Donald Trump Too Dishonest To Take Down Crooked Hillary

trump-castro-connection

This year’s election probably has the two most dishonest and corrupt major party nominees in recent history. It now seems like it is becoming a regular event for Newsweek to expose more dishonesty on Trump’s part. This week’s issue reports on Trump violating the embargo against Cuba:

 A company controlled by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, secretly conducted business in Communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal, according to interviews with former Trump executives, internal company records and court filings.

Documents show that the Trump company spent a minimum of $68,000 for its 1998 foray into Cuba at a time when the corporate expenditure of even a penny in the Caribbean country was prohibited without U.S. government approval. But the company did not spend the money directly. Instead, with Trump’s knowledge, executives funneled the cash for the Cuba trip through an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corp. Once the business consultants traveled to the island and incurred the expenses for the venture, Seven Arrows instructed senior officers with Trump’s company—then called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts—how to make it appear legal by linking it after the fact to a charitable effort.

It is questionable if this will hurt Trump among his supporters, but it could have an impact in Florida. Those supporting both Trump and Clinton no longer seem to care about the dishonesty of their candidate. However, with Clinton moving back into a small lead over Trump after this week’s debate, this does make it harder for Trump to get away with regaining momentum with his planned attacks on Clinton for her corruption. Jonathan Chait writes:

Donald Trump’s campaign is signaling that its new, post-first-debate message will be an attack on Hillary Clinton’s finances, under the catchphrase “Follow the money.” This is probably Trump’s most fruitful avenue of attack. The Clinton Foundation has created appearances of a conflict of interest, and the Clintons’ policy of accepting speaking fees from any source as long as the check would clear the bank has tarnished her image, and months of bashing at the hands of Bernie Sanders left her branded in the mind of many young liberals as a handmaiden of Wall Street.

And yet the notion that a voter ought to support Trump over Clinton on grounds of financial ethics or transparency is insane. Trump is corrupt on a world-historic scale. Andrew Prokop’s summary merely skims the surface of a career that has left hardly any rule or norm of business conduct un-violated. It is not only Trump’s history of misconduct, or even his ongoing abuse of his foundation for personal gain, but his astonishing promise, if elected, to continue to abuse his power to enrich himself by having his children manage his branded business that he will enhance via public office.

Even if none of that were true, it remains the case that Trump has shattered modern precedent by refusing to disclose his tax returns. How on Earth can a candidate run on the slogan “Follow the money” while stonewalling any questions about his own money? The only possible context in which this makes sense is a myopic, context-free focus on Clinton’s ethical shortcomings, combined with the assumption that Trump’s dangerous lunacy amounts to some kind of independence from big moneyed interests.

This does downplay the magnitude of Clinton’s corruption, but the key point here is that Trump is far too dishonest himself to successfully run against Clinton based upon ethics. This is rather fortunate for Clinton, and is one of the reasons why she is able to remain ahead of Trump, but would probably be trailing any other Republican candidate.

In some ways Clinton’s corruption is worse than Trump’s. I would rank her abuse of a cabinet position to make money to be more of an issue than Trump’s dishonest business practices. A politician who enters into ethics agreements made due to concerns about corruption, and then violates them as Clinton did, should not be considered for any further government positions, especially president. The bottom line is that both Clinton and Trump are too dishonest and corrupt to be fit to be president.

For for first time ever I agree, to a certain degree, with The Detroit News on its assessment of presidential candidates. Their editorial says, “Donald Trump is unprincipled, unstable and quite possibly dangerous. He can not be president.” On Clinton they write, “character matters. Her career-long struggles with honesty and ethics and calculating, self-serving approach to politics trouble us deeply.”

While it would be unrealistic to expect a newspaper as conservative as The Detroit News to endorse Jill Stein, I give them credit for endorsing a third party candidate such as Gary Johnson. Their defense of endorsing a minor party candidate can apply to either:

We anticipate our decision not to support either of the major party candidates will bring charges that we are throwing away our endorsement. Our contention is that an endorsement based on conscience is never wasted.