Friday, April 22, 2011 8:03:37 AM
Trump: In his own words
April 21, 2011: 8:09 PM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Below are excerpts from Donald Trump's deposition conducted on Dec. 19-20, 2007, in his lawsuit against author Timothy O'Brien and Warner Books, then owned by Time Warner, CNN's parent company.
Andrew Ceresney served as the attorney for the defense.
*
On the damage the book did:
Ceresney: Mr. Trump, you also claim that the book damaged your reputation, correct?
Trump: Yes.
Trump: I'm worth whatever I feel
Ceresney: And that's because you are perceived publicly, you believe, as a billionaire, correct?
Trump: That's correct.
Ceresney: And the book --
Trump: I am a billionaire. I'm not perceived. I mean, I am a billionaire. Of course, if you read Tim O'Brien's writings and what was then transposed into the The New York Times, you would certainly not think that. But I am a billionaire, many times over, on a conservative basis.
Ceresney: And you believe that because the book, at least according to you, suggested that you were not a billionaire that damaged your reputation, correct?
Trump: Yes.
Ceresney: And you think that that has hurt you in your business dealings? Is that what you've said?
Trump: Well, I've lost deals. I've lost specific deals because of it.
On calculating his own net worth:
Ceresney: Mr. Trump, have you always been completely truthful in your public statements about your net worth of properties?
Trump: I try.
Ceresney: Have you ever not been truthful?
Trump: My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings, but I try.
Ceresney: Let me just understand that a little. You said your net worth goes up and down based upon your own feelings?
Trump: Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day...
Ceresney: When you publicly state a net worth number, what do you base that number on?
Trump: I would say it's my general attitude at the time that the question may be asked. And as I say, it varies.
On having a thin skin:
Trump: I'm very thick-skinned if they tell the truth. In other words, I've had many bad articles over the years, and if they're accurately bad -- I mean, some things are bad, some things are good -- I can really handle it well ... Where I do become thin-skinned is when somebody writes bad things that are untrue."
On his valuations of his properties:
Ceresney: Have you ever done an analysis to determine whether the amount that you have contributed in cash to these golf courses is more or less than the amount that you have made from these golf courses?
Trump: It will be. They will all be very good investments in the future. This is ... this is a business that you start off slow, and then you get more and more members, and all of a sudden it becomes extremely profitable.
Ceresney: Mr. Trump, I asked you have you ever done an analysis?
Trump: No, I have never done an analysis.
Ceresney: Have you ever done a projection as to how much you anticipate you will profit on these courses over time in light of the contributions that you're making in cash?
Trump: Yes, I've done mental projections.
Ceresney: Mental projections?
Trump: Yes.
Ceresney: These are projections that you've done in your head?
Trump: Yes.
*
© 2011 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company
http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/21/news/companies/donald_trump_excerpts/
===
The Danger of Donald Trump
By TIMOTHY EGAN
April 21, 2011, 9:00 pm
It’s easy to see why people think Donald Trump has become the Charlie Sheen of the Republican Party. Gluttons for attention, the two share a rare talent at self-promotion, self-delusion and self-immolation. And Sheen now proclaims himself a birther, in league with Trump’s crusade to promote a lie about President Obama that is also believed by nearly half of G.O.P voters.
But the more you watch Trump crash around the land, leaving shards of fabrication for the rest of us to sweep up, the more you realize who he’s really like: Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister who has served longer than any leader of his country since Mussolini goose-stepped over bell’Italia.
Donald Trump, left, and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy
Gary Coronado/Palm Beach Post, via Associated Press, left; Olivier Morin, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The surface matches are compelling. Hair plugs for Berlusconi, a pricey thatch of some sort for Trump. Berlusconi regularly insults women in public. Trump has also publically called at least one woman a “fat pig.” Berlusconi brought sexed-up game shows to Italian television. Trump has a silly “reality” show in which he plays a business mogul. Berlusconi, at 74, socializes with teenage girls. Just shy of his 60th birthday, the thrice-married Trump said that if then-24-year-old Ivanka Trump were not his daughter, “perhaps I’d be dating her.”
When I lived in New York, and later in Italy, I heard many people dismiss these men as a joke. They’re vulgarians — it’s all a sideshow of limos and pouty women with bee-sting lips. But an equally large segment of the population is strangely entranced by Trump and Berlusconi. If Trump is leading in some Republican polls, and Berlusconi still commands a large following despite being on trial for his latest sex scandal, what does it say about an enabling public?
Trump’s latest meteor flash explains less about him and more about the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. (Trump, by the way, once compared Reagan to a con man.) In a month’s time, he became the voice in that party of murky lies usually circulated by people with far less money (and even stranger hair).
Trump and Berlusconi revel in all those things your mother said not to do. They’re crude, obnoxious, boastful and bullying. They are the opposite of classy. And when they go public with something other than money talk or reality television, it gives the more obvious crazies a measure of validation.
Look: I have Trump-fatigue as much as the next guy. Even Donald is now sick of The Donald who dominated the recent news, saying on Thursday that “I’ve spoken my piece” on the birther issue, and was ready to move on. But he can’t just smash things up and then retreat back into his money, letting “other people clean up the mess,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the rich in “The Great Gatsby.” He has to be held accountable for driving American politics further into the sewer.
Consider the case of Marilyn Davenport, the Orange County Republican official [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/us/19brfs-GOPOFFICIALD_BRF.html ({items linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=62156870 and following)] who recently forwarded an e-mail with a picture of Barack Obama superimposed on the face of a baby chimpanzee, with a family of simians. The tag line: “Now you know why no birth certificate.” (She apologized Wednesday, after coming under pressure from the N.A.A.C.P.) Would she have felt free to circulate racist mockups among the well-off in Southern California had Trump not opened the door to the false claims that Obama was born in Kenya?
Or look at a New York Times/CBS poll [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/us/politics/22republicans.html ] released on Thursday, showing that a 47 percent plurality of Republican voters don’t think the president of the United States is an American citizen by birth.
“I’ll tell you, people love this issue — especially Republicans,” Trump said when he started on his birther crusade, vowing to send investigators to Hawaii to get to the bottom of what was settled long ago.
The fact-denying block of the Republican party seems to grow daily, thanks to people like Trump. Here, folks: take five minutes and read all of this, a nonpartisan, fact-checked debunking of the birther issue [ http://www.factcheck.org/2011/04/donald-youre-fired/ ].
By doing that, you’ve done far more than Trump has done. He can’t even get his misinformation right, wrongly claiming on national television that Obama’s grandmother said the president was born in Kenya, or that nobody in Hawaii knew him growing up. Each statement is disproven by a 10-second search of the record.
This week, George Stephanopoulos asked Michele Bachmann whether she believed in the birther garbage. She said she had her own personal documentation of birth.
“Well, I have the president’s birth certificate right here,” said Stephanopoulos, producing a document from Hawaii. “It’s certified. It’s got a certification number. It’s got the registration of the state, signed. It’s got a seal on it, and it says, ‘This copy serves as prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding.’”
Bachmann: “Well, then that should settle it.”
Except, it won’t. In true reality-show fashion, Trump has promised some kind of revelation during ratings month in May, about him or Obama. But when pressed this week by a reporter about what his “investigators” had found in Hawaii, he turned churlish and said, “None of your business.”
He’s riding this horse because he has nothing else. Not long ago, Trump was pro-choice on abortion, in favor of universal health care by a single-payer, Canadian-style system, and for higher taxes on the rich — all positions he’s since abandoned. It takes a buffoon with multiple media outlets to make Mitt Romney look like a paragon of character and consistency.
But Trump won’t go away, nor will Berlusconi, not so long as we have a need for someone to give voice to our darker angels — and get away with it.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/the-danger-of-donald-trump/ [with comments]
April 21, 2011: 8:09 PM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Below are excerpts from Donald Trump's deposition conducted on Dec. 19-20, 2007, in his lawsuit against author Timothy O'Brien and Warner Books, then owned by Time Warner, CNN's parent company.
Andrew Ceresney served as the attorney for the defense.
*
On the damage the book did:
Ceresney: Mr. Trump, you also claim that the book damaged your reputation, correct?
Trump: Yes.
Trump: I'm worth whatever I feel
Ceresney: And that's because you are perceived publicly, you believe, as a billionaire, correct?
Trump: That's correct.
Ceresney: And the book --
Trump: I am a billionaire. I'm not perceived. I mean, I am a billionaire. Of course, if you read Tim O'Brien's writings and what was then transposed into the The New York Times, you would certainly not think that. But I am a billionaire, many times over, on a conservative basis.
Ceresney: And you believe that because the book, at least according to you, suggested that you were not a billionaire that damaged your reputation, correct?
Trump: Yes.
Ceresney: And you think that that has hurt you in your business dealings? Is that what you've said?
Trump: Well, I've lost deals. I've lost specific deals because of it.
On calculating his own net worth:
Ceresney: Mr. Trump, have you always been completely truthful in your public statements about your net worth of properties?
Trump: I try.
Ceresney: Have you ever not been truthful?
Trump: My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings, but I try.
Ceresney: Let me just understand that a little. You said your net worth goes up and down based upon your own feelings?
Trump: Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day...
Ceresney: When you publicly state a net worth number, what do you base that number on?
Trump: I would say it's my general attitude at the time that the question may be asked. And as I say, it varies.
On having a thin skin:
Trump: I'm very thick-skinned if they tell the truth. In other words, I've had many bad articles over the years, and if they're accurately bad -- I mean, some things are bad, some things are good -- I can really handle it well ... Where I do become thin-skinned is when somebody writes bad things that are untrue."
On his valuations of his properties:
Ceresney: Have you ever done an analysis to determine whether the amount that you have contributed in cash to these golf courses is more or less than the amount that you have made from these golf courses?
Trump: It will be. They will all be very good investments in the future. This is ... this is a business that you start off slow, and then you get more and more members, and all of a sudden it becomes extremely profitable.
Ceresney: Mr. Trump, I asked you have you ever done an analysis?
Trump: No, I have never done an analysis.
Ceresney: Have you ever done a projection as to how much you anticipate you will profit on these courses over time in light of the contributions that you're making in cash?
Trump: Yes, I've done mental projections.
Ceresney: Mental projections?
Trump: Yes.
Ceresney: These are projections that you've done in your head?
Trump: Yes.
*
© 2011 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company
http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/21/news/companies/donald_trump_excerpts/
===
The Danger of Donald Trump
By TIMOTHY EGAN
April 21, 2011, 9:00 pm
It’s easy to see why people think Donald Trump has become the Charlie Sheen of the Republican Party. Gluttons for attention, the two share a rare talent at self-promotion, self-delusion and self-immolation. And Sheen now proclaims himself a birther, in league with Trump’s crusade to promote a lie about President Obama that is also believed by nearly half of G.O.P voters.
But the more you watch Trump crash around the land, leaving shards of fabrication for the rest of us to sweep up, the more you realize who he’s really like: Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister who has served longer than any leader of his country since Mussolini goose-stepped over bell’Italia.
Donald Trump, left, and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy
Gary Coronado/Palm Beach Post, via Associated Press, left; Olivier Morin, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The surface matches are compelling. Hair plugs for Berlusconi, a pricey thatch of some sort for Trump. Berlusconi regularly insults women in public. Trump has also publically called at least one woman a “fat pig.” Berlusconi brought sexed-up game shows to Italian television. Trump has a silly “reality” show in which he plays a business mogul. Berlusconi, at 74, socializes with teenage girls. Just shy of his 60th birthday, the thrice-married Trump said that if then-24-year-old Ivanka Trump were not his daughter, “perhaps I’d be dating her.”
When I lived in New York, and later in Italy, I heard many people dismiss these men as a joke. They’re vulgarians — it’s all a sideshow of limos and pouty women with bee-sting lips. But an equally large segment of the population is strangely entranced by Trump and Berlusconi. If Trump is leading in some Republican polls, and Berlusconi still commands a large following despite being on trial for his latest sex scandal, what does it say about an enabling public?
Trump’s latest meteor flash explains less about him and more about the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. (Trump, by the way, once compared Reagan to a con man.) In a month’s time, he became the voice in that party of murky lies usually circulated by people with far less money (and even stranger hair).
Trump and Berlusconi revel in all those things your mother said not to do. They’re crude, obnoxious, boastful and bullying. They are the opposite of classy. And when they go public with something other than money talk or reality television, it gives the more obvious crazies a measure of validation.
Look: I have Trump-fatigue as much as the next guy. Even Donald is now sick of The Donald who dominated the recent news, saying on Thursday that “I’ve spoken my piece” on the birther issue, and was ready to move on. But he can’t just smash things up and then retreat back into his money, letting “other people clean up the mess,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the rich in “The Great Gatsby.” He has to be held accountable for driving American politics further into the sewer.
Consider the case of Marilyn Davenport, the Orange County Republican official [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/us/19brfs-GOPOFFICIALD_BRF.html ({items linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=62156870 and following)] who recently forwarded an e-mail with a picture of Barack Obama superimposed on the face of a baby chimpanzee, with a family of simians. The tag line: “Now you know why no birth certificate.” (She apologized Wednesday, after coming under pressure from the N.A.A.C.P.) Would she have felt free to circulate racist mockups among the well-off in Southern California had Trump not opened the door to the false claims that Obama was born in Kenya?
Or look at a New York Times/CBS poll [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/us/politics/22republicans.html ] released on Thursday, showing that a 47 percent plurality of Republican voters don’t think the president of the United States is an American citizen by birth.
“I’ll tell you, people love this issue — especially Republicans,” Trump said when he started on his birther crusade, vowing to send investigators to Hawaii to get to the bottom of what was settled long ago.
The fact-denying block of the Republican party seems to grow daily, thanks to people like Trump. Here, folks: take five minutes and read all of this, a nonpartisan, fact-checked debunking of the birther issue [ http://www.factcheck.org/2011/04/donald-youre-fired/ ].
By doing that, you’ve done far more than Trump has done. He can’t even get his misinformation right, wrongly claiming on national television that Obama’s grandmother said the president was born in Kenya, or that nobody in Hawaii knew him growing up. Each statement is disproven by a 10-second search of the record.
This week, George Stephanopoulos asked Michele Bachmann whether she believed in the birther garbage. She said she had her own personal documentation of birth.
“Well, I have the president’s birth certificate right here,” said Stephanopoulos, producing a document from Hawaii. “It’s certified. It’s got a certification number. It’s got the registration of the state, signed. It’s got a seal on it, and it says, ‘This copy serves as prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding.’”
Bachmann: “Well, then that should settle it.”
Except, it won’t. In true reality-show fashion, Trump has promised some kind of revelation during ratings month in May, about him or Obama. But when pressed this week by a reporter about what his “investigators” had found in Hawaii, he turned churlish and said, “None of your business.”
He’s riding this horse because he has nothing else. Not long ago, Trump was pro-choice on abortion, in favor of universal health care by a single-payer, Canadian-style system, and for higher taxes on the rich — all positions he’s since abandoned. It takes a buffoon with multiple media outlets to make Mitt Romney look like a paragon of character and consistency.
But Trump won’t go away, nor will Berlusconi, not so long as we have a need for someone to give voice to our darker angels — and get away with it.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/the-danger-of-donald-trump/ [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
