It’s incredible what a pain in the ass it can be running for President. When he was just an ordinary business magnate, the ravening press and its readers were more interested in his sex life and antics than his possible sleazy business practices. But when you decide to run for the highest office in the land, especially if you have no juicy political history to dig into, the press tends to look more seriously at what you’ve done for the last 35 years with your life. The ungrateful bastards, especially after all the YUGE sound bites you’ve given them over the last 16 months!
The original scandal goes back about 35 years. Trump had to demolish a 12 story building to build his Trump Tower, now his personal home, business office and campaign HQ. But union workers cost money, so Trump went searching for an alternative. He found them right next door, undocumented Polish workers clearing rubble from the site next door to his. He negotiated with the contractor to have them do the demolition on his building, something they were not trained to do. According to an excellent article in TIME ;
The men were putting in 12-hour shifts with inadequate safety equipment at subpar wages that their contractor paid sporadically, if at all. A lawyer for many of the Poles demanded that the workers be paid or else he would serve Trump with a lien on the property. One Polish worker even went to Trump’s office to ask him for money in person, according to sworn testimony and a deposition filed under oath in a court case.
This was more than just hiring undocumented workers for your site. These guys were already working full time at the other site, then they were sneaking over to Trumps site to work 12 hour shifts. Several of them testified later in court that they were working 24 hours shifts, 12 at their regular job, and then sneaking over to Trumps site to work 12 more hours. I’ve worked 16 hour shifts in my time, but at a desk, with no more danger than mistyping something into my computer. These exhausted men were in actual physical danger.
This is going to hard for Trump to combat. Both at the time of the trial, and again during the debates when Marco Rubio pressed him on this, Trump sloughed it off by saying that he hired a contractor, who hired a sub contractor who hired the men. Trump was removed. Except it’s not that simple.
Unfortunately for Mein Furor, that turns out to be nothing but bullshit. Trump was intimately involved in the whole thing, right down to the initial contract to hire them. He knew exactly what was going on, and what he was doing.
How do we know about all of this? The old fashioned journalistic way. Somebody put in the shoe leather and time, got lucky and hit the jackpot;
But thousands of pages of documents from the case, including reams of testimony and sworn depositions reviewed by TIME, tell a different story. Kept for more than a decade in 13 boxes in a federal judiciary storage unit in Missouri, the documents contain testimony that Trump sought out the Polish workers when he saw them on another job, instigated the creation of the company that paid them and negotiated the hours they would work. The papers contain testimony that Trump repeatedly toured the site where the men were working, directly addressed them about pay problems and even promised to pay them himself, which he eventually did.
You’d think that it couldn’t get much worse than this, even for Das Donald, but you’d be wrong. Trump always knows how to make a bad situation worse, and he never misses an opportunity to do it. When the Polish workers sued to put a lien on his property, making it impossible to sell space in the building until they were paid, The Orange Julius sprang into action. After filing a second, and then third lien on the property for over $100,000 in unpaid wages, the lawyer received a phone call from a “Mr. Barron” (sound familiar?) advising that Mr. Trump was filing a $100,000,000 lawsuit against the workers for filing the liens. Typical Trump, never lead with your chin when you can lead with a lawsuit instead. But this could have gotten messy, Trump might have to testify again, and could actually lose. Then the kid gloves came off;
Szabo wrote a long letter defending his actions and laying out his case under the law and sent it to “Barron” on Aug. 18. A few days later, Szabo testified, he received a call from a real lawyer for Trump, Irwin Durben, who said Trump was threatening to ask the Immigration and Naturalization Service to have the Poles deported.
There is the true heart and soul of the man. He uses undocumented immigrants, hardly able to defend themselves effectively since they can’t become union members, uses them pretty much as personal chattel property, and when they finally threaten to stand up for themselves, the simplest answer is to send them packing empty handed back where they came from now that they’ve served their purpose.
And this ass gasket wants to negotiate the incredible deals that will “Make America Great Again”? How did our body politic ever get to the point where this spoiled, double dealing shitheels can even get nominated for dog catcher? These documents are not new, they’ve been in storage for more than 10 years, public records. Maybe if the media had done some more legwork back in the primaries instead of just basking in the ratings of his sound bites, Trumpenstein may not have gotten this far.
Thanks as always for reading!