When Donald Tr*mp came down that golden escalator in 2015, I should have started posting what I knew about him then. I never did until he was reelected & I have to live with the fact that I cared more about not alienating any of my customers, friends & family than I did about my own country. I honestly never thought he could win. I thought other people & the mainstream media would expose who & what he was. After all, he was an open secret in New York where most of the MSM is based. I didn't see it as my responsibility to tell what I knew. I do now.
Everyone in New York & New Jersey, especially in the real estate & construction industries, knew he was a conman & a lying self-promoter. He had been a dishonest braggart his entire adult life. A lot of people, including many news organizations, knew he regularly called up journalists pretending to be "John Barron" to sing his own praises, especially when those praises were undeserved. That narcissistic trait has never changed.
In the industry, it was well-known that the real estate developer made much of his money from cheating his partners, contractors & vendors. He would enter into contracts with no intention of ever fulfilling his financial obligations. He would regularly pay half or less of what he owed & dare the party he cheated to sue him for the rest, knowing his pockets were much deeper so he could outlast them in court. This went on for decades.
I first heard about the corrupt businessman in the mid-80s when I started spending a few weeks a year with friends & family in Manhattan & Fire Island, New York. Most of our friends, like my husband & I, were in the architecture & construction business. Our family held senior positions with a luxury crystal company that catered to the New York wealthy. They all knew plenty of people the president had cheated & a number contractors & vendors he had put out of business by refusing to pay them what they were owed.
I designed a few offices in Manhattan in the early to mid-90s & managed their construction. I talked with a number of contractors while working there who confirmed what I had heard from my friends. Everyone in the industry knew how unethically he operated, but there were always some willing to roll the dice that their experience would be different. They learned the hard way that he could not be trusted.
With an bachelors & masters in Interior Architecture & a decade of architecture & construction management experience under my belt, I spent the decade from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s as V.P. of Construction for a world-renowned architect & international real estate developer managing the construction of millions of square feet of high-rise office buildings, hotels & retail spaces in downtown Atlanta. The owner knew the New York developer well & told me on a number of occasions how personally unethical he was. He told me about the multiple bankruptcies & Tr*mp's refusal to pay his contractors & vendors what he was legally obligated to. He told me about the image he had created out of nothing more than self-promotion. He told me about the unethical business practices that were well-known to other developers who felt he gave them all a bad name.
My boss, probably 20 years Tr*mp's senior, was a misogynist with quite a bit of infidelity in his background too, though he was ethical in his business dealings. He recognized the moral bankruptcy of the New York developer & would occasionally say, "This isn't a Tr*mp company & I'm not Donald Tr*mp" to explain how he wanted his businesses run. Also, as an award-winning architect, he had disdain for the ego of a man who insisted on putting his name on every building he developed & some that he didn't, especially when he was unqualified to design them himself. My boss did design his own buildings, but would not allow them to be named after him. He thought that lacked imagination & reeked of narcissism.
So, after decades of knowing what kind of ethics this president had & all about his business failures, when The Apprentice premiered in 2004 portraying him as some kind of brilliant businessman, I laughed. At that point, Donald Tr*mp was drowning in debt & facing near-bankruptcy. While he portrayed a savvy business mogul on TV, his core businesses were hemorrhaging millions & he had reported nearly $353 million in net losses during the 1990s & early 2000s. The reality show created the illusion of him as a successful real estate developer when, at the time, he was anything but. He did it for publicity to feed his ego & the money to keep himself afloat. And it worked.
Millions of Americans believed the premise of The Apprentice, not realizing the reality show was in fact scripted. They believed the "star" was intelligent from the words he was given to say on TV each week. They believed he was a decisive & good manager every time he recited the show's "You're Fired" tagline. The Apprentice rehabilitated his image based on nothing more than fantasy & the imagination of the shows creators & producers, but millions of Americans bought it hook, line & sinker.
They believed in his made-up image as a successful businessman enough to think that, if elected president, he would "drain the swamp" instead of filling it. They believed all the promises he made on the campaign trail when those of us who knew his character, his dishonesty & his business practices recognized the lies & the hype as just another con. And he had right-wing media singing his praises & reinforcing his lies bc his outrageousness was good for their ratings &, therefore, their bottom line.
He told the gullible what they wanted to hear & they fell for it. They believed his television persona was real enough to elect him to the highest office in the land. They believed he was an outstanding businessman who they thought would implement his successful business practices in our government, failing to realize that governments & businesses serve 2 totally different purposes. A government is intended to serve its people, while a business is intended to serve its owners.
The problem is that this president IS running the government just like he did his businesses — to enrich himself while giving our citizens & our allies around the world the shaft. - Tami Lynn West