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Saturday, July 25, 2015

Why Aren't Republicans Going After Trump's Mob Connections?

I found this article from four years ago about why Donald Trump wouldn't run for president in 2012. The upshot: Trump's connections to organized crime connections would torpedo a serious run.
With lawsuits pending, Trump's business empire could not withstand the close scrutiny of a presidential campaign, and even his kids might have been muddied. Wayne Barrett, who first exposed Trump’s ties to organized crime in his 1992 book, looked into the Donald’s most recent business dealings and discovered:
  • One associate who was an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a massive 2000 stock swindle  — and escaped prison only by helping to convict 19 others, including six members of New York crime families
  • Two associates who served prison time on cocaine charges
  • Another partner prosecuted for trafficking underage girls after a dramatic helicopter raid on a yacht off the Turkish coast
  • A pending lawsuit against Trump Soho that alleges daughter Ivanka, among others, made fraudulent misrepresentations
When Trump dropped out the last time, he said:
"Nobody said it was going to be easy, but I had no idea I would get hammered in the way I've been hammered the past few weeks," Trump said in Nashua, New Hampshire. 
Much of that was due to the ridicule Trump suffered after President Obama released his birth certificate. So why is Trump so popular this time around? And why aren't Republicans hammering him?

I get that some Republicans are quaking in their boots after he issued his extortion threat last week -- "Be nice to me or I'll  run as a third-party candidate and hand the election to the Democrats." But the Republican who takes down Trump will be a hero to the rest of the party -- why are they so afraid of this blowhard?

It should be trivial to dethrone Trump. Just have your lawyers look into any one of his golf courses or hotels or casinos on the East Coast -- they've all got to be riddled with corruption of some sort or other, or based on sweet-heart deals he cut with the Democratic office holders to whom he contributed campaign dollars. They could take out Trump and embarrass some Democrats at the same time.

And does anyone seriously believe Trump is is no longer connected to organized crime? As a casino owner and real estate developer in New York and New Jersey, how can he not be all mobbed up?

Finally, Trump brags about what an unreliable, underhanded and dishonest businessman he is -- it's his definition of "smart." Trump is a crook six ways to Sunday. He's a shell of a human being: all blustering ego and native cunning with a marginally average intelligence. He succeeds only because he's a soulless, narcissistic sociopath without the conscience that prevents most people from swindling everyone they deal with. There must be dozens of people that Trump has screwed over who are just itching to get back at him. Why haven't Republicans dug any of them up? They might start looking into his four bankruptcies.

The Democrats certainly will if Trump is the nominee.

Republicans are constantly complaining about us becoming Greece, but with Trump as president we'd become Italy. Trump is just Silvio Berlusconi with more hair glued on his head.

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