It’s truly amazing how things come full circle. As we just learned that First Daughter Ivanka Trump may be guilty of felony fraud for a series of real estate misrepresentations she made in connection with the sale of buildings that she told potential buyers had more units sold already than were actually sold, it’s not hard to imagine where she learned the “business acumen” that might have trained her brain to work on such a level.
Her father has been at it in much the same way his entire career. The recent exposé in the New York Times detailing his years of tax fraud and avoidance looks like a master class in Trumpist business practices if you look at it from the perspective of someone who expects Donald Trump to always be looking for ways to make more money than he is entitled to, including using his office to benefit himself and his businesses, no matter what he says about divesting himself of business interests while in office.
And we’ve known it since before he was even inaugurated.
Trump was actually secretly recorded at a New Year’s Eve party just after the election at the resort that would become his “Winter White House,” Mar-a-Lago. He was entertaining a crowd of around 800 people when he openly praised a businessman from Dubai — a man named Hussain Sajwani who has built Trump golf courses in his home country.
Sajwani was present at the Mar-a-Lago party, and although Trump’s spokespeople at the time said that no business was conducted at the party, it’s certainly hard to imagine that the Emirati traveled all the way to Florida for a New Year’s party when Abu Dhabi holds the world’s premier fireworks display every year.
But as Cristina Alesci points out in this clip from CNN that contains the hidden video, it doesn’t actually matter if Trump divests himself or pretends to hand over the reins of his businesses to his sons — the fact is, he already knows who his business partners are, and that knowledge has clearly already affected his policymaking when it comes to the countries those people and companies are from.
Watch the footage here:
Featured image via screen capture
