I know thwy seem reluctant to actually nail Donald Trump to the wall for a pattern of illegality because he’s an ex-President with some money and a flollowing …
But after reading even the reviews and excerpts on and from the book?
Nailing him would be a service for the country…
And?
A necessity…..
His pimping the the media, the banks, other businessess and even his followers are exposed in the book….
Someone REALLY needs to put an end to the Queens NYC hustler that has gone on way too long…
Someo0ne neesds to step up to the plate….
And stop the ‘Trump’ show even if the media losses it’s free ride….
The guy shits like the rest of us….
Even after eating stuff that might incrimnate him….
Trump’s chief mentor, and a consigliere to most of the big shots named above, was the legendary underworld and overworld fixer Roy Cohn. The pampered son of a kingpin in Bronx Democratic politics, long notorious for his McCarthyite Red Scare grandstanding, Cohn, as Haberman details, connected Trump with Stone as well as with organized crime while giving him master classes in high-stakes con-man strategy and tactics. Whenever Trump today intimidates the press with threats of retaliation, whenever he defends his aggressions by claiming to be the victim, whenever he calls his accusers (especially if they represent the federal government) life-destroying, treasonous “scum,” he is channeling his mentor, Cohn.
Haberman offers plenty of material about how these men did it all with virtual impunity. Of course, there would be the occasional fines and sealed judgments — and Cohn was disbarred weeks before he died of AIDS, abandoned by Trump, who knew the score on being heartless. But as Haberman describes, Trump went to great lengths to square himself with a paragon of the city’s power elite, the longtime Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, including making generous donations to Morgenthau’s pet charity, the New York Police Athletic League, the one charity commitment, Morgenthau would joke warmly, that Trump could be counted on honoring. Not until Cyrus Vance Jr., who had a fine pedigree but was no crusader, succeeded Morgenthau in 2010 did Trump and his properties, after Vance backed off for years, finally face serious investigation by the D.A.’s office — and even then, prosecutors on the case quit in protest when Vance’s successor suddenly seemed to drop it….
…
“Confidence Man” likewise enlightens about the massive oversights by the press and the broader world of publishing, especially in New York, not simply in failing to expose the corruption that Haberman catalogues but in creating and then abetting Trump’s celebrity. There were certainly exceptional naysaying reporters, notably Jack Newfield’s protege at the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett, who, at Newfield’s urging, dug deep into Trump’s shady dealings. Barrett’s and the Voice’s condemnations sparked a brief aborted federal investigation, but they weren’t about to shake the inertia at the most influential outlets, topped by the New York Times. Neither did the late lamented Spy magazine’s bull’s eye satirical shots at the “short-fingered vulgarian” provoke inquiries, although they did provoke Trump to threaten lawsuits and are said to anger him to this day.
Indeed, the higher- as well as the lower-end media became Trump’s vehicles, sometimes absurdly. Haberman relates, for example, how in 1984 Cohn, the grand wizard of press manipulation, placed a profile story in The Washington Post’s Style section, followed up independently by another piece in a magazine called Manhattan, Inc., that — though skeptical and even arch about Trump — fed impressions that the brash young dealmaker might seriously serve President Ronald Reagan in top-level arms-control negotiations. Much later, in 1997, when Trump had fallen into one of his disastrous business troughs, a New Yorker profile, though as unguarded as any such piece was likely to be, helped advance his latest comeback. More famously, the queens of tabloid gossip, Cindy Adams and Liz Smith, aided by the New York Post’s garish Page Six, rendered Trump an epic figure. Long before “The Apprentice”completed his makeover as America’s fantasy mogul, driving the phony image to the credulous beyond the Hudson, the publishers, editors and scribes of the Manhattan press, forgoing the facts, had crowned him the king of New York…
…
.Haberman’s contribution in “Confidence Man,” though, is much larger than its arresting anecdotes. Later generations of historians will puzzle over Trump’s rise to national power. The best of them will have learned from Haberman’s book that none of it would have been possible but for a social, cultural, political, media and moral breakdown that overtook New York beginning in the 1970s, a fiasco of trusted institutions that, having allowed the Trumpian virus to grow, failed at every step to contain its spread, then profited from, aided and even cheered its devastation….