents and sister to the United States while her husband railed about
“chain migration,” there is much we don’t know. It irks Melania to be
considered fragile, Jordan writes. She encouraged Trump to run for president;
she was not merely a leaf sucked along by the wind. She has been an influential
adviser to him on certain issues, such as choosing Mike Pence as his running mate. She
encouraged Trump to back down from the “zero tolerance” policy that had
separated many children from their parents at the Mexican border.
She has not always been a voice for
moderation. She joined her husband in his “birther” attacks on Barack Obama. She has impugned the integrity of
women who have accused her husband of sexual harassment and worse. Woe to
anyone, the author suggests, who crosses her.
While she was growing up, Melania’s
father was a trained mechanic who sometimes worked as a chauffeur. Her mother
was a seamstress who clothed her daughter impeccably from the day she was born.
Melania briefly studied in the prestigious architecture programme at the
University of Ljubljana before dropping out.
Jordan pays attention to the many
interviews Melania gave as a model and afterward, and catches her in many
exaggerations, including the fact that she speaks many languages. She appears
to speak only two. Jordan never quite finds a voice with which to tell this
story. She doesn’t have a strong point of view, and shies away from acute
analysis. The Art of Her Deal reads like a very long newspaper article rather
than a tightly wound book. The author bends so far backward to be fair to her
subject that, at times, you fear she may need chiropractic help.
Has Melania had plastic surgery? The
author quotes one of her former New York roommates as saying she returned from
a 1997 Christmas trip to Europe looking more buxom. That same former roommate told
the author that Melania, in those pre-Trump days, liked to watch Friends, ate
seven fruits and vegetables a day, didn’t drink alcohol and walked with weights
on her ankles to keep toned. Jordan confirms that the first lady and her
husband sleep in separate bedrooms. He likes darkly coloured walls and rugs;
she prefers light ones. They rarely seem to interact. He uses Irish Spring
soap. Jordan quotes Jay Goldberg, one of Trump’s lawyers during his
playboy days, as saying that Trump often spoke romantically about business but
never about women. What made him happy, Goldberg said, was chocolate: “Give him
a Hershey bar and let him watch television.”
When someone once hazarded a joke about
Trump’s penis size, the author writes, Melania replied, “Don’t say this – he’s
a real man.” Donald Trump appears to dwell in the White House, for the most
part, like a sultan among his pillows. Melania is self-exiled with her parents
and son. On many days, Jordan writes, her press office doesn’t answer questions
about where she is.
Perhaps they’re happy. Or perhaps each
has so much kompromat on the other that they live like Mr and Mr. Smith, the married assassins in the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie movie, each waiting for a chance
to fire a kill shot. Melania played a kind of satirical James Bond girl in a famous photo shoot for
British GQ. I thought of her situation recently while watching the Bond film
Live and Let Die. That’s the one in which Roger Moore, stranded in the middle of a pond
filled with crocodiles, manages to get to the safety of shore by using their
heads as steppingstones.– The New York Times
The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of
Melania Trump’ By Mary Jordan Illustrated. 341 pages. Simon & Schuster
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