The Big Cheat

 

David Cay Johnston, “The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family,”  Simon & Schuster, 2021, 230 pp..

Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and longtime Trump-watcher delivers enough charges to fuel a few hundred indictments.  This is the third book of this author’s that I have read over the years; I’ve never been disappointed in his research and presentation of facts.

Johnston opens describing the wake of the 2008 financial crisis when a great numbers of low-income, poorly informed Americans longed for a savior who “would relieve their financial crisis.” What they got was a “master con artist” who would “cheat them out of what they had, all the while telling them that he was really their friend and helper.” Step 1: Destroy the notion of objective truth. Step 2: Send up a smokescreen of lies. Step 3: Loot the people’s treasury, self-dealing while leaving scraps for other financial predators.

Johnston assembles a case that’s full of news and startling incidents. In one, a 29-year-old Trump, accompanied by his father, assaults outgoing New York Mayor Abe Beame to strong-arm a sweetheart deal; though police officers escorted him from Beame’s office, he got what he demanded. The behavioral pattern with the most staying power is not violence, however, but cheating: overstating assets, engaging in phony accounting, not paying taxes. With the power of the presidency, Trump—who, Johnston reminds us, is the only president past or present who opened the nation’s coffers to his fellow grifters, engaging in “the kind of borrowing that made Trump infamous—money you borrow but never pay back in full and perhaps not at all.” Those fellow grifters are legion, but at the top of the list are daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner as well as former transportation secretary Elaine Chao; poster children “who illustrate the need for strict ethics training and for equally strict enforcement of laws against misusing public office.” Trump’s sole accomplishment, by Johnston’s account, was the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021, because it “testifies to his incompetence” while shining a light on would-be dictators waiting in the wings.

My Notes: 

Pg. 6:  This book examines Trump’s promises against his performance.  It completes a trilogy that began with the author’s 2016 biography of Trump and continued with his 2018 assessment of Trump’s first year in office.  Trump did what he has always done: promise the moon, the sky, and the stars, and then deliver rocks and sand, if that. 

Pg. 8:  Five months after Trump left office, a state grand jury in Manhattan returned an extraordinary indictment against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg.  The indictment detailed a calculated 15-year-long criminal tax fraud conspiracy that included all four years that Trump was president.  The indictment asserts that Weisselberg ‘evaded approximately $556,385 in federal taxes,’ plus a third of a million dollars in state and city taxes.  It said he and his wife received an apartment free of rent including parking, utilities, and cable television, each enjoyed a leased Mercedes-Benz, and they were reimbursed private school tuition for grandchildren among other hidden compensation

  Pg. 134:  Shortly after Trump became president he shut down the White House national security program that Obama had assembled to track and deal with pernicious viruses before a pandemic erupted.  Trump also shut down Obama’s program to train American and foreign scientists in how to detect and slow the spread of viruses. This followed his pattern of endeavoring to expunge everything Obama had done. 

Pg. 223;  Even the most ardent Trump supporters should realize by now that Trump sold us a bill of goods.  There was no plan for infrastructure.  There was no plan to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, no plan to lower drug prices.  There was never a replacement or improvement for Obamacare.

Pg. 230:  We should recognize that Trump performed one important public service for America.  He showed us just how vulnerable our democracy is to a would-be dictator interested in his own welfare above ours.  For that, but nothing else, America owes Trump a thank-you.