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So it turns out treating a charitable foundation like your personal piggy bank is frowned upon. Who knew!
Tierney Sneed talked with experts in the legal and tax implications of Trump’s self-dealing, and this stuff is so out of bounds, so beyond the norm, that it could put the tax-exempt status of the foundation in jeopardy and incur serious financial consequences for Trump himself.
Worth your read this morning.
If I had to bet on this election, I’d still put my money on Hillary Clinton. But there is a big question about why she is not doing better. When presidential candidates face opponents who can’t even command the support of their party’s leadership and leading interest groups, it’s usually landslide time. Think of Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Richard Nixon against George McGovern in 1972. And Trump has less support in his party’s leadership than either Goldwater or McGovern had. Yet if the polls are to be believed, the race between Clinton and Trump is close.
As I noted earlier this evening, I was wrong about what I thought would happen when Steven Bannon took a leave from Breitbart News and took over the Trump campaign. I assumed that formally teaming up with Bannon would mean Trump finally ditching even the pretense of a ‘pivot’ and doubling down on a 90 day primal scream of rage and derp. It is still largely rage and derp. But Bannon brought a discipline to Trump’s operation that his two predecessors never could. Yes, yes, the bar is so low it might simply be a painted over part of the floor. But recognize the difference. Bannon kept Trump on the teleprompter mainly. He limited the Curiel/Khan type debacles. And yet even with the Bannon/Conway leadership, two people Trump seems largely to trust and work with, it is amazing the degree to which the campaign remains a war between a semblance of strategy and management and Trump’s instinctive drives and arrested emotional development.
One of the many fascinating things to come out of my chat with Josh Green (for Episode 3 of the podcast) was the still largely unappreciated role of Steve Bannon looming over the 2016 race.
Obviously, being Trump’s campaign chairman in itself is a very big deal. Kellyanne Conway is the nominal campaign manager. But Bannon seems to be the top executive in the operation. And to the surprise of many (including myself), rather than signaling Trump going finally totally off he rails, Bannon is the first of Trump’s three campaign chiefs to bring some level of discipline to the operation. Not a high bar. But it’s been real and important. So that’s point one.
The latest national premium phone poll has Clinton up seven percentage points among likely voters.
We’ve been seeing over recent days that Donald Trump and members of his family not only treat the Trump Foundation as a sort of personal piggy bank but actually think that’s how it’s supposed to work. Well, it seems like that may be the case. A longtime Trump family aide, Tracey Patton, told The Des Moines Register today that some of the Trump Foundation money actually is Trump’s personal money and he can do anything he wants with it.
Fascinating little nuggets of information from searching the Trump Tweet Archive.
1. Trump has used the word “neurotic” three times since he opened his account. Once about Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, once about Mika Brzezinski, once about Maureen Dowd.
As I said earlier, it really, really pains me to have to argue Corey Lewandowski’s case here. But here goes.
In lots of press reports, emailers, folks on Twitter saying that Lewandowski is now being paid for “strategy consulting” rather than simply a severance. He’s also being paid to his company, Green Monster Consulting, LLC. So basically he’s back on the payroll.
I’m surprised this is only getting attention now. It’s not just that Donald Trump essentially ripped off his own Foundation to settle business disputes – and in doing so cheated taxpayers who give his Foundation preferential tax treatment. The nature of one of the disputes itself is almost as amazing. This isn’t just some prosaic or mundane legal dispute. It’s a classic Trump cheat.