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20/20
Insights, scoops, and analysis of the most important election season of our lives
Early this morning, President Donald Trump shared a video of a white man in a golf cart with Trump campaign posters yelling “white power!” The video, shot at the Villages, a retirement community in Florida, showed an expletive-filled confrontation between a line of Trump supporters riding in golf carts and protesters calling them “racists” and “Nazis.”
Trump tweeted the video, below, along with the text: “Thank you to the great people of The Villages. The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!!” He deleted his tweet three hours later.
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) June 27, 2020
In a statement, White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere did not apologize for the tweet. “President Trump is a big fan of The Villages. He did not hear the one statement made on the video. What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters.” (The statement can be clearly heard at the beginning of the video.)
Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) called the president’s retweet “indefensible” on CNN.
Trump has long enjoyed support from the Villages. As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote back in 2016,
Since the first trailers popped up in cattle country an hour north of Orlando, Florida, four decades ago, the Villages has swelled to a population of more than 114,000 people; almost all are over the age of 55, white, and drive around the community in golf carts that can be outfitted to resemble taxis, fire trucks, or tanks.
Residents refer to the place as “Disney for adults.”
In addition to being one of the most quintessentially Florida places on Earth, the Villages is one of the most Republican places in Florida.
Brad Parscale, campaign manager for Trump's 2020 reelection campaign, walks on stage during the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 28 in National Harbor, Maryland. Samuel Corum/Getty
The Trump campaign is running Facebook ads from a page for campaign manager Brad Parscale, spending thousands of dollars to promote Parscale’s name and potentially his private business.
The campaign has multiple Facebook pages that it uses to run ads. Most ads come from the campaign’s official page for President Trump so that ads show the candidate’s name as their source. Users who click on the sponsoring page at the top of the ads are directed to the Facebook page the campaign set up for the president. The campaign has set up other official pages that it runs ads from, including for Vice President Mike Pence, Team Trump, Women for Trump, Latinos for Trump, and Black Voices for Trump.
And then there’s the one for Parscale. This page is different from the others in one respect. While the page specifies that it is the property of the Trump campaign, the only link on its “about” section directs people not to the campaign’s website but instead to Parscale’s private consulting firm, Parscale Strategy.
Parscale has profited immensely from his association with Trump and the campaign, not only through a salary but also by doing campaign work through his private firms. In March, Mother Jones reported that Parscale Strategy had billed the campaign, the Republican National Committee, and the pro-Trump America First Action PAC about $35 million since 2017. It’s unclear how much of that money was used to place ads and how much was retained in fees by Parscale’s firm. Another firm owned by Parscale had billed $1.7 million to the super-PAC supporting Trump. In 2018, Parscale reportedly spent millions on new homes and cars in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. According to the New York Times, media stories about Parscale’s growing wealth prompted Trump to send word that Parscale should not make more than $800,000 off the campaign.
In the last 30 days, the campaign has spent $47,357 to run 649 ads from Parscale’s page, according to data in Facebook’s ad library. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the campaign’s massive Facebook spending overall. In the same timeframe, the campaign spent nearly $5.5 million on Facebook ads from both the campaign’s coffers and a fund administered jointly by the campaign and the Republican National Committee. But the spending for Parscale’s page has recently exceeded spending on ads from the Latinos for Trump and Black Voices for Trump pages. The only apparent difference in the ads is which campaign page they link back to if a viewer were to click on the sponsoring account.
It’s unclear why the campaign chose to make Parscale’s Facebook page a Trump campaign property and run ads from it. Facebook indicates that the page was created by Parscale in March 2018, around the time he became Trump’s 2020 campaign manager. As recently as last September, the page was listed as a “public figure” page—used by people, often celebrities, who want to build a public brand beyond their personal Facebook profile, according to Facebook, which often verifies these pages’ authenticity—but not owned by the Trump campaign, according to the Internet Archive.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s possible that the campaign decided that Parscale, who has gained a certain sort of fame as the architect of Trump’s digital campaign in 2016 and as the public face of his reelection effort, was enough of a celebrity that supporters would engage with the campaign ad when they saw that it came from him. Regardless of the motive, Parscale stands to benefit, once again.
This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on June 9, 2016.
Believe Donald Trump, folks: There is an anti-asbestos conspiracy. In his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback, Trump warned America not to buy the crusade against “the greatest fire-proofing material ever used.” He claimed the movement to remove asbestos—a known carcinogen—was actually the handiwork of the mafia:
I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal. Great pressure was put on politicians, and as usual, the politicians relented. Millions of truckloads of this incredible fire-proofing material were taken to special “dump sites” and asbestos was replaced by materials that were supposedly safe but couldn’t hold a candle to asbestos in limiting the ravages of fire.
Trump claimed asbestos is “100 percent safe, once applied,” and that it just “got a bad rap.” That, unsurprisingly, was a stretch. Asbestos can be safe, but only if it’s in perfect condition and not shedding any fibers, which are toxic and can cause cancer. But the Occupational Safety and Health Administration says the asbestos often used in fireproofing will “readily release airborne fibers if disturbed”—and that there’s “no ‘safe’ level of asbestos exposure for any type of asbestos fiber.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has been linked to unsafe work conditions and crooked contractors. Polish construction workers who worked on the construction of Trump Tower sued Trump, with some telling the New York Times that “they often worked in choking clouds of asbestos dust without protective equipment.” The contracting company used by Trump hired the Poles—undocumented immigrants who were working off the books—at only $4- to $5-an-hour, dramatically less than the wages of union members working on the same site. Some of the workers charged they were paid even less. The case was settled in 1999, but the terms are sealed.
But Trump did know something about the mob. A recent story in Politico laid out Trump’s long-standing and unusually close ties to mob-linked figures, including his lawyer Roy Cohn and the concrete company he used to build Trump Tower. “No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks,” wrote investigative reporter David Cay Johnston.
Elizabeth Warren in Nashua, New Hampshire, on February 5, 2020.Brian Cahn/ZUMA Wire
Joe Biden doesn’t really have any electoral weaknesses, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. The results, released Wednesday, put Biden 14 points ahead of Trump, beating him across every demographic except among non-college-educated white voters. If any shortfalls were to be gleaned, it would be a lack of excitement for the former vice president’s candidacy among young voters: Only 13 percent of respondents in that group said they had a “very favorable” view of him.
It’s not too serious a problem: Biden is 34 points ahead of Trump among voters aged 18-to-29. Still, conventional wisdom dictates that an enthusiasm gap is worth addressing, something that a vice presidential pick could assuage. And the unenthusiastic set in swing states thinks that pick should be Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Those are the findings from a new Civiqs poll from Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, conducted among Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters aged 18 to 34 across 12 states Democrats hope to win in November: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. 35 percent of respondents chose Warren as their first choice, 19 percent chose former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and 16 percent chose Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).
None of the other women considered earned more than 4 percent of support—including Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms or Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), two Black women whose names have garnered increased attention in the wake of nationwide outcries against police brutality. This, as FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon Jr. wrote, is to be expected: No one really knew their names until they’d been floated as potential VP picks a few weeks ago.
The results track with previous polling Data for Progress conducted as part of a broader effort among liberals to demonstrate Warren’s viability as a vice presidential contender. In the eyes of many Democrats, the historic level of civil unrest over the treatment of Black Americans demands Biden choose a Black running mate. Harris has lately been billed as the “clear frontrunner” due to her experience with the criminal justice system as a federal prosecutor and California attorney general, in addition to her ability to demographically balance the ticket. A majority of Democratic primary voters who responded to a recent Monmouth survey said Harris was their top pick.
But some progressives have argued that a vision for Black America is perhaps more important than being representative of it. Warren boosters point to the plans she launched during her presidential bid aimed at combating systemic racism. Since protests broke out over the police killing of George Floyd, Warren has reprised her courtship of Black activists, a cornerstone of her presidential run, making calls to Black leaders and appearing with them in Zoom roundtables to discuss systemic racism. Some of them have, in turn, endorsed her vice presidential prospects.
Democrats have been particularly worried about an enthusiasm gap amongyounger Black voters in swing states where Hillary Clinton fell short in 2016, and progressives point to Warren’s activist support as evidence that she could bridge it. But in this survey, Warren’s support gets murkier in the racial breakdown of survey respondents. Among white respondents, Warren was the runaway favorite: 42 percent of them chose her as their top VP pick. But only 23 percent of Black respondents did, and 28 percent selected Abrams as their first choice. Though perhaps negligible given the poll’s margin of error, this finding breaks a trend Data for Progress identified in a poll conducted earlier this month across all states, which found Warren was the clear favorite among Black voters aged 18-to-34. Still, Warren beat out Harris across all demographics.
But if Warren’s ability to gin up enthusiasm with that demographic is debatable, so too is whether the enthusiasm gap among young Black voters is Biden’s greatest weakness. According to the Time/Siena poll, he’s facing a bigger problem with their white peers: 21 percent of non-white voters aged 18-to-29 said their view of Biden is “very favorable,” but only 4 percent of white voters in that same age group held that view.
This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on August 10, 2016.
It’s not generally hard to ascertain what Donald Trump is thinking about—it seems as if every thought that goes through his head over the course of the day comes right out of his mouth. But what about when he’s sleeping? Timothy O’Brien, author of the 2005 book TrumpNation, asked the mogul about his “most frequent dream,” and Trump replied with his signature candor.
“Always sexual,” he said. “It’s always fucking.”
Does he have nightmares? “Every once in a while, you have something,” Trump said. “But basically, I don’t have those sicko deals.” And therapy? “I have found I am not a disbeliever in it. But I look at reports that psychiatrists have by far the highest rate of suicide than anybody—that means they’re pretty fucked up, and I don’t have the time for it.”
This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on June 15, 2016.
Mark Bowden, the reporter and author of the book Black Hawk Down, was “prepared to like” the aging and increasingly hefty Donald Trump when he set out to profile the mogul for Playboy in 1996. The two men took a trip down to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for a weekend, but the reality of The Donald quickly made any affection impossible.
“Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong,” Bowden wrote last year in Vanity Fair, recalling his time profiling Trump. “He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression.” Any remaining chance of that went out the window when Trump unleashed his fury on an equipment box at the Mar-a-Lago tennis courts, as Bowden wrote in the profile:
The Donald had his tile man—a genius! the best!—come out just a few weeks ago to lay smooth, rust-colored slate on the platforms between the burgundy clay tennis courts. It looks a lot nicer than plain concrete. Handsome stone water coolers stand at one end of the platform, and there’s enough room under a yellow-striped umbrella for four chairs and a small table. Except, today, smack in the middle of each platform there’s this…this thing…this little metal box about two feet high and a foot wide with wires and tubes sticking out of it, right where the table is supposed to go. Inspecting the courts with his tennis pro, Anthony Boulle, Donald probes the ugly box first with his foot.
“What’s this?” he asks, like a man with a turd on his dinner plate.
Boulle explains that it’s the chiller for the water cooler, that he tried to tell the plumber that Mr. Trump wouldn’t be happy, but the guy said…
Donald kicks the thing. It doesn’t budge so he bends over, pissed royally now, and gives the thing a hard shove. It flops over. Water from the ruptured main begins to spout two, three, four feet high, rapidly soaking and then puddling on the carefully combed courts. The Donald, muttering angrily, skips out of the spray and strides off, stepping around the widening pool.
Even Donald seemed to instantly know the impromptu demolition was a bad idea, Bowden remembered:
Catching a glimpse of me watching, Trump grimaced.
“I guess that’ll have to be in your story,” he said.
This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on September 21, 2016.
When Donald Trump was trying to pitch the Scottish government on a new $1.2 billion golf course and coastal resort near Aberdeen in 2008, he gave away swag emblazoned with the official Trump family coat of arms—an ostentatious gold floral pattern surrounding a helmet atop a shield with three lions and two chevronels (the inverted V pattern that is a fixture on police and military uniforms).
But there was one problem: There was no official Trump family coat of arms. His mother is Scottish, but the Trump surname is German. And that meant Trump was in violation of an ancient Scottish heraldic law dating back to 1672, which prohibits unregistered coats of arms. According to the Telegraph, a shield costs £900 to register, and you pay an additional £1,300 for special features like a crest and a helmet, both of which graced Trump’s coat of arms.
Finally, four years after the initial brouhaha, Trump secured permission from the Scottish heraldic authorities for a new coat of arms. In an interview with the New York Post, Trump International–Scotland Vice President Sarah Malone explained the deep significance of the symbols:
“The Lion Rampant makes reference to Scotland and the stars to America,” Malone said, describing the insignia.
“Three chevronels are used to denote the sky, sand dunes and sea—the essential components of the [golf resort] site—and the double-sided eagle represents the dual nature and nationality of Trump’s heritage.”
She added, “The eagle clutches golf balls, making reference to the great game of golf, and the motto ‘Numquam Concedere’ is Latin for ‘Never Give Up’—Trump’s philosophy.”
If you believe President Donald Trump, nearly one million people registered for his June 20 campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But come Saturday, fewer than 6,200 people showed up, according to the Tulsa fire department. Large swaths of the 19,000-seat arena were empty, the New York Times reported, and the outdoor overflow venue was such a ghost town that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence cancelled appearances there.
Maybe Trump’s popularity has fallen just that far. Maybe Tulsans were worried about catching the coronavirus. And maybe a horde of K-pop fans and TikTok users successfully pranked the president’s campaign into thinking its rally would be packed to the rafters.
Since June 11, when the Trump campaign asked supporters to register for the event using their phones, social media users been encouraging each other to reserve tickets (for free) to the Tulsa rally with no intention of showing up.
“I just registered for Trump’s rally, and I’m so excited—to not go,” one user posted on TikTok.
On Twitter, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) thanked the teens for their service. “KPop allies, we see and appreciate your contributions in the fight for justice too,” she added.
KPop allies, we see and appreciate your contributions in the fight for justice too 😌
It’s not the first time K-pop fans have mobilized en masse for political or social causes in recent weeks. When the Dallas Police Department launched an app for users to send in videos of “illegal activity” taking place at Black Lives Matter protests, K-pop fans crashed it with videos showing their beloved stars dancing and singing. When white supremacists planned a day of action online, attempting to make the racist hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter trend on Twitter, K-pop fans flooded the hashtag with more fancams. And when K-pop boy band BTS donated $1 million to Black Lives Matter, its army of fans matched the contribution within 24 hours.
In a statement, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale blamed the rally’s poor attendance on protesters and “fake news media” warning people of the risk of catching coronavirus, which has killed nearly 120,000 people in the US.
He also implied that the real purpose of collecting sign-ups for the rally was to harvest the contact information of people who may later be spammed with fundraising requests and targeted political advertising.
Campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh echoed this in an interview with Bloomberg: “Leftists always fool themselves into thinking they’re being clever,” he said. “Registering for a rally only means you’ve RSVPed with a cell phone number. Every rally is general admission and entry is first-come-first served. But we thank them for their contact information.”
I wonder how well Team Trump’s data specialists are dealing with their new spreadsheets of minors and BTS fangirls.
Underrated part of the tiktok teens and K-pop fans that bloated the Trump ticket distribution: the campaign now has about a million useless names throwing off their databases
The man who kicked off his first presidential campaign with racism about Mexicans rebooted his second one on Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a racist fantasia to explain why the police shouldn’t be defunded.
At his first rally since the coronavirus shutdown—originally scheduled for Juneteenth but moved on the counsel of unnamed Black “friends” of Donald Trump—the president asked the crowd to imagine a “tough hombre” breaking the “window of a young woman” at 1 a.m.. Her husband, “a traveling salesman or whatever he may do,” is away.
“And you call 9-1-1,” Trump said, “and they say, ‘I’m sorry, this number is no longer working,'” apparently because emergency dispatch centers have also been defunded in this copless dystopia. Having thus traded Kathryn Steinle for a more generalized racist panic scenario, Trump rounded into his conclusion: “If you want to save that beautiful heritage of ours—we have a great heritage, we’re a great country—you are so lucky I’m president, that’s all I can tell you.”
Trump introduces the new parable of the "young woman" who has a "tough hombre" break into her home while her "traveling salesman" husband is away. pic.twitter.com/c2Af3WkIMo
Attendees of President Donald Trump's June 20 rally, without masks on, cheer Eric Trump.Sue Ogrocki/AP
President Donald Trump’s rally tonight could be, health officials warned, a “super spreader” event—risking a rise in hospitalizations in the community. In light of that potential spread, local health officials in Tulsa have cautioned against the gathering. Still, Trump decided to go ahead with it.
In theory, if someone did test positive for COVID-19 after attending the rally, there would be a need to conduct contact tracing to mitigate the spread. I was curious if the Trump campaign had reached out to local officials to put a plan in place in the event someone does get the virus. You could imagine the campaign potentially helping Tulsa’s 60 public health officials trace to stop the spread of the virus after a mass event, that, after all, they didn’t want in the first place. Resources like the campaign’s databases of tickets could be helpful, for example.
But, nope, the Trump campaign has not talked to city officials about combating any outbreak.
“The Tulsa Health Department has not been contacted by any representatives from the Trump campaign,” the city’s health department told me in a statement.
This is even more worrying considering that, this morning, it was revealed six Trump staffers doing logistics for the rally tested positive for COVID-19. When it was revealed, Trump just got mad that it went public.
Six people working on logistics for President Trump’s Tulsa rally have tested positive for COVID-19, according to NBC News. Twenty-thousand people, none of whom will be required to wear masks, are expected at the rally, which will be held inside.
JUST IN – 6 members of the Trump campaign advance staff in Tulsa doing logistics for Trump's rally tested positive for COVID, per @carolelee@kwelkernbc@albamonica@kellyo
“Quarantine procedures were immediately implemented,” said a Trump spokesperson, adding: “No COVID-positive staffers or anyone in immediate contact will be at today’s rally or near attendees and elected officials.”
The top health official in Tulsa warned against President Donald Trump’s first rally since the coronavirus pandemic, saying it could cause havoc, including a surge in hospitalizations. Even the president, the official warned, was at risk.
“A large indoor rally with 19-20,000 people is a huge risk factor today in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” he said, as we reported earlier. “I’m concerned about our ability to protect anyone who attends a large, indoor event, and I’m also concerned about our ability to ensure the president stays safe as well.”
Health officials have worried that this could be a “super spreader” event. But as we’ve documented in timeline form, the president’s self-regard always comes first, even at the expense of other people’s lives.
President Donald Trump’s campaign ran an ad on Facebook Friday illustrating the campaign’s struggle with how to tarnish his rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, while also energizing its base. In this case, can it attack the presumptive Democratic nominee for being 77-years-old without alienating senior voters who are crucial to the Trump campaign’s coalition?
It looks like they may be trying to find out. The ad, which was first posted last month, features an unflattering, black-and-white image of Biden surrounded by question marks. The text reads: “He’s How Old?”
The ad was part of a larger digital push to lure people to fill out an online survey, an aspect of the campaign’s strategy to keep supporters engaged, capture their contact information, and grow its lists. The image about Biden’s age on Friday was used in at least 38 Facebook ads nationwide. Some iterations targeted older people. In one, the image was sent to women over 65 in Florida and West Virginia. Another sent the image to only 18-24 year-old men in Florida.
The Trump campaign’s legendary 2016 digital operation was known for throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck; they boasted about how many variants of ads they ran on Facebook to test which message, which text, or which image engaged supporters most. It’s possible this is part of a similar test designed to see whether attacks on Biden’s age work, and with which demographics. But the attack on Biden could backfire and remind voters that Trump himself is no spring chicken, having just celebrated his 74th birthday this month. It also comes as Trump’s support among seniors is dropping, perhaps the greatest threat to his re-election.
That erosion of support among a once solid demographic goes a long way to explaining why, with less than six months until the November elections, polls consistently show Trump losing to Biden. People over 65 were a key voting block for Trump four years ago when he won them by nine points, according to the Pew Research Center. But polling from as early as April showed those numbers had essentially flipped, with support from seniors shifting to Biden. Florida presents a stark example of the problem: in a must-win state where senior citizens are a powerful voting block, Trump won them by 17 points in 2016. A late April Quinnipiac poll showed Biden leading seniors in Florida by 10 points. In May, Quinnipiac polling showed women over 65 supporting Biden over Trump by 22 points. In the first week of June, a CNN poll found seniors supporting Biden over Trump 51 percent to 47 percent, a split within the polls margin of error but far below what Trump will need to win in November.
While polls were picking up on Trump’s struggles to hold his support among senior voters—particularly senior women—before the coronavirus, the pandemic has made the problem much worse. From mid-March to mid-April, the Morning Consult tracking poll showed seniors going from the age group most supportive of Trump’s handling of the crisis to the most critical. In early June, the same poll showed seniors’ net support for Trump’s handling of the crisis had ticked up just two percentage points, even as other age groups had more favorable views of Trump’s reaction to the virus. These voters are among the most at risk from the virus, and many of them may believe the president has been cavalier with their safety. In March, Trump toyed with the idea that the country should reopen, even if that meant seniors would sacrifice themselves for the economy. Since then, he encouraged protest movements pushing for reopening, in defiance of policies put in place largely to protect older Americans. He refuses to wear a mask. By mid-June, virus cases were growing particularly high in states with large numbers of seniors, including Florida and Arizona. The boomer generation remains the most concerned about the pandemic.
This is the situation in which the Trump campaign seeks out the best strategy to tarnish Biden and win back older voters. According to the Washington Post, the campaign spent much of April debating how to go after Biden as Kellyanne Conway warned that relentlessly mocking Biden’s mental acuity risked further alienating seniors.
Perhaps this ad is meant to test senior voters’ sensitivity to the age issue. But surely a better strategy would be a more conscientious handling of the pandemic that has put their lives at risk.
This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on July 15, 2016.
After a chartered helicopter crashed and killed three of Donald Trump’s top executives in October 1989, the real estate mogul was distraught. “These were three fabulous young men in the prime of their lives,” he said in a statement. “No better human beings ever existed. We are deeply saddened by this devastating tragedy, and our hearts go out to their families.” A few months later, Trump told New York magazine that the crash had shocked him, showing him “how short and fragile life is.” The event, he said, helped convince him he should leave his wife Ivana.
But did Trump cheat death that day? “Sources said Trump himself was scheduled to be on the flight but decided at the last minute he was too busy to leave New York,” United Press International reported the day following the tragedy. Other outlets reported the same claim from the Trump camp, including Long Island’s Newsday and the New York Daily News, which slapped the report on its cover.
At least one biographer, former Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett, believed the claim was a PR stunt. In his book, Trump: The Greatest Show On Earth, Barrett wrote that Trump “did not hesitate to use [the crash] for personal advantage. He planted stories suggesting that he had almost boarded the chartered copter himself, though he’d never ridden to Atlantic City on one, trusting only his [personal] Puma [helicopter].”
And after the DailyNews story about Trump’s close call appeared, one of his executives told the Associated Press it was false. “Trump had definitely never planned to be on it,” said Bernie Dillon, vice president of Trump Sports and Entertainment.
As BuzzFeed noted last year, Trump later walked back his claim that he was supposed to be on the flight. He described it instead as a fleeting idea he had as the executives left his office. “As quickly as the idea had popped into my mind, I decided not to go,” he said in Surviving at the Top, his 1990 book.
This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on October 10, 2016.
If you’ve been following the news about Donald Trump’s charity donations, this is going to come as no surprise: Trump seems to never have followed through on a pledge to donate the profits from sales of his Trump Vodka to charity.
Trump frequently made such pledges while hawking products like “Trump: The Game,” his 2015 campaign book Crippled America, and his infamous Trump University, but there’s no evidence that he ever gave the money he promised to charities. The case of Trump Vodka, however, has an added, poignant twist.
Trump’s older brother, Fred C. Trump, Jr., was an alcoholic who died in 1981 at just 42 years old. Donald has spoken about how his brother’s death deeply affected him. “He had a profound impact on my life, because you never know where you’re going to end up,” he said to People last year. Trump is a famous teetotaler in part because of his brother’s warnings to him about the dangers of alcohol.
So when Trump signed up to promote his own line of vodka (especially to Russian millionaires), he had misgivings. “I sort of hated doing it,” he said in 2005 on his syndicated national radio segment, Trumped!, according to transcripts published by the Wall Street Journal. “I thought about it and what I’ve decided to do is donate any and all money that I make from alcoholic beverages to Mothers Against Drunk Drivers [sic]. I’m going to give 100 percent of that money to them in honor of my late brother, Fred Trump. I guarantee you that Fred is looking down now and saying, ‘That’s really the best thing to do.'”
Except that Mothers Against Drunk Driving doesn’t take donations from alcohol sales, as the group explained to the Huffington Post. In fact, it doesn’t seem he donated the profits to any charity after MADD rebuffed him. “Despite Trump’s promises, there appears to be no record he donated money from Trump Vodka to charity,” HuffPost wrote in June. Trump did, however, sue Drinks Americas, the company that licensed his name, in a New York federal court for $4.8 million dollars (plus interest) he claimed he was owed from the deal. The court dismissed the case, saying it didn’t have jurisdiction.
As for Trump Vodka, the brand started collapsing along with the economy in 2008, according to Bloomberg. Sales declined, Drinks Americas’ credit dried up, Trump Vodka’s distiller went bankrupt, and the booze is no longer sold in the US. But it does live on in Israel, where it’s a dubiously kosher-for-Passover backup option.
This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on October 20, 2016.
We all know Donald Trump firmly believes that size matters. It turns out it matters just as much to him when it comes to the American flag.
Trump waged a yearslong battle with the blue bloods of Palm Beach, Florida, the city where his Mar-a-Lago club is located, over everything from his parties to his plans to convert the former mansion to a club and noise from the local airport. Trump launched yet another fight in 2006 when he put up an American flag that smashed the city’s flag-flying rules. Palm Beach ordinances allowed for flags up to 4 feet by 6 feet on poles as high as 42 feet; Trump’s flag, according to the Sun-Sentinel, was a gargantuan 25 feet by 50 feet on a flagpole 80 feet high.
The city started fining Trump $1,250 a day for flying the flag, but the tycoon was gleeful. “This is a dream to have someone sue me to take down the American flag,” he told CNN’s Nancy Grace in January 2007. The city did not in fact sue, but Trump—predictably—did. He filed a $25 million federal suit against Palm Beach, alleging that the city had violated his free speech and equal protection rights in going after his flag. Flying a smaller flag, the suit claimed, “would fail to appropriately express the magnitude of Donald J. Trump’s…patriotism.” Trump also pledged to donate any damages to veterans returning from the war in Iraq.
After what the Sun-Sentinel said were “secret, court-ordered negotiations,” Trump and the city struck a deal in April 2007. The city would drop the $120,000 in fines against Trump and allow him to keep the flag on a slightly shorter but still technically illegal 70-foot flagpole. Trump, for his part, would drop the suit and donate $100,000 to a veterans’ charity.
According to the Washington Post, Trump wrote to the city a few months later to brag that he’d sent $100,000 to Fisher House, a charity that helps house families visiting hospitalized veterans, and thrown in $25,000 for the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial out of the goodness of his heart. But there was still one Trumpian twist to the story. He made the contributions through his foundation—a move that was possibly illegal—which was primarily funded by other people’s money.
This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files”—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current President—on November 7, 2016.
Donald Trump is a litigious man. He has threatened to sue the 12 women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault. He has threatened to sue the New York Times for publishing a story about his alleged sexual assaults. He sued Univision. His lawyers tried to shut down a bike race in Colorado because it was called the Tour de Rump. He sued an architecture critic for $500 million because the critic said he had bad taste. His real estate company once sued the mortgage company he’d slapped his name on for not paying rent.
So when Trump took over the Miss Universe pageant in 1996, every other pageant in America was soon on notice. Over the next two decades, his lawyers filed legal challenges against at least 23 different pageants, charging that they were infringing on the trademark of Miss USA, which Miss Universe LLP owns. The pageants challenged by Trump’s Miss Universe included Miss South Sudan USA, Miss Sierra Leone USA, Miss Teen Latina, Mrs. USA, Miss Plus USA, Señorita Mexico USA, Mr. and Mrs. Punjabi USA, Mrs. USA International, Miss Arab USA, and Miss Multiverse.
Yes, Miss Multiverse. (The complaint, which was filed in 2015, has not been resolved.)
Miss Universe under Trump (who sold the company in 2015) also filed complaints against Miss Sweetheart USA, Miss Thick’e USA, Miss Thick’e Universe, Miss Chinese USA, Miss Africa USA, Miss Black Universe, Miss Nude Southern USA, Miss Casino Queen of the Universe, Miss Asia-USA, Miss Guinee USA, Miss Gay Universe, Mr. Gay Universe, Miss Hip-Hop America USA, and Miss African-American USA.
Trump’s companies have a very good record in these cases. But he does not always win. In 2003, Miss Universe LLP filed a complaint opposing an application to trademark Miss Nude Southern USA, arguing that it was “confusingly similar” to the existing “Miss USA” trademark. “Applicant’s mark merely inserts additional modifying words (‘NUDE SOUTHERN’) between the words ‘Miss’ and ‘USA,'” his attorneys argued.
The owners of the competing pageant fired back with a compelling argument—adjectives matter. “The strong primary noun NUDE and SOUTHERN arranged between MISS and USA, prima facie contravert any allegation of confusing similarity.”
The two parties eventually reached a settlement and the complaint was withdrawn.
This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on October 12, 2016.
If Donald Trump has the “world’s greatest memory,” as he claimed in November 2015, he certainly hasn’t shown it off to his lawyers.
In fact, one of those lawyers, New Jersey casino specialist Patrick McGahn, once described how he and Trump’s fellow counsels always met with Trump in pairs because of Donald’s propensity for lying. “We tried to do it with Donald always if we could, because Donald says certain things and then has a lack of memory,” McGahn said in a deposition during the bankruptcy proceedings for the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
McGahn said he typically did this with all public figures, but he singled out Trump for his particularly casual relationship with the truth. “Hey, Trump is a leader in the field,” McGahn said. “He’s an expert at interpreting things, let’s put it that way.”
“That’s interestingly put,” his questioner noted.
Trump apparently has recurring memory problems when he meets with lawyers. He told NBC News last November that he had the “world’s greatest memory,” during a controversy surrounding his false claim to have seen thousands of Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey. But just three weeks later, he told a lawyer deposing him for one of the Trump University fraud lawsuits that he couldn’t even remember his own comment. “I don’t know that I said it,” Trump said.
President Donald Trump poses with a bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, DC on June 1, 2020. Shawn Thew/CNP via ZUMA
On Tuesday, Priorities USA Action released a TV ad in swing states attacking President Donald Trump’s handling of both the coronavirus pandemic and the protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. The Democratic-aligned super-PAC’s ad ends with the now-infamous image of Trump holding a bible upside-down outside of St. John’s Church by the White House. If the Trump administration hadn’t tear gassed peaceful protesters in order to take this photo, it might now be appearing in Trump’s own ads—it was, after all, the product of a photo op engineered by his own team. But the image, as Priorities sensed, has instead become a symbol of Trump’s failure.
Before releasing the ad, Priorities tested it with an online panel, finding that it moved voters away from Trump and toward Biden. “Trump’s photo op, and the violent clearing of the peaceful crowd that made it possible, is the perfect example of Trump’s failed leadership and the damage it’s doing to our country,” Priorities spokesperson Josh Schwerin wrote in an email.
But Priorities might not have known just how damning the photo-op really was until Wednesday, when data was released that bore out their hunch. This week, Navigator Research released polling that, among other lines of inquiry, asked people if their impression of the photo was positive or negative: 41 percent approved, versus 59 percent who disapproved.
The poll also found that only 23 percent of Americans agreed with the tear-gassing of protesters before the photo-op, meaning that even a majority of Republicans disapproved. “I’ve asked a lot of Trump approval questions on a lot of different things that he’s done, said, tweeted, whatever, for four years,” says Bryan Bennett, polling director at the Hub Project and an advisor on the Navigator poll. “I’ve never seen a single time when Trump was below 50 percent approval among Republicans on anything. It really was a stunning result.”
The Navigator poll showed that the opposition to the tear gas incident was indicative of a larger pro-demonstrator trend: 68 percent of respondents supported the protests. Majorities also believed that the killing of George Floyd and other recent events are indicative of broader racial problems in policing and that Trump is not equipped to handle issues related to race.In fact, they believe he’s making it worse.
When the protesting started and Trump began regularly tweeting the phrase “Law & Order!” it seemed he believed that, much like Richard Nixon did in 1968, he could win a presidential campaign by quelling upheaval for a “silent majority” who disapproved of social unrest. But recent polling shows that Trump—who, after all, is the incumbent—is seen as part of the problem, not the solution.
A majority of respondents to Navigator’s poll, conducted by the Global Strategy Group and GBAO Strategies under the umbrella of the liberal Hub Project, said they did not trust Trump to improve race relations or hold police departments accountable. Further, 54 percent believe race relations have grown worse under Trump; only 15 percent say they have improved. While Trump tweets about law and order, only 39 percent actually believed he stood for these principles.
Other polls have captured similar findings. Priorities’ own polling, released Wednesday, found that racial justice and police misconduct had become one of the most important issues to voters, and that 64 percent of them believed Trump was exacerbating tensions. It’s unsurprising that the poll also showed Trump losing to Joe Biden—though the Electoral College and the way it puts massive influence in a hands of a few states means the race remains close.
Despite the signs that Trump’s tactics have backfired amid a surge of sympathy for the protesters, Trump has doubled down on a politics of white grievance, most recently by going out of his way to support monuments and military facilities that honor Confederates. According to Navigator, this isn’t a clearly popular position anymore: 43 percent support removing such monuments and 44 percent want to keep them up.
While the poll found that attitudes on police brutality toward people of color have shifted significantly, Americans—particularly white Americans—are compartmentalizing this awakening. Tellingly, 74 percent of respondents said that Floyd’s death reflected a broader problem in policing rather than an isolated incident, including 71 percent of white people and a majority of Republicans. Smaller majorities said the same of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, who was shot by Louisville police in her own apartment, and Ahmaud Arbery, killed by a white man in Georgia while jogging. But just 45 percent of respondents believed that Amy Cooper’s racist threats against birdwatcher Christian Cooper in Central Park were indicative of a broader problem, including just 40 percent of white respondents and 27 percent of Republicans. It’s one thing to acknowledge racism in police departments; but the Amy Cooper incident revealed a pervasive racism among white Americans that their peers may not yet be ready to accept.
Navigator also tapped into a deeper tension that will play out over the next five months leading up to the November elections. Remember, while 59 percent of respondents had a negative reaction to the Bible photo, among Republicans the approval was 78 percent—closer to the level of support the president’s actions typically receive from members of his own party.
Those numbers make the poll’s findings about opposition to the tear gas incident among Trump’s own base all the more remarkable. “I think there’s still a bit of a tension between Trump versus the things that he’s doing,” says J. Isaiah Bailey, associate polling and analytics director at The Hub Project. “You can directly point to some things that Trump is doing, and even his people are like, ‘I don’t like that.’ I think that is going to be a very interesting tension for us to continue to pay attention to.”
Despite the indications that the tear gas incident is a serious vulnerability for Trump, the president is not backing down. On Thursday, he tweeted praise for how soldiers, who were well-equipped and participated in an action where chemical agents were deployed, had managed to “easily” clear out peaceful and unarmed protesters, portraying them as a dangerous group.
Our great National Guard Troops who took care of the area around the White House could hardly believe how easy it was. “A walk in the park”, one said. The protesters, agitators, anarchists (ANTIFA), and others, were handled VERY easily by the Guard, D.C. Police, & S.S. GREAT JOB!
Before nationwide protests over police violence began last week, Trump’s 2020 campaign was a little lost. The job losses following the coronavirus had wiped out its plans to brag about the economy, and it was struggling to find an effective attack on Joe Biden. Now, the campaign has embraced a new tactic: run against the mob.
On Facebook, the Trump campaign is running ads that portray the protests not as the largely peaceful movement against the unlawful deaths of black people at the hands of law enforcement that it is, but as violent hordes that must be put down.
“Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem,” the text of one ad running nationwide on the platform reads. “They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting—it’s absolute madness.” The ad goes on to point the finger at Antifa, a nebulous “anti-fascist” group known for punching Nazis and otherwise getting physical in response to white supremacist and neo-Nazi agitators. But the president uses the loosely defined group, whose use of violence is widely condemned on the left, as a boogyman to paint the peaceful demonstrators as violent and distract from the disturbing and documented violence perpetrated by some police officers on protesters and journalists. (On Monday, Twitter took down a supposed Antifa account urging violence when it discovered it was actually the work of a white supremacist group.) On Facebook, Trump’s campaign has made Antifa a key word in it ads this week.
When the protests began, President Donald Trump and his quickly team decided that the demonstrations were an opportunity to run a “law and order”-style campaign, as Richard Nixon did with success more than 50 years ago in another time of national turmoil. There are plenty of reasons to think this might not turn out the way it did then; to begin with, Trump is the incumbent, while Richard Nixon was not. Trump has been using Twitter, his favorite megaphone, to literally tweet the phrase “law and order” and blame Antifa for the protests. The campaign’s application of his message on Facebook gives it additional reach and scale.
The campaign has also decided to attempt to tarnish Biden—who leads in recent national and swing state polls—by associating him with the protesters. One ad now up on Facebook builds off of a news report that some Biden campaign staff had donated to a cash bail relief fund to aid protesters arrested in Minneapolis.
“Sleepy Joe Biden’s campaign is so RADICAL that they are working to get dangerous ANARCHISTS out of jail at the cost of Americans’ safety,” reads the text of one Facebook ad running nationwide, but with a higher concentration in some swing states such as Florida. “We can’t let them get away with this. THESE RIOTS MUST END.”
Meanwhile, the campaign is running a number of ads that feature former President Barack Obama with a variety of messages. Some portray Obama as a sinister force and flick at the made-up Obamagate scandal, a supposed plot by the Obama administration to derail Trump’ 2016 campaign that Trump himself has pushed. “Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been coming after President Trump since day one and it’s time we expose them for their lies,” reads the text on a number of ads featuring images of Obama overlaid with text saying “Stand Against President Obama.” As black protesters take to the streets, the ads pit Trump not against his actual opponent, Joe Biden, but his African American predecessor.
Another set of ads using Obama’s image acknowledge the former president’s popularity among Democrats, but seeks to drive a wedge between his supporters and Biden—particularly among men, according to Facebook targeting data. These ads show images of Obama looking dejected alongside text reading: “It took 355 days for Cheatin’ Obama to endorse Joe—it’s obvious that even he didn’t want his former VP to become the next President, or else he wouldn’t have waited until Joe was the last man standing—how pathetic.”
All together, the ads make up a messaging campaign that seeks to divide Democrats and engage the Republican base with fear and anger by feeding a belief that peaceful demonstrators are dangerous mobs. That’s the playbook, at least for now.
Demonstrators protest near the White House on May 31, 2020. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Update 2:30 p.m. ET: Following publication of this story, a Facebook spokesperson informed Mother Jones that “a bug kept some ads from displaying in the Ad Library” this morning. The Trump campaign did not in fact pull its ads; they were simply not visible for a few hours. The original story is below.
After a tumultuous weekend of protests, on Monday morning President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign appears to have gone dark on Facebook.
The president has not addressed the nation as it undergoes historic unrest, with the exception of incendiary posts on Twitter and Facebook. On most days, the president’s campaign is running thousands of Facebook ads. But on Monday, the Trump campaign’s page in the Facebook Ad Library showed virtually none.
The only ads running appeared to be a small number selling “Space Force” T-shirts.
The president’s advisers are evidently unsure about how to handle the present moment. Recently, campaign aides and Trump supporters have been pushing for the campaign to unleash its war chest on Joe Biden, while those in charge of the campaign have opted to hold off on such a broadside amid the coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, the campaign has struggled to find a message that successfully works against Biden.
Now, with the nation at a standstill, crushed by a pandemic, an economic crisis, and protests against police brutality, Trump’s behemoth Facebook ad machine appears to be at a standstill as well.
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