Trump Gotchas (with Cheri Jacobus)
There were SO MANY TIMES when this could have been stopped.
On March 5, 2017, the financial journalist Adam Davidson published a piece in the New Yorker titled “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal.” The titular “deal” was Trump Tower Baku, a gleaming, ugly hi-rise hotel in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Neither city nor country feature prominently on any traveler’s bucket list.
The project was a boondoggle and a money pit—so much so that it made zero sense that anyone, even Trump, would invest in it. It was sited in an undesirable part of the city. It was hopelessly overbudget. It was being run by one of the more corrupt families in one of the more corrupt countries on earth. It never opened. What was going on here?
What was going on, apparently, was that the Baku project was kind of sort of maybe being used to launder money for the Iranian National Guard. Which is, you know, bad. Rudy Giuliani was on TV just this week accusing President Biden of working for Iran; yet here was Trump, years ago, possibly indirectly partnering with them. As Davidson explains:
No evidence has surfaced showing that Donald Trump, or any of his employees involved in the Baku deal, actively participated in bribery, money laundering, or other illegal behavior. But the Trump Organization may have broken the law in its work with the Mammadov family. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, passed in 1977, forbade American companies from participating in a scheme to reward a foreign government official in exchange for material benefit or preferential treatment. The law even made it a crime for an American company to unknowingly benefit from a partner’s corruption if it could have discovered illicit activity but avoided doing so. This closed what was known as the “head in the sand” loophole.
With the requisite journalistic detachment, Davidson lays out the many reasons why Trump appears to have run afoul of the law in Baku. There are lots of quotes from Alan Garten, lawyer for the Trump Organization, defending the deal, and quotes from law professors explaining why Garten is wrong. The piece is a roadmap for any federal prosecutor looking to investigate Trump’s shady deal-making.
I remember reading the Baku piece when it came out and thinking, This is it! They got him! Maybe Davidson thought so, too.
[Narrator’s Voice] They did not get him. They still haven’t gotten him.
There have been many such “gotcha” moments over the last eight years—especially early on—when it looked like Trump’s corpulent goose was cooked: The Access Hollywood tape. The Steele dossier. The bombshell about the Trump Tower meeting with Putin’s lawyer. The D.C. hotel and the Emoluments Clause. The allegations of sexual harassment and rape. Firing Jim Comey, laughing about it with Russians in the Oval Office, and then admitting to Lester Holt that he did it because of “the Russia thing.” The Mike Flynn imbroglio. Paul Manafort’s indictment. Michael Cohen’s indictment. Mike Flynn’s indictment. The Mueller Report—a blueprint for Trump’s indictment. Helsinki. The Epstein indictment. Volume 5. Extorting President Zelenskyy of Ukraine. “Suckers and losers.” The Suzanne Craig bombshell about how Fred Trump and his kids all committed fraud for years and years in their real estate dealings. Politicizing and monetizing the pandemic response to help his re-election chances. Disseminating the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Leading the violent insurrection to overthrow the government. And, still pending: paying off Stormy Daniels, running a fraudulent company, stealing classified documents, violating the Georgia RICO Act, ignoring a judge’s gag order.
And that’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are omissions. But none of those things got him, at least not yet. The orange motherfucker is swaddled in prosecutorial bubble-wrap.
Along the way, the public perception of Trump has changed. His MAGA-backed candidates, including Trump himself, have lost in 2018, 2020, and 2022, and will likely continue the losing streak next year. Slowly (too slowly), people have begun to see him as he really is—a crook, a rapist, a traitor to his country—and not how Mark Burnett and Jeff Zucker presented him on that idiotic reality show a decade and a half ago.
One of the first people to behold the emperor with no clothes was Cheri Jacobus, my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. Back in 2015, she was a seasoned Republican political operative. Communications was her specialty. She’d run campaigns, worked on the Hill, appeared on the cable news shows as a political analyst, written a regular column for USA Today. After two meetings that spring with Corey Lewandowski, an outsider no one in Washington had heard of, she was asked to take a job with the Trump campaign. She declined, mostly because Lewandowski was a jerk, and the two camps went their separate ways—until she helped blow the whistle on one of Trump’s early lies, confirming the existence of his super PAC.
In 2015-6, you may recall, Trump campaigned on being self-funded, on not being owned by anyone, on not being beholden to wealthy campaign donors—or, you know, Russian dictators. In hindsight, this is guffaw-inducing, but back then, his perceived autonomy was at the heart of his appeal, especially to independent voters and the “both parties are the same” crowd. When the Washington Post reported on the existence of a Trump super PAC—you know, the thing he kept insisting he didn’t have—Jacobus knew that the report was true. She’d heard Lewandowski blabbing about it at their meetings. So when Trump threatened to sue WaPo for reporting the truth, she spoke up.
“I verified it, and said, ‘Yeah, they told me all about it,’” Jacobus recalls. “[Lewandowski and his colleagues] were talking so openly about the super PAC at both meetings.” This, too—this brazen flouting of the law—would be all too familiar to anyone following Trump for the next eight years.
“The point being: he had a sanctioned super PAC and was lying when he said he didn’t. And that was the crux of the report,” Jacobus says. “Which, any other candidate, they would have been out of the race in two weeks.”
Howard Dean once dropped out of a presidential race because he snapped at someone.
But Trump wasn’t any other candidate. Jacobus’s confirmation of the WaPo story could have, and should have, ended his campaign. It did not. It was the first real “gotcha” that wasn’t.
That report came out in November of 2015, right around the time Jared Kushner—whose mother, Seryl, was an early contributor to the super PAC—formally joined the Trump campaign. Imagine all the national and global agony that would have been prevented, had the rest of the media picked up this story and zealously run with it, like they did with Hillary’s emails. But nah. Throughout the 2016 campaign, Clinton was the candidate presented as shady; Trump was the maverick, the iconoclast, the breath of fresh air, the one who wasn’t afraid to say what’s really on his mind, and so on.
No good deed goes unpunished, as the old saw goes, and Jacobus paid the price for opening her mouth. The vindictive candidate and his goons did what they could to ruin her life. Trump denigrated her on Twitter. FOX stopped booking her. CNN blacklisted her. She was catfished. Her AOL account was hacked. She began to fear for her safety. (You can read about all of this in a great Politico story from the summer of 2016).
Her career has not recovered from the damage caused by Trump and his lackeys. Meanwhile, Trump is under indictment in four different jurisdictions, about to lose his fortune in a fifth, and may wind up going to the hoosegow for being incendiary on Truth Social.
This is all promising. But we are still waiting for the real Trump gotcha.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
S6 E9: Chaos Crescendo (with Cheri Jacobus)
Cheri Jacobus is a political analyst and operative, as well as the host of the “Politics with Cheri Jacobus” podcast. She talks to Greg Olear about her experiences as an early “Never Trump” Republican, the consequences of her truth-telling, how the media created Trump, the success of Biden/Harris, and more. Plus: MAGA perdedor.
Follow Cheri:
https://twitter.com/CheriJacobus
Subscribe to her podcast:
https://www.patreon.com/PoliticsWithCheriJacobus
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Photo credit: Gage Skidmore. Donald Trump speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.
Greg, “off the top of your head” was a pretty good list of Trump’s crimes that should have been gotchas. Thank you again. But now he has 100% of the Republicans in Congress voting to elect an election denier as speaker of the House . I am even more worried for our country than 2 days ago.
Greg,
Many years ago, I began more or less collecting asshole Donald Trump biz puff stories in various NY business magazines and newspapers. When other real state developer friends talked him up in discussions about a newly publicized project, I knew where his money had really come from and how he always overpaid, stiffed subs, gullible attorneys, and suppliers. When I saw the first reality television show “Survivor” appear, I knew that the studios had found away to rid themselves of mega-movie stars and replace the expense television series with non-paid actor wannabes. I never predicted that Trump would become such a mega-jerk-off in the world of reality entertainment, but I should have seen it coming. It was predictable and he did and more than fifty percent of the American public believed and still believe the bullshit. He even ate the Republican political party completely. Everyone thinks they can control a guy like him, but thus far, they have not been able to do so yet. Now, we’ll see if Jack Smith, Fani Willis, Alvin Bragg, and Letitia Janes can roll up this dirt bag. Or will his pals in the SCOTUS and Congress save him?