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'American Oligarchs' Reveals How Trump, Kushner Families Learned To Game The System
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/08/794509417/american-oligarchs-reveals-how-trump-kushner-families-learned-to-work-the-system. . .
Fred Trump amassed his real estate fortune in part, Bernstein says, by donating to politicians who would bend rules to his favor — and his son followed suit: "It is a lifelong practice for Fred Trump — and then later for Donald Trump — that they cultivate[d] their connections with the Brooklyn political machine, which at that time was almost exclusively controlled by the Democratic Party."
"You would see [Donald Trump] continuing the practices that he learned from his father: making enormous political donations, hiring the lawyers and the insurance brokers and other people connected to the political machines, learning how to manipulate law enforcement," she says.
. . .
On the Trump family's business dependence on government help
They could not have been what they are without the help of the taxpayers in a whole variety of ways through infrastructure programs, through tax abatement programs, which allowed them to avoid paying taxes in certain instances. And they also benefited by what The New York Times called "outright fraud." They just simply didn't pay the taxes they were supposed to. So they were in this position of getting help from the government and getting help from government programs, at the same time actively trying not to pay money back to the taxpayers.
. . .
On Jared Kushner's grandmother's Holocaust survival story
The Kushner family was sent to die, to board trucks bound for mass graves. But then, before they could board the trucks, they were asked, "Is anybody here a furrier?" And the Kushners said they were, and the Germans pulled them out of the line because they wanted them to make hats and coats for the German army. And this is what they did. They basically lived inside a ghetto, had very little to eat and had to work as enslaved people for the Nazis, and the Nazis kept killing more and more people as they decided they were superfluous. There were a few hundred survivors in the summer of 1943, and they realized they had to escape. They knew that there was a band of partisan Jews in the forest. And if they could get out there, they had a chance of living. So they began to dig a tunnel, and they had to hide the bags of dirt that they were excavating underneath beds and inside walls so the Nazis wouldn't find them. But they did build this tunnel and crawled out of it. It was 2 feet across. [Jared's grandmother] Rae Kushner and her father, Naum Kushner, and her sister, Lisa, made it out of the tunnel alive and into the forest. Their brother Chanon, when he got out of the tunnel, became disoriented, ran in the wrong direction and was ultimately shot by the Nazis.
On why Bernstein thinks there has been so little accountability for Donald Trump's actions
One of the things that the Trump family has always understood is that part of their business success needs to be making sure that no law enforcement agent or district attorney or prosecutor is going to blow the whistle. ... He has managed through money and charm to keep law enforcement at bay, and he has never been called to account. And what we find is that each time he is not called to account, he feels more powerful to go even further the next time. We see this exact pattern with Ukraine. [The] Mueller report does not lead to an impeachment. The day after Mueller testifies, [Trump] calls the president of Ukraine and asks him to interfere in the 2020 election. So what is at balance in this upcoming impeachment trial? This is the final way to call Donald Trump to account. If he is not called to account, I think we can only expect what we've seen in the past, which is that he feels even more empowered to break rules, break norms in the way he's been doing.
Fred Trump amassed his real estate fortune in part, Bernstein says, by donating to politicians who would bend rules to his favor — and his son followed suit: "It is a lifelong practice for Fred Trump — and then later for Donald Trump — that they cultivate[d] their connections with the Brooklyn political machine, which at that time was almost exclusively controlled by the Democratic Party."
"You would see [Donald Trump] continuing the practices that he learned from his father: making enormous political donations, hiring the lawyers and the insurance brokers and other people connected to the political machines, learning how to manipulate law enforcement," she says.
. . .
On the Trump family's business dependence on government help
They could not have been what they are without the help of the taxpayers in a whole variety of ways through infrastructure programs, through tax abatement programs, which allowed them to avoid paying taxes in certain instances. And they also benefited by what The New York Times called "outright fraud." They just simply didn't pay the taxes they were supposed to. So they were in this position of getting help from the government and getting help from government programs, at the same time actively trying not to pay money back to the taxpayers.
. . .
On Jared Kushner's grandmother's Holocaust survival story
The Kushner family was sent to die, to board trucks bound for mass graves. But then, before they could board the trucks, they were asked, "Is anybody here a furrier?" And the Kushners said they were, and the Germans pulled them out of the line because they wanted them to make hats and coats for the German army. And this is what they did. They basically lived inside a ghetto, had very little to eat and had to work as enslaved people for the Nazis, and the Nazis kept killing more and more people as they decided they were superfluous. There were a few hundred survivors in the summer of 1943, and they realized they had to escape. They knew that there was a band of partisan Jews in the forest. And if they could get out there, they had a chance of living. So they began to dig a tunnel, and they had to hide the bags of dirt that they were excavating underneath beds and inside walls so the Nazis wouldn't find them. But they did build this tunnel and crawled out of it. It was 2 feet across. [Jared's grandmother] Rae Kushner and her father, Naum Kushner, and her sister, Lisa, made it out of the tunnel alive and into the forest. Their brother Chanon, when he got out of the tunnel, became disoriented, ran in the wrong direction and was ultimately shot by the Nazis.
On why Bernstein thinks there has been so little accountability for Donald Trump's actions
One of the things that the Trump family has always understood is that part of their business success needs to be making sure that no law enforcement agent or district attorney or prosecutor is going to blow the whistle. ... He has managed through money and charm to keep law enforcement at bay, and he has never been called to account. And what we find is that each time he is not called to account, he feels more powerful to go even further the next time. We see this exact pattern with Ukraine. [The] Mueller report does not lead to an impeachment. The day after Mueller testifies, [Trump] calls the president of Ukraine and asks him to interfere in the 2020 election. So what is at balance in this upcoming impeachment trial? This is the final way to call Donald Trump to account. If he is not called to account, I think we can only expect what we've seen in the past, which is that he feels even more empowered to break rules, break norms in the way he's been doing.
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