Letter to the Editor: Trump Is the Fake News

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Amid the cyclone of investigations that is swirling about the White House, twisting the Trump administration into bizarre and unnatural forms, several phenomena require special notice.

In a remarkable feat of journalism, The New York Times has exposed the utter falsity that is Donald Trump’s persistent claim to be a brilliant businessman and a self-made billionaire. “Self-made” evidently meant that the $413 million in today’s money that Trump received from his father, Fred Trump, was of no consequence.

Even worse, Trump proceeded to blow this fortune and more with almost preternatural incompetence, racking up losses of some $1.17 billion in the years from 1985 to 1994.

Virtually all of the ventures at which Trump threw money, among them Mar-a-Lago, the New York Generals football team, the Trump Shuttle airline, and the Atlantic City casinos Trump Castle and Trump Taj Mahal, came a cropper.

Equally devastating, it now appears that Trump has evaded an indictment for obstruction of justice in the Robert Mueller report only because of a flimsy Office of Legal Counsel ruling that an incumbent president cannot be indicted, essentially regardless of circumstance.

The president avoided an indictment not because of a lack of evidence, but because of a technicality. Hail to the chief. In a letter released to the public on May 6, 663 former federal prosecutors asserted jointly that but for the OLC ruling, Trump could have been indicted on at least 10 counts of obstruction. Anything less, the attorneys claim, “runs counter to logic and our experience.”

There is no petition for the contrary view. Score this 663 for the public interest and 0 for Trump.

Granted, no one is perfect. The critic should bear in mind the Biblical injunction against “casting the first stone.”

But Trump is in a class by himself. The man lies about his hotels, his casinos, his golf courses, his ex-wives, his ex-mistresses and his ex-attorneys. He lies about his height, his weight and his bone spurs. He lies about the value of the fake Renoir in his Manhattan apartment. If he had a dog, he would lie about his dog.



Disgustingly, Trump posits that in 2016 he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton only because millions of ineligibles somehow voted illegally. For this vicious slander of the national integrity, Trump characteristically has no proof whatsoever.

You want fake news? It is Trump.

From the establishment of the United States in 1776 amid pledges of “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” such outstanding American leaders as Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy and Reagan have inspired the nation and the world to new heights of human achievement. Not without cause, were we “the shining city on the hill.”

But to the embarrassment of the nation and the world, we are now mired in the sinkhole of Donald Trump. The sooner the man leaves, the better.

 

Joseph Tipler

Centralia