American Oligarchs' Near the End of Trump's First Term

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Brian: Brian Lehrer, WNYC. Before Trump got COVID and before the president had rung off a debate, the big story that started last week was revelations in The New York Times about his tax returns, how quickly the news cycle goes these days. Let's pick up on that story and more now in the context of a happy event, the new paperback edition of my colleague, Andrea Bernstein's book, American Oligarchs, the Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power, which is out in paperback today. Andrea, of course, is also cohost of the WNYC podcast, Trump Inc. Hi, Andrea?

Andrea: Hey, Brian. I can't think of a better place to be on my paperback pub date than with you and also you're right, the Trump tax story was a week ago. My head spins.

Brian: All our heads spin. Let's talk about the tax returns first. I wonder what you thought when you read The Times reporting last week, because you've been all over Trump's finances for your career at Trump, Inc., for this book. What was the newest or most surprising thing there for you?

Andrea: I think the most-- I mean, one is kudos to The New York Times reporters for getting those tax returns. It put numbers to something that we've been trying to piece together, but this is a more definitive account, is obviously the according to Trump account, but it's still a more comprehensive account than the ones we've been able to put together.

The biggest thing for me about it was that they really directly lay out what kind of financial stake Trump has in winning this election, which is an unprecedented situation in America. Basically, he's run his business empire by starting with a lot of money and then using that to cover his next failure.

It was the money that came from his father's businesses that backed him up, the money that came from the sale of his father's assets, the apprentice, and now here we are in a situation where the presidency is in that role, the presidency is enabling Donald Trump to make what money he has now. He's still losing money, but he's drawing all of this money in from lobbyists and foreign governments and other people who want things from him as president.

That's one, and two, he has this massive debt, that is going to come too should he be reelected in a Trump second term. We have a situation where for Trump, it's better to be president of the United States because that pressures the banks to forgive his debt. It gives him some leverage or to delay his debt and that direct financial incentive in winning an election is something we have just never seen in modern history.

Brian: What's your best information about who he actually owes the money too? Because there's speculation, since The Times was not able to get that information, that if his creditors are not just ordinary banks, that there might be some foreign countries, maybe Russia, maybe Saudi Arabia, maybe somebody else who would have leverage over the president of the United States as his debts to them come due.

Andrea: The tragedy is we don't know, and it's not like it's known and hiding in a vault somewhere. There've been a couple of recent books about this, Mike Schmidt of The New York Times, Andrew Weissmann, the former Mueller deputy who wrote the inside-tell-all. By the way, our next episode of Trump, Inc., is an interview with Andrew Weissmann.

In these accounts, it becomes clear how the investigators were never able to get at the mystery of Trump finances. We still don't know, we know that Trump has hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to Deutsche Bank. There's been a lot of speculation that some of that debt was sold off to somebody, possibly somebody with a connection to Russia, but it's never been investigated.

At this point, clearly, we are not going to find out, prior to the election, to whom he is indebted. All that we know is that he is indebted by a lot and he has no business plan to get out of it other than holding under the presidency.

Brian: This week, you wrote a New York Times- is it New York Review of Books?

Andrea: New York Review of Books, yes.

Brian: Article about Mary Trump's lawsuit against her uncle. You write, "The lawsuit is a handbook to everything we suspected about her uncle's business, but didn't actually know for certain." For those listeners who are not familiar with Mary Trump's lawsuit, can you first explain it? What does it help us understand?

Andrea: Mary Trump in her book, Too Much and Never Enough, wrote about how, when her grandfather, Fred Trump, Donald Trump's father, died she and her brother who were the children of Fred Trump Jr, were, as she claims, forced out of their true value of the Trump Estate. What she says is that Donald Trump and his siblings, fraudulently minimized the value of the state, which meant that the portion that they got was was worth much less.

This is a civil lawsuit, it has yet to be tested. The last time I checked the Trumps hadn't even responded to the court papers, although Trump spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany, did dismiss Mary Trump as having discredited herself. I think what is so interesting to me is, for my book, I interviewed scores of people who worked for Trump or his employees or executives or business associates, and almost all of them were afraid to go on the record with the specifics, for fear of retaliation, for reasons that I think are pretty obvious to anybody.

Mary Trump names names and she talks about the detailed mechanisms, the way in which Trump got an appraiser to inflate or devalue properties in order to maximize income, if say he wanted to get a bank loan or minimize it if he wanted to pay taxes or, in this case, pay out a settlement to his niece and nephew. That specificity was, even by the standard of Trump lawsuits, quite breathtaking, that she talks about the mechanism of how he perpetrated the alleged fraud.

Brian: Another blood relative of Trump embroiled in a legal morass that there is news on in the last day is Eric Trump, the president's son. Yesterday, after months of delay, Eric was questioned under oath, I see as part of a civil investigation by the New York State Attorney General, into whether the Trump family's real estate company committed fraud. Can you refresh listeners on what the charges entail with that and is anything known about what was discussed in yesterday's deposition?

Andrea: We have not seen a transcript of the deposition. Presumably if it goes further in it's investigation, some of it will come to light, but we do know from Attorney General James's legal papers, what she is looking at, and it's the same scheme, which is she's asking, and it's a civil investigation not a criminal investigation, she's asking, Did the Trump organization pay its fair share of taxes to New York?"

She's looking at some specific properties, including a golf course in Westchester where Trump bought it for a low price and then very soon after that said, when he wanted to donate it to charity and take a tax deduction, said it was worth many times more what he paid.

Similarly, there was a loan that the Trump organization received in Chicago, that the Attorney General said they didn't provide any evidence that they paid it back, which would be net- that would be income. This is what is being examined and what was so extraordinary about this lawsuit is that, until he was ordered to do so by a judge, Eric Trump refused to show up for his deposition, saying he was too busy with his father's campaign and it's a lawlessness, which is really concerning.

I mean, we've seen it, increasingly, through Trump's presidency, but here's a case where the president son, a businessman, not a part of the presidency in any way says, "You can't investigate me because my father is president", almost in so many words and that was alarming. It was somewhat reassuring that the court system continues to creak through and that the attorney general did get a chance to question Eric Trump. I hope to learn at a later date the specifics of what she learned.

Brian: My guest is Andrea Bernstein, her book, American Oligarchs, the Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power, is out in paperback today. In your new afterward, you point to a sentence in the first chapter of the original version of the book, which has new meaning to you in the present context, it's about Jews and the Holocaust and the line is, "Human minds resist accepting awful outcomes, many would die because they could not imagine worse." Why did you single out that line?

Andrea: Well, I wrote-- The book, The Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power, is a multigenerational saga. It starts with the story of Jared Kushner's grandparents, who have this really unbelievable story of survival of Nazi German brutality. His grandmother tunneled out under the Nazi barbed wire and they put the dirt that they dug out, they hid it behind the bed so the Nazis wouldn't see that they were doing and they all escaped.

To go from the destruction of her very comfortable life, Jared Kushner's grandmother's comfortable life, to having to crawl out into the forest to escape the Nazis. It was impossible for me not to think about how this related to our own experience, particularly because Jared Kushner's grandmother said in so many words, we didn't think it could get worse. We didn't think it could get worse. We didn't think it could get worse and then it did get worse.

I feel like there's a strain of overly optimistic thinking in American political life that, "Oh, things are not really that bad, things can't really get that bad," and having investigated the Trump family and the Kushner family and covered the Trump administration, which this is unbelievable unraveling of norms. It is impossible for me to not confront the reality that awful things can happen. Democracy can unravel, it's unraveling before our eyes.

This election is really this sort of last and final test I think of whether our democracy can withstand the assaults that Trump has bought. In American history, the solution to oligarchy has always been more democracy and I still do believe this is possible, but I think-- I mean, the day when I published my book was before the coronavirus, right before the coronavirus and then Trump was acquitted by the Senate and then the next day later is the first death from coronavirus in the United States.

At the impeachment trial, which you and I talked about a lot, I don't think anyone would have imagined that we would be facing what we're looking at now 200 and almost 10,000 people at least dead, the president infected. I do think we need to be clear-eyed about awful outcomes and about the dangers of denialism while also continuing to have hope and continuing to act as if our actions can affect the world in a positive way.

Brian: You single out that line about the Holocaust and the new afterward to the new edition. What else is new in this edition?

Andrea: Well, because the coronavirus had happened, I really wanted to talk about the Trump approach to the coronavirus and also the Kushner approach. Jared Kushner has obviously been involved in the task force and in both championing Trump's agenda, but also in setting-up his business task force to confronting.

I think what is troubling in both of their reactions and we see it right now this morning in the way Trump is saying it's not that bad, is that for both Trump and Kushner, their entire history before they came to the White House was deals where someone was a winner and someone was a loser and they didn't really have practice in what we need now to confront a pandemic, which is everybody working together to win together.

What we see for Trump is, he is approaching the virus as he would a business deal, as he would a development. How many times in New York City did Trump show up before reporters with plans for huge towers around the world that were just fantasies? By presenting the plan, he somehow was able to keep the myth going for long enough to get money to keep the business going.

That is the approach he's taking to the virus. Is if somehow he can deny its potency, it won't be potent. Obviously, you can't do to the virus what you can do to public opinion, which is mold and shape it based on your will of how it should be perceived.

Brian: That actually brings me back to the tax returns because every week in America is a story about inequality, but this week the message is stark. If you're rich and white and in power, you can receive top-notch medical care. If you're rich and white and in power, you can avoid paying taxes. The law is on your side and while that's true, how important is it to emphasize that the Trump family business was built with the support of US taxpayers? There would be no Trump family empire otherwise.

Andrea: Right, exactly. This is a line of thinking I really, really trace in my book because Donald Trump's grandfather Frederick Trump was able to change his social class. Things were still elastic enough in America that you could do that but over the years, as inequality has grown, there's been both more income inequality and more money flowing into campaign finance to break down the systems.

What we find is this situation where we're in now, where it's just, the differences are so stark and calcifying and that Trump's and the Kushner family and Donald Trump are both beneficiaries of that system, but also engines that help to bring it about before he was president and continued to do so now and that is also on the line in this election, which is this end of voting, which is now just four weeks from today.

Brian: I'm not sure what value that tax returns have in the election. How much do you think it's worth unpacking or emphasizing to the American people that the president might have a massive international business with the sole purpose of laundering money and avoiding taxes? We just don't know, we need more information, but how do you get that message across, and why is it so hard to get that message to stick if in fact it can be determined?

Andrea: Because I spend my life reporting on and talking about Trump business, there is some part of me believes that at some point, this laying out of the truth and of the facts will be meaningful in American life. Will it have a political effect? I don't know. I think that from what we've seen, nothing can shake the 40% of the people that are going to be with Trump, partly because they don't believe any contrary information.

They say a small group of swing voters that might be swayed. I think we don't know and we won't know until we get a chance to parse out this election. I think that, when you look at tax returns and business cheating and the comparable storyline of life and death and coronavirus, it's easy to see why people are focused on one rather than another. I do believe so.

Brian: I have to jump in because I want to be able to mention your events before the clock strikes 11:59, Andrea Bernstein's book, American Oligarchs, the Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power is now out in paperback. Events. Tuesday, October 13th at seven o'clock in the Green Space, she'll be in conversation with Kai Wright about the election. You can find a streaming link on the Green Space website, the greenspace.org.

You can also see Andrea on an upcoming Zoom panel. She'll be discussing the late great investigative journalist, Wayne Barrett, along with Eileen Markey and Tom Robbins. That's at five o'clock tomorrow, a streaming link for that @roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu. Andrea, thanks so much.

Andrea: Thank you, Brian.

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