Last month, Ted Cruz released an ad attacking Donald Trump for trying to use eminent domain to bulldoze a widow’s home in order to build a parking lot for limos in Atlantic City. Trump didn’t succeed, but the fact he tried makes him look like an almost cartoonish movie villain:
What I want to know is, why haven’t we seen more of this kind of attack on him? Trump has been extremely litigious throughout his career and has been involved in several shady business deals. It looks as if Trump is going to have to soon take the stand in a fraud trial over his for-profit “university.” Students at Trump U paid as much $35,000 for the “Gold Elite Program” and got nothing in return:
Of course, by the time Trump likely takes the stand to answer for this in May, there’s a good chance he’ll have already sewn up the GOP nomination. But this is all just the tip of the iceberg; there’s surely a lot more people that Trump has burned waiting to tell their stories. You don’t have to look any farther than YouTube. Here’s a guy named Gregory Starn telling his story about how he lost money by investing in a Trump resort in Mexico. I wouldn’t take every claim made on the Internet at face value, but it seems what Starn is alleging is consistent with the the public facts about this failed business venture and Trump’s general modus operandi:
When I think about the last few elections and the extensive and breathless news coverage surrounding who Mitt Romney allegedly bullied in prep school, racial slurs painted on rocks where Rick Perry used to hunt, or the cavalier implications that John McCain was sleeping with a lobbyist, I have to wonder why we’re not hearing much about the trail of exploited people Donald J. Trump has left in his wake. Now it’s true that the media have been covering Trump for decades and have covered these scandals to some extent. But given the stakes of a presidential election, can anyone make a defensible claim that Trump has received sharply critical coverage or investigative scrutiny in proportion to the horserace coverage and avalanche of self-serving media appearances?
Now, Politico is reporting that big GOP donors are unwilling to spend any money to attack Trump. “The donors cite the lack of success of the few super PAC attacks that have already targeted Trump as evidence that such attacks have not and cannot halt his momentum,” according to the report.
But how do we know that’s the case? Trump has received substantially less in the way of negative ads than Marco Rubio, who absorbed more than $20 million in attack ads between November and December.
Trump has made a lot money cheating people. You might think that would be disqualifying for a guy who said, “Nobody reads the Bible more than me.” In fact, I’d venture that many of the people who tell compelling stories about Trump swindling them are exactly the kind of downtrodden folks angry about how the system is rigged, i.e. the people that Trump is now purporting to represent. Only they’ll tell you that Trump is the guy doing the rigging.
Given the stakes of the election and wealth of scurrilous material available, it would be political malpractice not to tell Republicans exactly what kind of person they’re poised to nominate.
