Trump shuns ‘ex-presidents club’ — and the feeling is mutual
--The Trump Presidency Is Now History. So How Will It Rank?--
By WILL WEISSERT and DEB RIECHMANN yesterday
1 of 5 FILE - In this Dec. 5, 2018 file photo former President George W. Bush greets President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, former President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former President Jimmy Carter during a State Funeral for former President George H.W. Bush at the National Cathedral in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s a club Donald Trump was never really interested in joining and certainly not so soon: the cadre of former commanders in chief who revere the presidency enough to put aside often bitter political differences and even join together in common cause.
Members of the ex-presidents club pose together for pictures. They smile and pat each other on the back while milling around historic events, or sit somberly side by side at VIP funerals. They take on special projects together. They rarely criticize one another and tend to offer even fewer harsh words about their White House successors.
Like so many other presidential traditions, however, this is one Trump seems likely to flout. Now that he’s left office, it’s hard to see him embracing the stately, exclusive club of living former presidents.
“He kind of laughed at the very notion that he would be accepted in the presidents club,” said Kate Andersen Brower, who interviewed Trump in 2019 for her book “Team of Five: The Presidents’ Club in the Age of Trump.” “He was like, ‘I don’t think I’ll be accepted.’” It’s equally clear that the club’s other members don’t much want him — at least for now.
Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton recorded a three-minute video from Arlington National Cemetery after President Joe Biden’s inauguration this week, praising peaceful presidential succession as a core of American democracy. The segment included no mention of Trump by name, but stood as a stark rebuke of his behavior since losing November’s election.
“I think the fact that the three of us are standing here, talking about a peaceful transfer of power, speaks to the institutional integrity of our country,” Bush said. Obama called inaugurations “a reminder that we can have fierce disagreements and yet recognize each other’s common humanity, and that, as Americans, we have more in common than what separates us.”
Obama, Bush and Clinton recorded their video after accompanying Biden to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Solider following the inauguration. They also taped a video urging Americans to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. Only 96-year-old Jimmy Carter, who has limited his public events because of the pandemic, and Trump, who had already flown to post-presidential life in Florida, weren’t there.
Jeffrey Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said Trump isn’t a good fit for the ex-presidents club “because he’s temperamentally different.”
“People within the club historically have been respected by ensuing presidents. Even Richard Nixon was respected by Bill Clinton and by Ronald Reagan and so on, for his foreign policy,” Engel said. “I’m not sure I see a whole lot of people calling up Trump for his strategic advice.”
Former presidents are occasionally called upon for big tasks.
George H.W. Bush and Clinton teamed up in 2005 to launch a campaign urging Americans to help the victims of the devastating Southeast Asia tsunami. When Hurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast, Bush, father of the then-current president George W. Bush, called on Clinton to boost Katrina fundraising relief efforts.
When the elder Bush died in 2018, Clinton wrote, “His friendship has been one of the great gifts of my life,” high praise considering this was the man he ousted from the White House after a bruising 1992 campaign — making Bush the only one-term president of the last three decades except for Trump.
Obama tapped Clinton and the younger President Bush to boost fundraising efforts for Haiti after its devastating 2010 earthquake. George W. Bush also became good friends with former first lady Michelle Obama, and cameras caught him slipping a cough drop to her as they sat together at Arizona Sen. John McCain’s funeral.
Usually presidents extend the same respect to their predecessors while still in office, regardless of party. In 1971, three years before he resigned in disgrace, Richard Nixon went to Texas to participate in the dedication of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidential library. When Nixon’s library was completed in 1990, then-President George H.W. Bush attended with former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.
Trump’s break with tradition began even before his presidency did. After his election win in November 2016, Obama hosted Trump at the White House promising to “do everything we can to help you succeed.” Trump responded, “I look forward to being with you many, many more times in the future” — but that never happened.
Instead, Trump falsely accused Obama of having wiretapped him and spent four years savaging his predecessor’s record.
Current and former presidents sometimes loathed each other, and criticizing their successors isn’t unheard of. Carter criticized the policies of the Republican administrations that followed his, Obama chided Trump while campaigning for Biden and also criticized George W. Bush’s policies — though Obama was usually careful not to name his predecessor. Theodore Roosevelt tried to unseat his successor, fellow Republican William Howard Taft, by founding his own “Bull Moose” party and running for president again against him.
Still, presidential reverence for former presidents dates back even further. The nation’s second president, John Adams, was concerned enough about tarnishing the legacy of his predecessor that he retained George Washington’s Cabinet appointments.
Trump may have time to build his relationship with his predecessors. He told Brower that he “could see himself becoming friendly with Bill Clinton again,” noting that the pair used to golf together.
But the odds of becoming the traditional president in retirement that he never was while in office remain long.
“I think Trump has taken it too far,” Brower said. “I don’t think that these former presidents will welcome him at any point.”
Added detail - The Manhattan district attorney's case
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations for paying adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep silent about an affair she alleges she had with Trump. The indictment alleged that Cohen had paid Daniels $130,000 before the 2016 election for the benefit of "Individual-1," an unindicted co-conspirator described as an "ultimately successful candidate for president." But federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York didn't seek charges against Trump, who would have been immune from prosecution regardless while he was president.
Donald Trump listens as Michael Cohen, his personal attorney at the time, speaks in his behalf during a campaign stop at New Spirit Revival Center church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, on Sept. 21, 2016.Jonathan Ernst / Reuters file
Two prosecutors in New York seem to have picked up where federal prosecutors left off in examining Trump's finances.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-loses-tax-subpoena-another-legal-setback-n1242405 .. is looking into a variety of allegations of financial improprieties. Court documents show that Vance is investigating "possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization," Trump's family business, which could include falsifying business records, insurance fraud and tax fraud.
While the campaign finance violation of Individual-1 isn't a federal case, New York state law says falsifying business records in furtherance of an illegal act is a felony. Cohen has also alleged that Trump effectively uses two sets of numbers in his business, one with higher values to secure loans and a second with lower values to minimize taxes, according to his congressional testimony and published interviews. While Trump has declined to release his tax returns, saying he is under audit, The New York Times obtained many years of his tax records and determined that he had paid no federal income tax for 10 of the years and $750 in each of two other years. Image: Stormy Daniels
in New York on April 16, 2018.Hector Retamal / AFP - Getty Images file
Vance's office has subpoenaed eight years of the president's tax documents from his tax preparer, Mazars USA LLC, a subpoena the president fought all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in October 2019 that Trump wasn't immune from having to provide the documents while president and could fight the subpoena only on the same grounds any other person could, on the merits.
Since the ruling, Trump's legal team has fought the subpoena on its merits, but it has lost in the district and appeals courts. The Supreme Court must now decide whether to accept Trump's emergency request for a stay of the lower courts' rulings and possibly hear the case again or deny the stay. It's unknown when the Supreme Court could announce a decision, which would be made by a high court that now includes three Trump appointees.
If the stay request is denied, Vance gets the documents as soon as Mazars can transfer the files. This is the only known criminal investigation involving Trump, and if he is convicted, the penalties could be solely or largely financial.
NBC News legal analyst Danny Cevallos said he expects Vance to pick the "lowest hanging fruit" of crimes to charge, which would likely be tax evasion or falsifying business records.
The penalty for falsifying business records can be up to a year in prison with fines or probation with fines.
Cevallos said a person can be found guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree in New York "when he has the specific intent to defraud."
"That means that he intends to cheat or deprive another person of property or a thing of value," Cevallos said.
He said a lower-level employee could claim that he or she didn't personally benefit from the crime or merely executed orders on someone else's behalf. That affirmative defense likely wouldn't apply to Trump.
The New York attorney general's case
The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, meanwhile, is investigating four different Trump Organization real estate projects and his failed attempt to buy the NFL's Buffalo Bills. In March 2019, the office subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank. The fraud inquiry was reported to have been prompted .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/nyregion/deutsche-bank-trump.html?searchResultPosition=2 .. by Cohen's testimony before Congress that Trump had inflated his financial assets.
The attorney general's investigation is civil, not criminal, but the office would be allowed to refer any allegedly criminal elements to local prosecutors like Vance.
The Trump properties that James' office is investigating, according to court filings, include Seven Springs Estate, a 212-acre property just north of New York City that the company is seeking to develop; 40 Wall Street, a heavily leveraged building the company owns in Lower Manhattan; Trump International Hotel and Tower Chicago; and Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles.
Trump has blasted the Vance and James investigations as politically motivated.
The women
Multiple women have accused Trump of inappropriate sexual behavior in incidents alleged to date as far back as the 1970s. Trump has denied the allegations. A few of the women have taken legal action, and in the case with the most serious potential implications, Trump enlisted the Justice Department as his attorney to prevent submitting evidence.
Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll alleged in a 2019 book that more than 20 years earlier, Trump raped her in a department store dressing room. Trump denied the allegation, saying that Carroll wasn't his type and that the claim was meant to spur publicity for her book of "fiction." Carroll sued, saying Trump had defamed her by accusing her of lying.
The Justice Department moved the case from state to federal court and filed a motion to act as Trump's defense attorney, saying his denial of her rape allegation was a presidential act.
A judge denied the Justice Department's motion in late October. As a private citizen and a defendant in a civil suit, Trump may now be compelled to provide evidence — meaning testimony and, potentially, a DNA sample.
Summer Zervos, a former contestant on "The Apprentice," has also filed a defamation suit against Trump for denying her accusations of sexual assault. In a suit filed in early 2017, Zervos said he grabbed her breast and kissed her without permission. Trump agreed to testify, but his attorneys were able to postpone his testimony pending a decision from the New York State Court of Appeals, which isn't expected until next year.
E. Jean Carroll at her home in Warwick, N.Y., on June 21, 2019.Eva Deitch / The Washington Post/Getty Images
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