United States. Is Donald Trump ready to cheat to stay president?
Will the election be fair? Will he recognize the result in case of defeat? Many ingredients in the course of the American president contribute to the concern.
Five weeks before the US presidential election, Donald Trump continues to stir up trouble, repeating in recent days that the ballot will be skewed, calling the postal vote a scam and refusing to say whether he will agree to peacefully transmit the power to Joe Biden in case of defeat.
These words say a lot about his vision of the world, which he seems to see no other than from the angle of lies and rigging. Back on the journey of the New York billionaire, who seems to recognize no limits and constantly blurs the boundaries of morality and amoral, legal and tortious, false and true.
How he entered the University of Pennsylvania
A 1968 graduate of the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania's business school, Donald Trump says he was a great genius there and the top of the class, calling the school one of the toughest in the world. But oddly enough, his name was not among the 58 on the dean’s list, the honor roll published at the time by the Daily Pennsylvanian.
Trump’s entry requirements for Wharton School in 1966 are questionable at least. To be sure, he benefited from the mediation of his older brother, Fred Trump Jr, whose best friend, James Nolan, works in the admissions department at the University of Pennsylvania.
Nolan, 82, denied last year that the school at the time was particularly selective, with half of the applicants accepted. And in his memory, he "didn't feel like he was in front of a genius" during the admission interview with student Donald Trump.
Prior to transferring to Wharton School, Trump had studied for two years at Fordham University in New York City's Bronx. And according to his niece, psychologist Mary Trump, daughter of Fred Trump Jr., he also cheated to get into it. High school student Donald reportedly got an excellent mark on the Scholastic assessment test (SAT), a compulsory exam to enter a university in the United States, by paying a classmate to take the exam for him. Cheating is her way of life, says Mary Trump in a July book titled Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.
How he escaped the Vietnam War
Unlike 2.6 million Americans of his generation, Donald Trump did not take part in the Vietnam War, which claimed 58,000 lives in the ranks of the US Army. How did he escape conscription? He reportedly suffered from a bony growth in his heel. Problem: The medical certificate provided in the fall of 1968 was most likely of convenience. According to a 2018 survey published by the New York Times, the document was signed by Larry Braunstein, a podiatrist in Queens - the New York neighborhood where the Trump family lived - who was leasing his practice to Fred Trump Sr., entrepreneur of the real estate and father of young Donald, then 22 years old.
Dr Braunstein died in 2007, but he has reportedly often said, in private, that he did Fred Trump a favor. The newspaper interviewed his daughters, Elysa and Sharon, to whom he reportedly told that Donald Trump did not have a foot injury that would exempt him from military service. Has he examined it? I don't know, Dr Elysa Braunstein, who knows what her father got in return, told the newspaper: When there was a problem in the building, my father would call and Trump would fix it immediately. According to colleagues of Dr. Braunstein, this exchange of good practices with Trump Sr. would have also earned him to escape rent increases.
How he spread stories and bought silence
To shape his image, and in particular to pass himself off as richer and more attractive than he is, Donald Trump kept inventing fictional characters whose sole role was to intoxicate the media. From the 1980s, journalists remember receiving calls from a certain John Miller, who claims to be Trump's press secretary, others from John Barron, the so-called vice-president of the Trump Organization. .
Barron, for example, insisted on journalist Jonathan Greenberg, who established the list of the 400 richest personalities in Forbes magazine: he artificially inflates the fortune of the jet setter Trump, in order to ensure him a place in the ranking.
In 1991, John Miller, who claims to be a new press secretary in New York Square, and a confidant of Trump, called celebrity journalists to give them tips on his divorce proceedings with his first wife, Ivana. , and his relationship with model Marla Maples and other conquests: He's a really nice guy, he doesn't harm anyone, he treated his wife well and he will treat Marla well, he confides to Sue. Carlswell from People magazine. Miller will claim to several reporters that Madonna wanted to date Trump, that he had a relationship with Carla Bruni (who has always denied) and simultaneously with three women.
Several newspapers, including the Washington Post, have established that Miller, Barron and Trump (the first name of the son Trump will have in 2006 with his current wife Melania) are one, the calls from the Trump Organization and the masked voice is well that of Donald Trump.
Having become the Republican Party's presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump will, on the contrary, endeavor to erase the traces of real connections. He instructs his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to buy for 130,000 dollars the silence of Stephanie Gregory Clifford, alias Stormy Daniels on the screens of the cinema X. Likewise, he had his friend the boss of the National buy 150,000 dollars. Enquirer, an exclusive interview with former Playboy model Karen McDougal, which will be deliberately left in a drawer. He dated these two women in 2006, shortly after the birth of his last son.
How he tricked in business
Donald Trump the businessman seems to have crossed the red line multiple times in his career. As a result, he has been the subject of hundreds of complaints - but not always of appeals - from artisans who did not have enough backbone to take legal action. Michael Diehl, owner of a musical instrument store, recounted in 2016 how the supply of pianos to the Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City in 1990 almost left him in the shackles. The Trump Organization only paid him $ 70,000, take it or leave it, of the 100,000 owed.
Pursued by the Attorney General of New York, Trump and his minority associates, on the other hand, had to compromise in November 2016 and compensate up to $ 25 million to the “students” of Trump university who sued them for fraud. Between 2004 and 2011, the institution usurped the college designation to provide bogus real estate investment training billed as high as $ 35,000.
Trump also had to pay $ 2 million in 2019 to eight charities. He had embezzled money from the Trump foundation, a now dismantled charitable foundation, to pay personal bills related to his business or political activity. So the purchase (10,000 dollars) of a portrait of himself hung in one of his hotels in Florida.
A corner of the veil on the functioning of the Trump empire has also been lifted by the President's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, sentenced at the end of 2018 to three years in prison for tax, banking and electoral fraud, which he says he committed. at the instigation of Trump. During hearings before Congress and in a book in which he settles his accounts, Cohen thus suggests that Trump would have lied to Deutsche Bank, the creditor who resuscitated him after his bankruptcies in the 1990s: he would have deliberately overvalued several of his real estate in 2014 in order to obtain a new loan to acquire the Buffalo Bills American football team, which would have constituted a tort. The project was aborted.
But the heart of the reactor, the Trump Organization and the billionaire's personal accounts, remain protected by a deliberate opacity. Donald Trump is the only president who has refused to publish his tax returns. His lawyers continue to rail against a July 2020 ruling by a federal court, which requires him to provide these documents to the Manhattan prosecutor.
How he was a rigging industrialist
If Donald Trump inherited a real estate business from his father, the activities he developed situate him in the world of entertainment and even more precisely of illusion and rigging. This is true of the Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants, which he owned 1996 to 2015, and The Apprentice, a reality TV show he hosted and produced (2004 to 2015), which did of reality than the name.
The American psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, who has dissected the psychological springs of the character, especially likes to recall that "before setting his sights on the political arena, Trump had thrown him on the rings of professional wrestling, where the real facts and the fiction are interwoven to create scenarios related to the feelings of the public ”. From 1998 to 2013, he made a foray into the fight production of this bogus sport where the fights are arranged and the wrestlers given nom de guerre.
This experience of a world where the recipe for success is to make people believe, emphasizes Grosz, seems to have rubbed off on his perception of the political struggle.
Defeated in the first Republican primary of 2016 in Iowa, Trump says Texas Senator Ted Cruz could only win him by cheating. At the August 2020 Republican convention, he declares from the podium that he can only be beaten if the election is rigged, and on September 23 he calls the mail ballots a big scam.
Another indication of this confusion between fiction and reality, Trump dressing up his political opponents with nicknames mimicking the world of wrestling: he invented "Hillary the Twisted" and "Joe the Sleeping" on the model of "Jake the Serpent" or "Dwayne. le Roc ”. In 2017, the US president tweeted a video in which he appeared slaying an opponent whose head had been replaced by the logo of CNN, one of his pet peeves.
#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017
Sign of this abolition of borders, seems to make no difference between the true and the false, that he weaves together permanently. Since the start of his term, the Washington Post has counted more than 20,000 deceptive statements and outright lies from the President's mouth.
How Trump once crossed the yellow line to be elected
In May 2019, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller released his findings after two years of investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, in which 34 people were indicted and six Trump relatives convicted. The Mueller Report noted the existence of widespread social media manipulation aimed at polarizing American public opinion and weakening Democratic candidate Hillary.
But the former FBI director has not found compelling evidence of collusion between the Republican campaign team and Russian agents. And while he doesn't accuse Donald Trump of obstructing the investigation, his report doesn't exonerate him either. However, some pieces of this puzzle, which Mueller could not piece together as a whole, remain troubling: Roger Stone, a close friend of Trump, knew in the summer of 2016 that WikiLeaks had obtained hacked emails from the Democratic Party; sentenced to 40 months in prison for lying to Congress and pressuring witnesses, escaped jail after presidential pardon; the U.S. Senate, which completed its own investigation this summer, found Konstantin Kilimnik, with whom Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort had a relationship, was an agent of the GRU, the underground action service of the Russian army.
Equally disturbing: Donald Trump, this time very clearly, crossed the red line in the summer of 2019, during a telephone conversation with the new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, where he linked military aid to Ukraine to the outbreak of an investigation into his Democratic rival Joe Biden. This earned him an indictment by the Democratic-majority House of Representatives in December. If Trump escaped impeachment, he owes his salvation to the fact that the Republican majority united in January during the Senate trial.
