Fact checks lies about tarrifs and corporate tax cuts - echo analysis

This report was published in the Vanity Fair report titled "The Hive", reported by Bess Levin. 

Chinese say (translated for tRump to read) - "bring it on".

Donald Trump's stupid trade war with China just went from his ill conceived "easy to win", to "5,000 years of hell"....an opinion essay published in The Hive, a feature column in Vanity Fair.

While Donald Trump previously appeared to view tariffs as a negotiating tactic, he now seems to believe they should be permanent. The Chinese say “bring it on.”

The president’s decision last year to slap tariffs on goods from countries around the world and drag the U.S. into a trade war with China hasn’t gone super well for America. 

In fact, the farmers whose profits have been destroyed as a result know this. The manufacturers who have had to lay off employees and move production overseas know this. The consumers who paid $3 billion a month last year to finance the tariffs know it, too. One person who doesn’t? Donald Trump, who lives in his own alternative reality and still thinks this whole thing is going great. On Tuesday, after China responded to the latest round of tariffs with fresh punitive measures of its own, the president claimed that “Tariffs have rebuilt our Steel Industry” (fact-check: false); that “Our great Patriot Farmers will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of what is happening now” (fact-check: false, and weirdly Soviet); and that we will be “moving jobs back to the USA” (fact-check: false again!).

In tweets and other public utterances in recent days, Trump has hailed his tariffs, claiming they have helped power U.S. economic growth, and repeated over and over again that other countries such as China foot the bill, a view even his own economic advisers are uncomfortable defending. 

Moreover, Trump is also displaying a preference for his tariffs over his own deals. Among the major hurdles to a congressional vote to ratify his renegotiated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement are the steel and aluminum tariffs that Trump imposed on products coming from Canada and Mexico.

Those tariffs have invited retaliation against U.S. agricultural exports, such as corn and pork, that [is] hurting U.S. farmers. They also have caused senior Republicans like Chuck Grassley,the powerful head of the Senate Finance Committee, to say they will block any vote for Trump’s rebranded NAFTA, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. But Trump has refused to bend unless Canada and Mexico agree to other trade restraints with new investment in domestic steel mills and aluminum smelters, one of the benefits of Trump’s trade wars the president is most eager to tout.

While an obsession with tariffs certainly hurts the U.S. economy—Moody‘s analysts predictTrump’s threat to hit virtually all Chinese goods with a 25 percent levy “would slash U.S. real G.D.P. by 2.6 percentage points”—experts say the never-ending counterattacks would likely be detrimental to the global economy, too, causing a painful economic slowdown that could tip the country into a recession.  

“I’m with most economists and I think tariffs and a reduction in free trade are going to be a bad outcome for all involved,’’ Stephen Gallagher, chief U.S. economist at Societe Generale SA, told Bloomberg. Gary Hufbauer, of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, noted that while it might be easy—if not entirely misguided—to slap tariffs on imports from other countries, it’s a lot harder to take them off, pointing to a tariff that was introduced in the 1960s to protect U.S. light trucks from foreign competition and has never been removed.

Meanwhile, China appears to be in this thing for the long haul. On Tuesday, its state media released a clip effectively saying the country’s been through a lot worse than some bloated real-estate developer with a Twitter addiction.

In a clip from state broadcaster CCTV that went viral, an anchor asks, “After 5,000 years of trials and tribulations, what kind of battle have the Chinese not been through?”

The video, which has been viewed more than 3.3 billion times, underscores how China wants to portray itself as playing the long game in the trade battle in contrast with President Trump, whose re-election next year could be at risk if voters perceive the trade war negatively. Meanwhile, the People’s Daily, the official newspaper for China’s Communist Party, posted a photo captioned, “This, is China’s attitude!” CNBC’s translation of the Chinese phrases in the image reads: “Negotiate—we can! Fight—bring it on! Bully us—YOU WISH!”

And WAIT~ there's even more!

AT&T has cut more than 23,000 jobs since receiving a big tax cut at the end of 2017, despite lobbying heavily for the tax cut by claiming that it would create thousands of jobs. AT&T in November 2017 pushed for the corporate tax cut by promising to invest an additional $1 billion in 2018, with C.E.O. Randall Stephenson saying that “every billion dollars AT&T invests is 7,000 hard-hat jobs. These are not entry-level jobs. These are 7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year.”

The corporate tax cut was subsequently passed by Congress and signed into law by Trump on December 22, 2017. The tax cut reportedly gave AT&T an extra $3 billion in cash in 2018. But AT&T cut capital spending and kept laying people off after the tax cut. A union analysis of AT&T’s publicly available financial statements “shows the telecom company eliminated 23,328 jobs since the Tax Cut and Jobs Act passed in late 2017, including nearly 6,000 in the first quarter of 2019,” the Communications Workers of America (C.W.A.) said yesterday.

In 2019, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that, contrary to the administration’s claims that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act had resulted in “big bonuses” for American workers, employees had received, on average, an increase of a penny, which they hopefully haven’t spent all in one place.

Fact check summary - Fake Economic Trumpzi propaganda!

Donald Trump's racism in the face of antisemitism - Michael Cohen statement

In the post 2018 Mid Term Election news conference, Donald Trump cruelly read a list of names of candidates who lost their elections. His horrendous lie about the #BlueWave was to claim that the candidates lost their elections because they did not "embrace him". He never mentioned the negative public response to the Hollywood Access tape, to the Trump "both sides" response about Charlottesville or the heinous massacre of Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Michael Cohen is talking about the racist "real  Donald Trump".

Donald Trump's inappropriate response to both the Charlottesville white supremicist assaults and his insensitivity to the burial of the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre are consistent with the racist he really is. In fact, Trump's Twitter handle is @realDonaldTrump and nearly all of the Tweets he writes are caustic.

Mourners gathered in Pittsburgh to honor and remember the victims of the harrowing attack on the Tree of Life synagogue. 

Reported by Emily Jane Fox in Vanity Fair's  The Hive

As he awaits sentencing, Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen says that he wants to clear his conscience and warn voters about what he sees as the president’s true nature.

Days earlier, while observing Shabbat, 11 Jews were murdered. Robert Bowers, the alleged suspect, later told a SWAT officer that he wanted all Jews to die. (Bowers has since pleaded not guilty.) 

The tragedy united thousands of Jews in Pittsburgh, who peacefully protested Donald Trump’s visit to the synagogue earlier this week. It also consumed a far larger constituency, which remained aghast that the alleged killer was motivated by fear fanned by the president of the United States.

Michael Cohen*, the president’s former lawyer (who plead guilty to breaking campaign finance laws, in the Robert Mueller investigation), was among those closely following the tragic story. 

Cohen is the son of a Holocaust survivor.

But, Cohen remained largely silent since the F.B.I. executed search warrants on his home, hotel room, and office this past spring. In August, he pleaded guilty to charges related to campaign-finance violations and tax fraud, and at the advice of counsel, he has not spoken publicly about his case or his relationship with the president ever since. Privately, he has been cooperating with investigators in the Southern District of New York, the special counsel’s office, and New York State. (He faces sentencing in the Southern District next month.) Yet Cohen wanted to express himself in the wake of the tragedy. Shortly after the sun rose on Tuesday, he tweeted, “In honor of those sadly being buried today resulting from #AntiSemitism #PittsburghSynagogueShooting, let’s follow the wisdom and thoughtful words of #RabbiJeffreyMyers ‘it can’t just be to say we need to stop hate. We need to do, we need to act to tone down rhetoric.’”

Like many, Cohen has observed the president’s scorched-earth campaign tactics as the midterm elections approach, and as the prospect of a Democratic House majority beckons, with its attendant promise of investigations and inquiries. 

He heard Trump’s constantly negative invocation of the migrant caravan moving through Central America; he’s noticed the president threaten to revoke birthright citizenship; he’s noted Trump’s tweet calling Florida’s African-American gubernatorial candidate, Andrew Gillum, a “thief,” without any evidence. 

He also watched Trump shirk responsibility after it was discovered that Bowers invoked the caravan in posts online ahead of the mass murder in Pittsburgh, and after one of his ardent supporters was charged last week with mailing pipe bombs to notable Democrats and other frequent Trumpian targets. (The suspect plans to plead not guilty.) On Twitter and during rallies, Trump has referred to the media as “the enemy of the people,”

blaming the free press for “the anger we see today in our society.”

That message rang hollow to those most familiar with the president and his language, including Cohen, who said he has spent the last several months quietly reflecting on his former boss and his own role in the Trump Organization. Amid the president’s recent tirades, Cohen has re-registered as a Democrat and urged people on Twitter to vote in the midterm elections, calling it possibly “the most important vote in our lifetime.” He said that events also activated within him an urge to reveal details from his tenure at the Trump Organization, during which he said the president privately uttered chilling, racist language in one-on-one conversations. On Tuesday, the day of the first funerals in Pittsburgh, he shared some of these memories.

Certainly, Cohen is aggrieved, and his credibility has been questioned by the president, his lawyers, and others. His allegations could inflame the very divisions that he’s said he wants to diffuse. Through the president’s public attacks against him, he stayed silent, as his lawyers advised, and he’s taken a risk in sharing these recollections on the record. When I asked him why he was coming forward now with such uncomfortable claims, Cohen was clear: he knew that the president’s private comments were worse than his public rhetoric, and he wanted to offer potential voters what he believed was evidence of Trump’s character and to do so in advance of the 2018 midterm elections.

During our conversation, Cohen recalled a discussion at Trump Tower, following the then-candidate’s return from a campaign rally during the 2016 election cycle. Cohen had watched the rally on TV and noticed that the crowd was largely Caucasian. He offered this observation to his boss. “I told Trump that the rally looked vanilla on television. Trump responded, ‘That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.’” (The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

This conversation, he noted, was reminiscent of an exchange that the two men had engaged in years earlier, after Nelson Mandela’s death. “[Trump] said to me, ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city,’” Cohen recalled, a statement that echoed the president’s alleged comments about African nations earlier this year. (White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (aka by MaineWriter - Morticia) denied those comments at the time. She added that “no one here is going to pretend like the president is always politically correct—he isn’t.” She subsequently noted that it was “one of the reasons the American people love him.” - uhh-ahh, although 56 % do not).

Cohen also recounted a conversation he had with Trump in the late 2000s, while they were traveling to Chicago for a Trump International Hotel board meeting. “We were going from the airport to the hotel, and we drove through what looked like a rougher neighborhood. Trump made a comment to me, saying that only the blacks could live like this.” After the first few seasons of The Apprentice, Cohen recalled how he and Trump were discussing the reality show and past season winners. The conversation wended its way back to the show’s first season, which ended in a head-to-head between two contestants, Bill Rancic and Kwame Jackson. “Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking Jackson,” an African-American investment manager who had graduated from Harvard Business School. “He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black f-g win.’” (Jackson told me that he had heard that the president made such a comment. “My response to Trump is simple and Wakandan,” he said, referring to the fictional African country where Black Panther hails from. “‘Not today, colonizer!’”)

In retrospect, Cohen told me that he wishes he had quit the Trump Organization when he heard these offensive remarks. “I should have been a bigger person, and I should have left,” he said. He didn’t, he said, because he grew numb to the language and, in awe of the job, forgave his boss’s sins. 

Cohen, in fact, even defended the president publicly against charges of racism. Last year, he explicitly tweeted as much. 

Moreover, Cohen explained that he defended the president because he thought the magnitude of the office would eventually force him to be more judicious with his words. “I truly thought the office would change him,” he said. But it hasn’t, Cohen continued. In fact, he said, it has exacerbated his rhetoric.

Cohen’s claims would damage most presidents. Trump, however, survived the Access Hollywood tape in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

In fact, incredulously, Trump's supporters stayed with him after his jarring “both sides” comment regarding the racial violence in Charlottesville, and didn’t bend when Omarosa Manigault Newman accused him of using vile racial language after she left the White House. (Trump referred to her as “that dog” after her book came out.) When Trump portrayed Brett Kavanaugh as a man under siege, his poll numbers went up. Trump seems to perform best with his base when he appears like his back is up against the wall. For Cohen’s part, he said he is hoping that people bear his words in mind as they vote (...in 2018 and in the future).

*Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer, has reached a plea deal with prosecutors.

• He entered guilty pleas to five counts of tax evasion, one count of making a false statement to a bank, one count of making an unlawful corporate contribution, and one count of making an illegal campaign finance contribution.
• Cohen is the focus of a criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York into whether he violated campaign-finance laws, committed bank fraud or wire fraud, engaged in illegal lobbying, or participated in other crimes.