Trump's record is a rap sheet of fraud and lies. But it is what some Americans choose as their proud heritage.

It is not that the FBI is biased against Trump.  It's that the list of offenses he has made is so impressive that he is near the top of their list of suspected miscreants that it is their job to monitor.  One post cannot detail the number of fraudulent, illegal, and deceptive dealings of the man currently holding the presidency.  The most puzzling aspect is what has happened to the American people that this could happen?  The stories of Trump's deals have been reported for decades, but Americans have been brain-washed into thinking that anything done in the name of business is okay as long as money is made,  no matter how dishonest or how many people are destroyed.

One of the most extensive compilations of Trump's offenses was published by the conservative National Review.   This was published six months before the election.   It introduced its list with this statement:

Given their number and scale, it can be difficult to keep track of all of Donald Trump’s many scandals and debacles. And so, for those whose heads are still spinning, here is a comprehensive roundup of the man’s disastrous record:

And then it went on to list his four bankruptcies,  his refusal to pay contractors, his adultery and divorces, and his many failed enterprises.   It lists 20 categories.

A few days before the election, Politicususa printed the account of a Canadian journalist who fact checked everything Trump said.  The article reports:

In Donald Trump "you have a candidate who is frequently saying 20 false things in a day, up to 37 on some days.”

Nothing he has done since taking office has diminished his reputation for lying.  Factcheck summarizes his presedential performance:

We first dubbed President Donald Trump, then just a candidate, as “King of Whoppers” in our annual roundup of notable false claims for 2015.  He dominated our list that year – and again in 2016 – but there was still plenty of room for others. 

This year? The takeover is complete. 

In his first year as president, Trump used his bully pulpit and Twitter account to fuel conspiracy theories, level unsubstantiated accusations and issue easily debunked boasts about his accomplishments. 

And a chorus of administration officials helped in spreading his falsehoods.

The New York Times tracked what Trump said during his first 100 days in office, noting,   "The Times has logged at least one false or misleading claim per day on 91 of his first 99 days (Saturday is Day 100). On five days, Mr. Trump went golfing, and on two he made limited public statement."

By November, the Times compiled a list of Trump's falsehoods and explained why each was untrue.

So we have catalogued nearly every outright lie he has told publicly since taking the oath of office. Updated: The president is still lying, so we've added to this list, taking it through Nov. 11, and provided links to the facts in each case.

The Washington Post also kept a record of Trump's lies and published it with this headline:

In 298 days, President Trump has made 1,628 false and misleading claims

USA Today has found Trump to be an offense to the nation.  But after one of his latest tweet rages. it declared he is "not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush. "  The paper concludefd:

Rock bottom is no impediment for a president who can always find room for a new low.

The media carry out their responsibility as the Fourth Estate in recording his constant malevolence and dishonesty.  But it does not examine closely those politicians wiho collude with him to sell out the principles of liberty, equality, and justice in order to impose their own agendas on the country.  Nor does it face the fact that Americans elected Trump president and have knowingly chosen to follow the path to deceit and malice that Germany blazed in the 1930s.  

In its efforts to make nice to its audience,  the press has avoided facing the fact that Trump is what Americans chose as their moral and intellectual emblem.  And the lower he sinks, so does the nation,  as a matter of its choice.  He defines what America has become.  Except for those who understand what genuine resistance entails.

How the Democrats shot their foot off

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/democratic-sens-manchin-and-leahy-say-franken-shouldnt-have-resigned/

The current frenzy for reporting incidents of male sexual harassment is a revival of a flurry of such accusations that the nation experienced during the early 1990s.  At that time, it was fueled by the forced resignation of Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon, who had quite a reputation for his overt expressions of lust for women.  And by the hearings of accusations of harassment of Anita Hill by Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas. As a previous post reports, higher education addressed those allegations as they affected both the accusers and the accused.  Men responded, then as now, with admissions, denials, and counter accusations.  Women complained that they weren't believed or feared retaliation if they reported incidents. But a lot of men were fired or otherwise disciplined in summary ways that avoided due process in which the accused would face their accusers.  Professional organizations that deal with due process stepped in and restored some semblance of justice to the proceedings where they could.


The presumption that guided harassment accusations in academe was that everyone, accuser and accused, deserved due process.  And due process requires that an accused person has the right to know who the accuser is and to present exculpatory evidence.  In the zeal to correct a wrong, many institutions neglected due process sometimes to save embarrassment to the accuser, to prevent retaliation, and sometimes to evade the hostilities that such cases produce.  A lawyer who worked on such cases said,  "It's cheaper to fire someone in many cases than it is to defend against a claim of sexual harassment."  In a few cases where men did pursue and prove false claims, however, the results were damaging to institutions as well as to the person who made a false accusation.  The settlements of civil cases were harshly expensive, and in some jurisdictions the making of a false harassment charge could be  considered a criminal act, thus implicating the organization that fired or took disciplinary action without following the procedures of due process.  

In the current flurry of accusations, the mistakes of a quarter century ago are being repeated.   In the frenzy to respond effectively in behalf of harassed and assaulted women, due process is largely forgone.  A columnist for a teen magazine expressed a current attitude:

Here's an unpopular opinion: I'm actually not at all concerned about innocent men losing their jobs over false sexual assault/harassment allegations. First common false allegations VERY rarely happen, so even bringing it up borders on a derailment tactic. It's a microscopic risk in comparison to the issue at hand (worldwide, systemic oppression of half the population). And more importantly: The benefit of all of us getting to finally tell the truth + the impact on victims FAR outweigh the loss of any one man's reputation.

The cases of Al Franken and Garrison Keillor in Minnesota are two in which the absence of due process is a glaring omission.  There is inherent dubiousness in some of the accusations and a severity of punishment and a dismissal of human worth that is more characteristic of a vengeful rage than of an act of accountability.

In Franken's case, the first accuser is herself photographed in some on-stage acts of groping and sexual horseplay.  Daily Kos and comedian Tom Arnold claim that Leeann Tweeden was coached by ultra conservative associates and the she was a birther in claiming that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. Subsequent accusations followed a meme-like repetition that women asked to pose for picture with Franken and in the process he squeezed their butts. Politicians and their staffs have challenged the credibility of those circumstances.  In large public gatherings, politicians have staffs around them to manage and organize their appearances.  They would be aware of any incidents, and an objective of the appearances is to give the politician a favorable exposure to the public and strenuously avoid any offense. People who know Franken, especially his staff, say he does not behave in such a manner and is simply not stupid enough to engage in such behavior.  Most egregious, is that some of the accusations were anonymous.  What happened to Franken is that members of his own party lynched him in order to demonstrate their moral superiority over the opposition.

Franken asked for a full investigation by the Senate ethics committee.  However, when members of his own party demanded his resignation, he saw that he would be unable to function as a senator, and resigned.  Not one politician in the Senate which claims to be the nation's most upstanding deliberative body in upholding liberty, equality, and justice mentioned due process.

Former Republican Governor of Minnesota Arne Carlson spoke for many people on the matter.   He wrote:

I am deeply troubled by the resignation of U.S. Sen. Al Franken and the complete absence of anything resembling due process... a rush to punishment is totally unacceptable.

While the Democrats were flaunting their parade on the "high road," they were in fact flouting any pretense to justice and showing disdain for the most basic principle of democracy.  They destroyed any credibility to what they claim the party stands for.  The kindest thing one can say about their performance is they showed a level of stupidity that befits the era of Trump.  The U.S. Senate seemed to compete with him to see who could show the most abject failure of decency.

The case of Garrison Keillor was similarly excessive and insanely so in Minneapolis Public Radio's attempt to totally obliterate him.  Apparently, he had seething enemies who longed for a chance to reign vengeance on him.  He  has indicated he does not intend to go quietly into the night, however.


It has been encouraging to see that harassers and assaulters of women have been called onto account.  But that encouragement was dashed into bits when those exposures became reason to abandon even the most rudimentary forms of justice.

***Early in the accusations against members of Congress, Nancy Pelosi was asked about how the allegations should be handled and she mentioned due process, for which she was soundly scolded by pundits and commenters.

How Molded Fiber Glass Co. got the shaft from Donald Trump

Molded Fiber Glass built the onion domes and minarets for one of Trump's great failures for $3 million.  They had to sue to get their money, but only got $1 million

 Molded Fiber Glass Co. is preparing to close its Aberdeen plant in February, putting 409 employees out of work.  While it enters history as one of the transient companies  that had a brief use for Aberdeen,  its own history includes being a dupe in one of Donald Trump's  perfidious bilking schemes.

The story is recounted in an Associated Press story which ran most prominently in the Atlantic city newspaper, which is where Trump built his Taj Mahal casino, a failed enterprise which demonstrated just what kind of '"businessman" Trump was.   He opened his $1.2 billion casino in April 1990.  It filed for its first bankruptcy in July 1991.  Trump was trying to corner the casino business in Atlantic City, but his finanancing was shaky and fraudulent.  The New York Times reported that "Mr. Trump assembled his casino empire by borrowing money at such high interest rates — after telling regulators he would not — that the businesses had almost no chance to succeed. " He raised  capital by offering junk bonds.   During its run, the casino violated almost all of the financial rules, among which was money laundering.  Tump managed to divest himself of the property by 2009 after a constant history of bankruptcy proceedings and it was taken over by fellow billionaire Carl Icahn.  Trump left behind a number of contractors and other businesses who he did not pay.  Defaulting on bills was the art Trump used in his deal-making.  Molded Fiber Glass was one of his victims.

In early 1990, Trump was pushing contractors to finish their work so the casino could open for business.  But in February, they became concerned when payments for work that had been completed stopped.  The AP story takes up the story of Molded Fiber Glass:

Five hundred miles away, in Ashtabula, Ohio, Robert Morrison of the Molded Fiber Glass Co. was pressing his workers to finish the domes and minarets and other faux Moorish ornaments in time for the April opening — and worrying about who was going to pay for all of it. An invoice sent a few weeks earlier for $1.4 million still hadn't been paid.

"Naturally, you assumed you'd get paid," Molded Fiber Glass CEO Morrison wrote in a book about the Taj published in 1994. "Donald Trump was flamboyant, but he was an immensely successful contractor who paid his debts.”

Many contractors didn't know what to think. Trump was denying he was in financial trouble: "I have a tremendous amount of cash," he told the Washington Post that March. Far from being overstretched, he told Newsweek, he was looking to expand: "I think the people with a lot of cash —and I have a lot of cash — are going to be able to make beautiful deals in the next few years."

  Morrison of Molded Fiber Glass was getting desperate for his money and so he turned to Irwin Tobman, a field supervisor in Atlantic City overseeing the installation of the domes and minarets. Tobman had been told earlier by a Trump official that the delay in sending the check was due to a "slight glitch.”

 On June 12, Molded Fiber Glass sued for the $3 million it was owed. A few days later, its lawyers ratcheted up the pressure; they threatened to remove the domes from the Taj and cart them away. The New York Post headline: "The Taj May Go Topless.” 

Molded Fiber Glass never removed its domes, choosing instead to join with Lundy and 46 others in a negotiated settlement with Trump for cash equal to 33 cents of each dollar owed, plus 50 cents in convertible bonds, according to Morrison's book. Trump also threw in a "right of first refusal," meaning the contractors would get future work at the Taj if they matched the best bid from others. The bonds would eventually pay in full, but the holders had to wait at least several years.

Strapped for money, some contractors sold them immediately, getting a fraction of what they were worth at maturity. Among the sellers was Morrison of Molded Fiber Glass, according to Tobman, his man in Atlantic City. Morrison ended up having to write off $2 million of the $3 million that Trump owed him, according to his book. The company refused to comment.

A telling line in Robert Morrison's account is, "Donald Trump was flamboyant, but he was an immensely successful contractor who paid his debts.”   Morrison, who died in 2002, wrote a book about the entire affair titled High Stakes to High Risk: The Strange Story of Resorts, International and the Taj Mahal.  A search on the Internet turns up no reviews or accounts of the book, but the overall impression is that Morrison, the founder of  molded Fiber Glass, regards the Taj Mahal affair as corporate business as usual.  He calls Trump who had already earned  reputation for bilking contractors "an immensely successful contractor," and any who checked knew that Trump did not always pay his debts.
As the  AP story relates, "Trump's cash crunch left Morrison with no money to pay the dozen companies he had hired to help with the Taj work. But Morrison paid them anyway... by borrowing the money."    Still, "The trouble wasn't enough to keep Molded Fiber Glass from doing work for Trump again. The company helped with the roof of the Trump Parc East, a residential building overlooking Central Park in Manhattan... "

When AP reporters contacted some of business people who were stung by Trump about that they thought him, they did not "believe Trump acted badly given the hardball, sometimes unscrupulous nature of industry."   in other words, it was business as usual.

One of the men, however told the reporters, "If ethics or morality has nothing to do with business, he's a very good businessman."

Me, too. Caught between a rock and a hard on

Sexual matters are a fact of academic life.  They include sexual discrimination, sexual harassment,  and sexual assault.  And some more positive aspects.  Harassment and assault often happen in conjunction.  But there are other matters of consensual sexual misconduct that break societal rules,  and there are marriages that fail for reasons having little to do with sex.  I have witnessed affairs that ended marriages and careers.  On the campuses where I have worked,  sexual misbehavior has happened, frequently, but it has not disrupted the ability of the colleges to carry on with their primary work. Most faculty and students tend to the business of higher learning and do not get distracted or diverted by other people's libidinous peccadilloes.

I was aware of incidents, but carefully avoided circumstances where they might occur.   I knew about the dean who was fired because he could not leave a young oriental professor alone.  I heard the narrative of another dean and advisor to student government, the father of seven, who was shacking up with the president of the student association, also married.  I worked with a number of drama coaches who were suddenly let go because they couldn't resist the attractions of student actors, male and female.  At the institutions where I have worked, I was ignorant of lesser transgressions which did not make such good tales. But my aloofness ended late one Friday afternoon when a faculty member, his wife, and a lawyer from the Twin Cities came to my office.

As an officer of the faculty collective bargaining organization,  I became sort of the go-to person in matters of due process.  I was a negotiator for the contract with the Board of Regents and was proud of the provisions for due process that we had hammered out.  I often served as the grievance officer for people who were responding to or using due process to settle some matter.

For those who are not familiar with due process,  it is a set of procedures to be followed anytime a faculty member is involved in some kind of disciplinary action.  The procedures insure that any such actions adhere to the standards established in the Fifth Amendment.  

The contract requires that any person to be charged with a transgression be provided with notice of both the names of those who have made allegations against the faculty unit member and the specific nature and factual basis for the charges; a reasonable time and opportunity to present testimony on any disputed issue of material fact; and a hearing before an impartial decision-maker.   In addition, the contract provides a grievance procedure for anyone who thinks a disciplinary measure was wrongly or incompetently imposed.

The three persons who came to my office were irate because the professor had been called in and served with a notice that a sexual harassment complaint had been made against him, and he was informed that the matter was being investigated and he would be advised of the outcome.  The notice did not name the accuser, the specifics of the complaint, or provide  any opportunity for him to obtain the information or any opportunity to respond.  He was told that the procedure was in wide use on campuses so that women would not feel humiliated or intimated for fear of retaliation if they reported incidents of harassment and abuse.  


The professor, his spouse, and the lawyer came to see me as the union president and the person most familiar with due process matters.  Their first question was, why did the union allow such a violation of what was stipulated in the contract?  My answer was that the notice they were given was the first that I, or any other union officer, was aware that a special procedure was being applied to sexual harassment cases.  

It turned out that the university attorney had been instructed to formulate a procedure for handling sexual harassment cases.  He apparently devised one from procedures used on other campuses.  The attorney of the professor outlined actions he was prepared to take against both the university and the union if the case was pursued any further using the procedure with which it was served.  For reasons I have never understood, the administration decided to go ahead despite the fact that the collective bargaining contract required a careful observance of due process.

As the case continued,  there was some background information regarding the professor  I became aware of.  He had applied for a much better position at a more prestigious university and had been accepted.  Any accusation of misconduct could jeopardize his new job.  Furthermore,  his wife hated Aberdeen, and was clearly dedicated to seeing that nothing would interfere with the new opportunity at a place she much preferred.  Her parents told her to hire a lawyer, and they would pay all the legal fees involved in behalf of the professor.  When the professor, his wife, and their lawyer came to my office,  they were already building a case in the event that they had to take the matter to court.

The administration said it would follow the procedure it informed the professor about.  The professor's lawyer was not a member of the South Dakota Bar,  so he hired a lawyer who was to represent the professor before the state judicial system at his direction.  Very quickly the university administration learned that the lawyers appeared before a judge to obtain a writ of mandamus which would order the university to  follow the due process procedure required in the collective bargaining contract.  When the administration realized that the professor and his lawyers were playing hard ball, it began to make conciliatory gestures,  but the lawyers were adamant and demanded the name of the complainant, the specific complaint and the factual basis for it, and the schedule of hearings for processing it.  During the fury of actions generated by their demands, it became clear that the lawyers were gathering information for a civil suit in the professor's behalf, if it came to that.

By this time, my role was that of a bystander, a union representative who monitored the proceedings to insure that they met the due process terms of the contract.  When the full complaint against the professor was finally presented as required, it identified a non-traditional student in the professor's class who was irate at receiving a low grade on an examination.  The lawyers and their investigators immediately assembled a narrative of what happened.

When the student received her exam back, she went to the student union with other students from the class and launched into a tirade about what a terrible professor the man was.  Other students suggested that she make an appointment with the professor to talk over the grade.  She did so and the professor talked with her at a table in the outer office with the departmental secretary present.  (He later explained that he always had a witness present when meeting with an irate student.)  He went over the examination with her, which included both multiple choice and essay questions.  On the multiple choice part, there were four versions given out to discourage copying answers from a neighbor's paper.  On some of the questions the student had marked ridiculous answers, which would indicate that they were copied.   In his explanation of her errors on the exam, he pointed out that she had chosen the worst possible answers on some of the questions.  He told her that she could submit a set of reading notes for extra credit to raise her grade for the course.

The meeting set off another rage on the part of the student, and she told a group of students that the professor accused her of cheating and announced that he was going to be taught a big lesson.  As one of the students she complained to explained it,  "She had a real hard on for the professor."

Her initial complaint was that the professor discriminated against her because she was a woman.  Later she claimed that the professor made sexual advances on her.  However, as the professor never had a meeting with the woman without a witness present, her claims were refuted  by witnesses during the hearings on the matter.  And as an aggressive lawyer represented the professor, the administration followed the rules of due process and finally determined that the complaint had to be dismissed as having no factual merit.  At the end of the school year, the young professor and his spouse happily moved to his new job.

As the professors I worked with agreed, the episode proved two things:  due process depends a lot on having a determined lawyer and the money to pay for one.  A dean later told me the student had transferred, and he expressed relief that the episode was over.  We took up a case in behalf of a dishonest, vindictive person and could have been sued out of existence, he said.

While that incident was taken care of,  the matter of how to deal with sex issues become a topic of urgent and intense discussion throughout higher education.   i was asked to join among others who dealt with due process to analyze the matter and come up with recommendations that would encourage women to report instances of harassment and abuse and seek recourse without violating any rights of due process.  We weren't very successful.  The committee was largely composed of department heads, many of whom were women.  They agreed that flagrant instances of harassment and assault in which the evidence was clear and unmistakeable could be taken care of through due process,  but many cases involved clashes of personality which are all but impossible to solve to anyone's satisfaction.   Acts of harassment are often defined by how a complainant and an accused person choose to interpret them.  The case I cite above was driven to resolution by the fact that it would eventually be tried in court and the university had no case against the factual one the professor's lawyer had assembled. Cases where there are no witnesses or evidence, just one person's word against another's,  can be impossible to resolve to the satisfaction of anyone involved.  The people asked to offer ideas about resolving sexual harassment complaints generally agreed that they would prefer to avoid them because they would inevitably make some dedicated enemies, no matter how hard they tried to be impartial and fair, and would end up with a toxic work environment.  Many such complaints arise from animosities that have non-sexual histories.

The issue that embroiled higher education was one that has dogged sexual harassment situations since Anita Hill accused now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings.  Anita Hill and a number of women who were in Congress at the time still think that Joe Biden, who chaired the confirmation hearings, did not handle the proceedings well.  

Women want to be able to report instances of harassment and assault without fear of retaliation or the embarrassment of humiliating details.    They complained that their accusations were met with skepticism and disbelief.  In order to demonstrate that sexual harassment reports would be believed, many organizations treated allegations of harassment or assault as established fact, and fired or took other disciplinary actions against accused faculty members without  due process.  Faculty on campuses where such actions took place saw these actions encroaching into matters of promotion and tenure and academic freedom.  Calls to investigate the actions and place sanctions against the offending institutions became too numerous for professional faculty organizations to handle.  

A few institutions worked out procedures that protected women who reported instances of harassment while giving the accused full access to due process while the complaints were investigated.   Those institutions were often cited for their efforts.  But the procedures they followed did not stop the constant criticism and complaints.  The hostile attitudes between those who contended that allegations were sufficient proof of misconduct and those who thought all disciplinary actions should follow a meticulous due process created sense of despair about confronting sexual harassment.  People in leadership positions in some cases resigned their jobs rather than try to deal with it.

One organization obtained some foundation grants to do a study on how harassment cases were handled to see if it could identify the best methods of resolution.  It assembled panels of people who were knowledgeable and experienced in due process to review the records of cases to determine how carefully and effectively procedures were followed, the kinds of misconduct charged, and the appropriateness of the resolution of the cases.   I was asked to serve on a review panel.

For about half of the cases, there was no question that harassment or assault had occurred.  The resolutions ranged from corrective actions to dismissal.

The other half of the cases were an incredible mess to sort through.  Many involved things said to women that men said they did not say.  Or that women took as sexual when they were not, according to the men.  The complaints came at a time when academe was in retrenchment, promotion and tenure was scarce, and the competition for tenure and advancement was fierce.  Many complaints were made by women and other men against rivals for advancement.  An accusation of sexually aggressive behavior could take a person out of the competition, it was thought at some institutions.  

A significant number of the cases were not matters of sexual harasssment, but arose from personal animosities, much like the case  I cited above. They were treated as sexual harassment largely because both genders were involved and administrators used the sexual harassment designation to move the problems to someone else's responsibility. For the panels reviewing the cases, the files reflected a record of how vile and unscrupulous people can be and to what depths of behavior they can sink when in competition with others.  An example was a case of two professors, one male and one female, who had a history of detesting each other for years.  The case became a sexual harassment issue when the female professor complained about her department being dominated by old, white men.  The male professor said it was unfortunate that advancing age  and declining sexual interest limited the opportunity to screw your way into a job you weren't qualified to hold in the first place.   Reading those case files back then was like reading Donald Tump's tweets now.  They were illustrations of the petty treacheries that characterize the culture of some institutions. 

The panels concluded that the cases where sexual harassment was established as fact were undercut by the cases where was doubt or differences of opinion about what had actually occurred.  They also concluded that all parties, both the accused and accuser, deserved the full application of due process.

Of the current accusations,  the ones in Minnesota involving Garrison Keillor and Al Franken emphasize  the need for due process in which facts, evidence, and witnesses get thorough examination.  Minnesota Public Radio went excessively ballistic in its eradication of Keillor, to the point that indicates that some maliciously resentful souls were waiting for some pretext to vaporize him.  Keillor seems to know who his accuser is, at least.  Franken who has apologized for any potential offense he created is in a situation where he doesn't know his accusers, except the first one, and does not remember the occasions,  which involve him posing for photographs with the accusers.  The Senate Ethics Panel has convened its inquiry, as Franken has requested, and the accusers, Franken, and the public all deserve the full application of due process with the examination of evidence and witnesses.

A detailed explanation of the standards of due process can be reviewed by clicking this sentence.   It explains how universities are expected to handle sexual harassment complaints and which can be instituted in other settings.  It's a matter of justice for all.