TBR News May 19, 2018

May 19 2018

The Voice of the White House 

Washington, D.C. May 19, 2018:”President trump has informed European countries that if they dared to do business with Iran, after he has sanctioned because his Israeli friends asked him to, he would sanction European countries.

The European countries have now given Trump the finger and ruled that their countries could do all the business they liked.

American once was a huge, producing country with heavy economic clout but now she is an importing country with highly reduced economic clout.

European leaders are increasingly annoyed by Trump’s irrational actions and are banding together to go it on their own.

Over the years the CIA has been running banks, television companies and other entities inside the EU but the time is coming when they will be png’d and have to go home.

For Europe, this is sooner rather than later.”

 

Table of Contents

  • Europe reassures Iran of commitment to nuclear deal without U.S
  • EU considers Iran central bank transfers to beat U.S. sanctions
  • The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election
  • Why Donald Trump’s Companies Went Bankrupt
  • Donald Trump’s Many Business Failures, Explained
  • In US evangelical capital, a new progressiveness and differing views on Israel
  • What are the End Days? A study in deception

 Europe reassures Iran of commitment to nuclear deal without U.S

May 19, 2018

by Alissa de Carbonnel

Reuters

TEHRAN (Reuters) – The European Union’s energy chief sought to reassure Iran on Saturday that the bloc remained committed to salvaging a nuclear deal with Tehran despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to exit the accord and reimpose sanctions.

Miguel Arias Canete delivered the message on a visit to Tehran and also said the 28-nation EU, once the biggest importer of Iranian oil, hoped to strengthen trade with Iran.

“We have sent a message to our Iranian friends that as long as they are sticking to the (nuclear) agreement the Europeans will… fulfill their commitment. And they said the same thing on the other side,” Arias Canete, European Commissioner for energy and climate, told reporters after talks with Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi.

Salehi said it would be disastrous if EU efforts fail to preserve the 2015 deal, in which Tehran agreed to curb its nuclear work in return for the lifting of most Western sanctions. “The ball is in their (EU leaders) court,” Salehi said. “We hope their efforts materialize.”

Since Trump’s announcement of the U.S. exit on May 8, EU leaders have pledged to try to keep Iran’s oil trade and investment flowing but admitted that will not be easy to do so.

Britain, France and Germany back the deal as the best way of stopping Tehran getting nuclear weapons but have called on Iran to limit its regional influence and curb the missile program.

“The EU’s adopted mechanisms … should be enforced by August 8, when U.S. sanctions begin to take effect,” Iranian TV quoted Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, as saying.

A collapse of the accord could tip the balance of power in Iran’s faction-ridden political establishment in favor of President Hassan Rouhani’s hardline rivals, who have fiercely criticized the president’s failure to deliver greater economic prosperity.

“ALL KINDS OF POSSIBILITIES”

Salehi said Iran had several options, including resuming its 20 percent uranium enrichment, if the European countries failed to keep the pact alive. He said the EU had only a few weeks to deliver on their promises.

“If the other side keeps itself committed to its promises we also will. …We hope the situation will not arise to the point that we will have to go back to the worst option,” Salehi told reporters in English.

“There are all kind of possibilities, we can … start the 20 percent enrichment.”

Under the 2015 deal, Iran’s level of enrichment must remain at around 3.6 percent. Iran stopped producing 20 percent enriched uranium and gave up the majority of its stockpile as part of the agreement.

Uranium refined to 20 percent fissile purity is well beyond the 5 percent normally required to fuel civilian nuclear power plants, although still well short of the highly enriched, or 80 to 90 percent, purity needed for a nuclear bomb.

In their diplomacy with Tehran, EU sources say Iranian government officials have warned they are under pressure from those who say Iran has traded away its nuclear sovereignty without reaping any economic benefits.

Iran has struggled to cash in on the accord, partly because of remaining unilateral U.S. sanctions that have deterred major Western investors from doing business with Tehran.

Rouhani has tried to assure ordinary Iranians, frustrated by high unemployment and stagnant living standards, that Trump’s decision would have no impact on Iran’s oil-reliant economy.

“Unfortunately because of the negative interferences of the U.S., we were not able to reap the fruits of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actions) we expected,” Salehi said.

“Public opinion is not as supportive as it was before and if the other side does not deliver… we will keep losing the support of our people for the JCPOA.”

Iran’s clerical rulers fear a revival of January’s anti-government protests that underlined the establishment’s vulnerability to popular anger fueled by economic hardship.

Writing by Parisa Hafezi in Ankara; Editing by Gareth Jones and Ros Russell

 

EU considers Iran central bank transfers to beat U.S. sanctions

May 18, 2018

by Robin Emmott

Reuters

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Commission is proposing that EU governments make direct money transfers to Iran’s central bank to avoid U.S. penalties, an EU official said, in what would be the most forthright challenge to Washington’s newly reimposed sanctions.

The step, which would seek to bypass the U.S. financial system, would allow European companies to repay Iran for oil exports and repatriate Iranian funds in Europe, a senior EU official said, although the details were still to be worked out.

The European Union, once Iran’s biggest oil importer, is determined to save the nuclear accord, that U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned on May 8, by keeping money flowing to Tehran as long as the Islamic Republic complies with the 2015 deal to prevent it from developing an atomic weapon.

“Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has proposed this to member states. We now need to work out how we can facilitate oil payments and repatriate Iranian funds in the European Union to Iran’s central bank,” said the EU official, who is directly involved in the discussions.

The U.S. Treasury announced on Tuesday more sanctions on officials of the Iranian central bank, including Governor Valiollah Seif,. But the EU official said the bloc believes that does not sanction the central bank itself.

European Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete will discuss the idea with Iranian officials in Tehran during his trip this weekend, the EU official said. Then it will be up to EU governments to take a final decision.

EU leaders in Sofia this week committed to uphold Europe’s side of the 2015 nuclear deal, which offers sanctions relief in return for Tehran shutting down its capacity, under strict surveillance by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, to stockpile enriched uranium for a possible atomic bomb.

SANCTIONS-BLOCKING LAW

Other measures included renewing a sanctions-blocking measure to protect European businesses in Iran.

The Commission said in a statement it had “launched the formal process to activate the Blocking Statute by updating the list of U.S. sanctions on Iran falling within its scope,” referring to an EU regulation from 1996.

The EU’s blocking statute bans any EU company from complying with U.S. sanctions and does not recognize any court rulings that enforce American penalties. It was developed when the United States tried to penalize foreign companies trading with Cuba in the 1990s, but has never been formally implemented.

EU officials say they are revamping the blocking statute to protect EU companies against U.S. Iran-related sanctions, after the expiry of 90- and 180-day wind-down periods that allow companies to quit the country and avoid fines.

A second EU official said the EU sanctions-blocking regulation would come into force on Aug.5, a day before U.S. sanctions take effect, unless the European Parliament and EU governments formally rejected it.

“This has a strong signaling value, it can be very useful to companies but it is ultimately a business decision for each company to make (on whether to continue to invest in Iran),” the official said.

Once Iran’s top trading partner, the EU has sought to pour billions of euros into the Islamic Republic since the bloc, along with the United Nations and United States, lifted blanket economic sanctions in 2016 that had hurt the Iranian economy.

Iran’s exports of mainly fuel and other energy products to the EU in 2016 jumped 344 percent to 5.5 billion euros ($6.58 billion) compared with the previous year.

EU investment in Iran, mainly from Germany, France and Italy, has jumped to more than 20 billion euros since 2016, in projects ranging from aerospace to energy.

Other measures proposed by the Commission, the EU executive, include urging EU governments to start the legal process of allowing the European Investment Bank to lend to EU projects in Iran.

Under that plan, the bank could guarantee such projects through the EU’s common budget, picking up part of the bill should they fail or collapse. The measure aims to encourage companies to invest.

Reporting by Robin Emmott; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Jon Boyle

 

The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election

May 19, 2018

by Glenn Greenwald

The Intercept

An extremely strange episode that has engulfed official Washington over the last two weeks came to a truly bizarre conclusion on Friday night. And it revolves around a long-time, highly sketchy CIA operative, Stefan Halper.

Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.

Over the past several weeks, House Republicans have been claiming that the FBI during the 2016 election used an operative to spy on the Trump campaign, and they triggered outrage within the FBI by trying to learn his identity. The controversy escalated when President Trump joined the fray on Friday morning. “Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,” Trump tweeted, adding: “It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true – all time biggest political scandal!”

In response, the DOJ and the FBI’s various media spokespeople did not deny the core accusation, but quibbled with the language (the FBI used an “informant,” not a “spy”), and then began using increasingly strident language to warn that exposing his name would jeopardize his life and those of others, and also put American national security at grave risk. On May 8, the Washington Post described the informant as “a top-secret intelligence source” and cited DOJ officials as arguing that disclosure of his name “could risk lives by potentially exposing the source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI.”

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, who spent much of last week working to ensure confirmation of Trump’s choice to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, actually threatened his own colleagues in Congress with criminal prosecution if they tried to obtain the identity of the informant. “Anyone who is entrusted with our nation’s highest secrets should act with the gravity and seriousness of purpose that knowledge deserves,” Warner said.

But now, as a result of some very odd choices by the nation’s largest media outlets, everyone knows the name of the FBI’s informant: Stefan Halper. And Halper’s history is quite troubling, particularly his central role in the scandal in the 1980 election. Equally troubling are the DOJ and FBI’s highly inflammatory and, at best, misleading claims that they made to try to prevent Halper’s identity from being reported.

To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that 1980 Presidential election spying campaign.

It was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter did this scandal emerge. It was leaked by right-wing officials inside the Reagan administration who wanted to undermine officials they regarded as too moderate, including then White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who was a Bush loyalist.

The NYT in 1983 said the Reagan campaign spying operation “involved a number of retired Central Intelligence Agency officials and was highly secretive.” The article, by then-NYT reporter Leslie Gelb, added that its “sources identified Stefan A. Halper, a campaign aide involved in providing 24-hour news updates and policy ideas to the traveling Reagan party, as the person in charge.” Halper, now 73, had also worked with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Alexander Haig as part of the Nixon administration.

When the scandal first broke in 1983, the UPI suggested that Halper’s handler for this operation was Reagan’s Vice Presidential candidate, George H.W. Bush, who had been the CIA Director and worked there with Halper’s father-in-law, former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who worked on Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign before Bush ultimately became Reagan’s Vice President. It quoted a former Reagan campaign official as blaming the leak on “conservatives [who] are trying to manipulate the Jimmy Carter papers controversy to force the ouster of White House Chief of Staff James Baker.”

Halper, through his CIA work, has extensive ties to the Bush family. Few remember that the CIA’s perceived meddling in the 1980 election – its open support for its former Director, George H.W. Bush to become President – was a somewhat serious political controversy. And Halper was in that middle of that, too.

In 1980, the Washington Post published an article reporting on the extremely unusual and quite aggressive involvement of the CIA in the 1980 presidential campaign. “Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory — perhaps ever — has attracted as much support from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA director Bush,” the article said.

Though there was nothing illegal about ex-CIA officials uniting to put a former CIA Director in the Oval Office, the paper said “there are some rumblings of uneasiness in the intelligence network.” It specifically identified Cline as one of the most prominent CIA official working openly for Bush, noting that he “recommended his son-in-law, Stefan A. Halper, a former Nixon White House aide, be hired as Bush’s director of policy development and research.”

In 2016, top officials from the intelligence community similarly rallied around Hillary Clinton. As The Intercept has previously documented:

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New York Times but claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” George W. Bush’s CIA and NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump a “clear and present danger” to U.S. national security and then, less than a week before the election, went to the Washington Post to warn that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin” and said Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

So as it turns out, the informant used by the FBI in 2016 to gather information on the Trump campaign was not some previously unknown, top-secret asset whose exposure as an operative could jeopardize lives. Quite the contrary: his decades of work for the CIA – including his role in an obviously unethical if not criminal spying operation during the 1980 presidential campaign – is quite publicly known.

And now, as a result of some baffling choices by the nation’s largest news organizations as well as their anonymous sources inside the U.S. Government, Stefan Halper’s work for the FBI during the 2016 is also publicly known

Last night, both the Washington Post and New York Times – whose reporters, like pretty much everyone in Washington, knew exactly who the FBI informant is – published articles that, while deferring to the FBI’s demands by not naming him, provided so many details about him that it made it extremely easy to know exactly who it is. The NYT described the FBI informant as “an American academic who teaches in Britain” and who “made contact late that summer with” George Papadopoulos and “also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page.” The Post similarly called him “a retired American professor” who met with Page “at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.”

In contrast to the picture purposely painted by the DOJ and its allies that this informant was some of sort super-secret, high-level, covert intelligence asset, the NYT described him as what he actually is: “the informant is well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years.”

Despite how “well known” he is in Washington, and despite publishing so many details about him that anyone with Google would be able to instantly know his name, the Post and the NYT nonetheless bizarrely refused to identity him, with the Post justifying its decision that it “is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.” The NYT was less melodramatic about it, citing a general policy: the NYT “has learned the source’s identity but typically does not name informants to preserve their safety,” it said.

In other words, both the NYT and the Post chose to provide so many details about the FBI informant that everyone would know exactly who it was, while coyly pretending that they were obeying FBI demands not to name him. How does that make sense? Either these newspapers believe the FBI’s grave warnings that national security and lives would be endangered if it were known who they used as their informant (in which case those papers should not publish any details that would make his exposure likely), or they believe that the FBI (as usual) was just invoking false national security justifications to hide information it unjustly wants to keep from the public (in which case the newspapers should name him).

In any event, publication of those articles by the NYT and Post last night made it completely obvious who the FBI informant was, because the Daily Caller’s investigative reporter Chuck Ross on Thursday had published an article reporting that a long-time CIA operative who is now a professor at Cambridge repeatedly met with Papadopoulos and Page. The article, in its opening paragraph, named the professor, Stefan Halper, and described him as “a University of Cambridge professor with CIA and MI6 contacts.”

Ross’ article, using public information, recounted at length Halper’s long-standing ties to the CIA, including the fact that his father-in-law, Ray Cline, was a top CIA official during the Cold War, and that Halper himself had long worked with both the CIA and its British counterpart, the MI6. As Ross wrote: “at Cambridge, Halper has worked closely with Dearlove, the former chief of MI6. In recent years they have directed the Cambridge Security Initiative, a non-profit intelligence consulting group that lists ‘UK and US government agencies’ among its clients.”

Both the NYT and Washington Post reporters boasted, with seeming pride, about the fact that they did not name the informant even as they published all the details which made it simple to identify him. But NBC News – citing Ross’ report and other public information – decided to name him, while stressing that it has not confirmed that he actually worked as an FBI informant:

The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment, consulting on Russia and China issues, according to public records.

There is nothing inherently untoward, or even unusual, about the FBI using informants in an investigation. One would expect them to do so. But the use of Halper in this case, and the bizarre claims made to conceal his identity, do raise some questions that merit further inquiry.

To begin with, the New York Times reported in December of last year that the FBI investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia began when George Papadopoulos drunkenly boasted to an Australian diplomat about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was the disclosure of this episode by the Australians that “led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the NYT claimed.

But it now seems clear that Halper’s attempts to gather information for the FBI began before that. “The professor’s interactions with Trump advisers began a few weeks before the opening of the investigation, when Page met the professor at the British symposium,” the Post reported. While it’s not rare for the FBI to gather information before formally opening an investigation, Halper’s earlier snooping does call into question the accuracy of the NYT’s claim that it was the drunken Papadopoulos ramblings that first prompted the FBI’s interest in these possible connections. And it suggests that CIA operatives, apparently working with at least some factions within the FBI, were trying to gather information about the Trump campaign earlier than had been previously reported.

Then there are questions about what appear to be some fairly substantial government payments to Halper throughout 2016. Halper continues to be listed as a “vendor” by websites that track payments by the federal government to private contractors.

Earlier this week, records of payments were found that were made during 2016 to Halper by the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, though it not possible from these records to know the exact work for which these payments were made. The Pentagon office that paid Halper in 2016, according to a 2015 Washington Post story on its new duties, “reports directly to Secretary of Defense and focuses heavily on future threats, has a $10 million budget.”

It is difficult to understand how identifying someone whose connections to the CIA is a matter of such public record, and who has a long and well-known history of working on spying programs involving presidential elections on behalf of the intelligence community, could possibly endanger lives or lead to grave national security harm. It isn’t as though Halper has been some sort of covert, stealth undercover asset for the CIA who just got exposed. Quite the contrary: that he’s a spy embedded in the U.S. intelligence community would be known to anyone with internet access.

Equally strange are the semantic games which journalists are playing in order to claim that this revelation disproves, rather than proves, Trump’s allegation that the FBI “spied” on his campaign. This bizarre exchange between CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and the New York Times’ Trip Gabriel vividly illustrates the strange machinations used by journalists to justify how all of this is being characterized

Despite what Halper actually is, the FBI and its dutiful mouthpieces have spent weeks using the most desperate language to try to hide Halper’s identity and the work he performed as part of the 2016 election. Here was the deeply emotional reaction to last night’s story from Brookings’ Benjamin Wittes, who has become a social media star by parlaying his status as Jim Comey’s best friend and long-time loyalist to security state agencies into a leading role in pushing the Trump/Russia story

Wittes’ claim that all of this resulted in the “outing” of some sort of sensitive “intelligence source” is preposterous given how publicly known Halper’s role as a CIA operative has been for decades. But this is the scam that the FBI and people like Mark Warner have been running for two weeks: deceiving people into believing that exposing Halper’s identity would create grave national security harm by revealing some previously unknown intelligence asset.

Wittes also implies that it was Trump and Devin Nunes who are responsible for Halper’s exposure but he almost certainly has no idea of who the sources are for the NYT or the Washington Post. And note that Wittes is too cowardly to blame the institutions that actually made it easy to identify Halper – the New York Times and Washington Post – preferring instead to exploit the opportunity to depict the enemies of his friend Jim Comey as traitors.

Whatever else is true, the CIA operative and FBI informant used to gather information on the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign has, for weeks, been falsely depicted as a sensitive intelligence asset rather than what he actually is: a long-time CIA operative with extensive links to the Bush family who was responsible for a dirty and likely illegal spying operation in the 1980 presidential election. For that reason, it’s easy to understand why many people in Washington were so desperate to conceal his identity, but that desperation had nothing to do with the lofty and noble concerns for national security they claimed were motivating them.

 

Why Donald Trump’s Companies Went Bankrupt

Details About the 6 Donald Trump Corporate Bankruptcies

January 19, 2018

by Tom Murse

Thoughtco

Donald Trump has portrayed himself as a successful businessman who has amassed a net worth of as much as $10 billion. But he has also led some of his companies into bankruptcy, maneuvers he says were designed to restructure their massive debt.

Critics have cited the Trump corporate bankruptcies as examples of his recklessness and inability to manage, but the real-estate developer, casino operator and former reality-television star says his use of federal law to protect his interests illustrates his sharp business acumen.

“I have used the laws of this country just like the greatest people that you read about every day in business have used the laws of this country, the chapter laws, to do a great job for my company, my employees, myself and my family,” Trump said in August 2015.

The New York Times, which conducted an analysis of regulatory reviews, court records and security filings, found otherwise, however. It reported in 2016 that Trump “put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments.”

“The burden of his failures,” according to the newspaper, “fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.”

6 Corporate Bankruptcies

Trump has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy for his companies six times. Three of the casino bankruptcies came during the recession of the early 1990s and the Gulf War, both of which contributed to hard times in Atlantic City, New Jersey’s gambling facilities. He also entered a Manhattan hotel and two casino holding companies into bankruptcy.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows companies to restructure or wipe away much of their debt to other companies, creditors, and shareholders while remaining in business but under the supervision of a bankruptcy court. Chapter 11 is often called “reorganization” because it allows the business to emerge from the process more efficient and on good terms with its creditors.

One point of clarification: Trump has never filed personal bankruptcy, only corporate bankruptcy related to his casinos in Atlantic City. “I have never gone bankrupt,” Trump has said.

Here is a look at the six Trump corporate bankruptcies. The details are a matter of public record and have been widely published by the news media and even discussed by the president himself.

1991: Trump Taj Mahal

Trump opened the $1.2 billion Taj Mahal Casino Resort in Atlantic City in April 1990. One year later, in the summer of 1991, it sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection because it was unable to generate enough gambling revenue to cover the massive costs of building the facility, particularly amid a recession.

Trump was forced to relinquish half of his ownership in the casino and sell off his yacht and his airline. The bondholders were awarded lower interest payments.

Trump’s Taj Mahal was described as the eighth wonder of the world and the largest casino in the world. The casino covered 4.2 million square feet on 17 acres of land. Its operations were said to have cannibalized the revenue of Trump’s Plaza and Castle casinos.

“Your wish is our command. … Our wish is that your experience here be filled with magic and enchantment,” the resort staff promised at the time. More than 60,000 people a day visited the Taj Mahal in its opening days.

The Taj Mahal emerged from bankruptcy within weeks of its filing but was later closed.

1992: Trump Castle Hotel & Casino

The Castle Hotel & Casino entered bankruptcy in March 1992 and had the most difficulty of Trump’s Atlantic City properties in covering its operational costs. The Trump Organization relinquished half of its holdings in the Castle to the bondholders. Trump opened the Castle in 1985. The casino remains in operation under new ownership and a new name, the Golden Nugget.

1992: Trump Plaza Casino

The Plaza Casino was one of two Trump casinos in Atlantic City to enter bankruptcy in March 1992. The other was the Castle Hotel & Casino. The 39-story, 612-room Plaza opened on the Atlantic City boardwalk in May 1984 after Trump struck a deal to build the casino with Harrah’s Entertainment. Trump Plaza closed in September 2014, putting more than 1,000 people out of work.

1992: Trump Plaza Hotel

Trump’s Plaza Hotel was more than $550 million in debt when it entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1992. Trump gave up a 49 percent stake in the company to lenders, as well as his salary and his day-to-day role in its operations.

The hotel, overlooking Central Park in Manhattan from its location on Fifth Avenue, entered bankruptcy because it could not pay its annual debt service payments. Trump bought the hotel for about $407 million in 1988. He later sold a controlling stake in the property, which remains in operation.

2004: Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts

Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, a holding company for Trump’s three casinos, entered Chapter 11 in November 2004 as part of a deal with bondholders to restructure $1.8 billion of debt.

Earlier that year, the holding company posted a first quarter loss of $48 million, double its losses for the same quarter the previous year. The company said its gambling take was down nearly $11 million across all three casinos.

The holding company emerged from bankruptcy less than a year later, in May 2005, with a new name: Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc. The Chapter 11 restructuring reduced the company’s debt by about $600 million and cut interest payments by $102 million annually. Trump relinquished the majority control to bondholders and gave up his title of chief executive officer, according to The Press of Atlantic City newspaper.

2009: Trump Entertainment Resorts

Trump Entertainment Resorts, the casino holding company, entered Chapter 11 in February 2009 amid The Great Recession. Atlantic City casinos were also hurting, according to published reports, because of new competition from across the state line in Pennsylvania, where slot machines had come online and were drawing gamblers.

The holding company emerged from bankruptcy in February 2016 and became a subsidiary of investor Carl Icahn’s Icahn Enterprises. Icahn took over the Taj Mahal then sold it in 2017 to Hard Rock International, which said it was planning to renovate, rebrand, and reopen the property in 2018.

 

Donald Trump’s Many Business Failures, Explained

August 2, 2016

by Kurt Eichenwald

Newsweek

Donald Trump was thundering about a minority group, linking its members to murderers and what he predicted would be an epic crime wave in America. His opponents raged in response—some slamming him as a racist—but Trump dismissed them as blind, ignorant of the real world.

No, this is not a scene from a recent rally in which the Republican nominee for president stoked fears of violence from immigrants or Muslims. The year was 1993, and his target was Native Americans, particularly those running casinos who, Trump was telling a congressional hearing, were sucking up to criminals.

Trump, who at the time was a major casino operator, appeared before a panel on Indian gaming with a prepared statement that was level-headed and raised regulatory concerns in a mature way. But, in his opening words, Trump announced that his written speech was boring, so he went off-script, even questioning the heritage of some Native American casino operators, saying they “don’t look like Indians” and launching into a tirade about “rampant” criminal activities on reservations.

If [Indian gaming] continues as a threat, it is my opinion that it will blow. It will blow sky high. It will be the biggest scandal ever or one of the biggest scandals since Al Capone,” Trump said. “That an Indian chief is going to tell [mobster] Joey Killer to please get off his reservation is almost unbelievable to me.”

His words were, as is so often the case, incendiary. Lawmakers, latching onto his claim to know more than law enforcement about ongoing criminal activity at Indian casinos, challenged Trump to bring his information to the FBI. One attacked Trump’s argument as the most “irresponsible testimony” he had ever heard. Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker Jr., whom Trump had praised in his testimony, responded by calling him a “dirtbag” and a bigot; Trump immediately changed his mind about the governor, proclaiming Weicker to be a “fat slob who couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Connecticut.”

For opponents of Trump’s presidential run, this contretemps about American Indians might seem like a distant but familiar echo of the racism charges that have dogged his campaign, including his repeated taunting of Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” because she claims native ancestry. But, in this case, there was more to it than that: Trump, through his offensive tantrum, was throwing away financial opportunities, yet another reminder that, for all his boasting of his acumen and flaunting of his wealth, the self-proclaimed billionaire has often been a lousy businessman.

As Trump was denigrating Native Americans before Congress, other casino magnates were striking management agreements with them. Trump knew the business was there even when he was testifying; despite denying under oath that he had ever tried to arrange deals with Indian casinos, he had done just that a few months earlier, according to an affidavit from Richard Milanovich, the official from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians who met with Trump, letters from the Trump Organization and phone records. The deal for the Agua Caliente casino instead went to Caesars World. (In 2000, Trump won a contract to manage the casino for the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, but after Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts declared bankruptcy in 2004, the tribe paid Trump $6 million to go away.) And in his purposeless, false and inflammatory statements before Congress, Trump alienated politicians from around the country, including some who had the power to influence construction contracts—problems that could have been avoided if he had simply read his prepared speech rather than ad-libbing.

Lost contracts, bankruptcies, defaults, deceptions and indifference to investors—Trump’s business career is a long, long list of such troubles, according to regulatory, corporate and court records, as well as sworn testimony and government investigative reports. Call it the art of the bad deal, one created by the arrogance and recklessness of a businessman whose main talent is self-promotion.

He is also pretty good at self-deception, and plain old deception. Trump is willing to claim success even when it is not there, according to his own statements. “I’m just telling you, you wouldn’t say that you’re failing,” he said in a 2007 deposition when asked to explain why he would give an upbeat assessment of his business even if it was in trouble. “If somebody said, ‘How you doing?’ you’re going to say you’re doing good.” Perhaps such dissembling is fine in polite cocktail party conversation, but in the business world it’s called lying.

And while Trump is quick to boast that his purported billions prove his business acumen, his net worth is almost unknowable given the loose standards and numerous outright misrepresentations he has made over the years. In that 2007 deposition, Trump said he based estimates of his net worth at times on “psychology” and “my own feelings.” But those feelings are often wrong—in 2004, he presented unaudited financials to Deutsche Bank while seeking a loan, claiming he was worth $3.5 billion. The bank concluded Trump was, to say the least, puffing; it put his net worth at $788 million, records show. (Trump personally guaranteed $40 million of the loan to his company, so Deutsche coughed up the money. He later defaulted on that commitment.)

Trump’s many misrepresentations of his successes and his failures matter—a lot. As a man who has never held so much as a city council seat, there is little voters can examine to determine if he is competent to hold office. He has no voting record and presents few details about specific policies. Instead, he sells himself as qualified to run the country because he is a businessman who knows how to get things done, and his financial dealings are the only part of his background available to assess his competence to lead the country. And while Trump has had a few successes in business, most of his ventures have been disasters.

Dependent on Daddy

When he was ready for college, Trump wanted to be a movie producer, perhaps the first sign that he was far more interested in the glitz of business than the nuts and bolts. He applied to the University of Southern California to pursue a film career, but when that didn’t work out, he attended Fordham University; two years later, he transferred to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and got a degree in economics.

Trump boasted when he announced his candidacy last year that he had made his money “the old-fashioned way,” but he is no Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg, self-made billionaires who were mavericks, innovators in their fields. Instead, the Republican nominee’s wealth is Daddy-made. Almost all of his best-known successes are attributable to family ties or money given to him by his father.

The son of wealthy developer Fred Trump, he went to work for his father’s real estate business immediately after graduating from Wharton and found some success by taking advantage of his father’s riches and close ties to the power brokers in the New York Democratic Party, particularly his decades-long friend Abe Beame, the former mayor of the city.

Even with those advantages, a few of Trump’s initial deals for his father were busts, based on the profits. His first project was revitalizing the Swifton Village apartment complex in Cincinnati, which his father had purchased for $5.7 million in 1962. After Trump finished his work, they sold the complex for $6.75 million, which, while appearing to be a small return, was a loss; in constant dollars, the apartment buildings would have had to sell for $7.9 million to have earned an actual profit. Still, Trump happily boasted about his supposed success with Swifton Village and about his surging personal wealth.

He already ached to be part of the Manhattan elite rather than just be known as the son of a Brooklyn developer. So, in 1970, he took another shot at joining the entertainment business by investing $70,000, to snag a co-producer’s credit for a Broadway comedy called  Paris Is Out!  Once again, Trump failed; the play bombed, closing after just 96 performances.

The next year, he moved to Manhattan from the outer boroughs, still largely dependent on Daddy. In 1972, Trump’s father brought him into a limited partnership that developed and owned a senior citizen apartment complex in East Orange, New Jersey. Fred Trump owned 75 percent, but two years later shrunk his ownership to 27 percent by turning over the rest of his stake to two entities controlled by his son. Another two years passed, and then Fred Trump named him the beneficiary of a $1 million trust that provided him with $1.3 million in income (2015 dollars) over the next five years. In 1978, he boosted his son’s fortunes again, hiring him as a consultant to help sell his ownership interest in a real estate partnership to the Grandcor Company and Port Electric Supply Corp. The deal was enormously lucrative for Donald Trump, particularly since it just fell into his lap thanks to his family. Under the deal, Grandcor agreed to pay him an additional $190,000, while Port Electric kicked in $228,500. (The payments were made over several years, but the value in present-day dollars on the final sum he received is $10.4 million.)

Despite having no real success of his own, by the late 1970s, Trump was swaggering through Manhattan, gaining a reputation as a crass self-promoter. He hung out in the fancy nightspot Le Club, where he was chums with prominent New Yorkers like Roy Cohn, the one-time aide to Senator Joe McCarthy who was one of the city’s most feared and politically connected attorneys. Cohn became one of the developer’s lifelong mentors, encouraging the pugilistic personality that showed itself all the way back in second grade, when Trump punched his music teacher.

Soon Trump gained the public recognition he craved. Through a wholly owned corporation called Wembly Realty, Trump struck a partnership with a subsidiary of Hyatt Hotels. That partnership, Regency Lexington, purchased the struggling Commodore Hotel for redevelopment into the Grand Hyatt New York, a deal Trump crowed about when he announced he was running for president.

He failed to mention that this deal was once again largely attributable to Daddy, who co-guaranteed with Hyatt a construction loan for $70 million and arranged a credit line for his boy with Chase Manhattan Bank. The credit line was a favor to the Trump family, which had brought huge profits to the bank; according to regulatory records, the revolving loan was set up without even requiring a written agreement. Topping off the freebies and special deals that flowed Trump’s way, the city tossed in a 40-year tax abatement. Trump’s “success” with the Hyatt was simply the result of money from his dad, his dad’s bank, Hyatt and the taxpayers of New York City.

Despite the outward signs of success, Trump’s personal finances were a disaster. In 1978, the year his father set up that sweet credit line at Chase, Donald’s tax returns showed personal losses of $406,386—$1.5 million in present-day dollars. Things grew worse in 1979, when he reported an income of negative $3.4 million, $11.2 million in constant dollars. All of this traced back to big losses in three real estate partnerships and interest he owed Chase. With Trump sucking wind and rapidly drawing down his line of credit, he turned again to Daddy, who in 1980 agreed to lend him $7.5 million.

All of these names and numbers can grow confusing for voters with little exposure to the business world. So to sum it all up, Trump is rich because he was born rich—and without his father repeatedly bailing him out, he would have likely filed for personal bankruptcy before he was 35.

Rolling Snake Eyes

As his personal finances were falling apart, Trump got a big idea for how to make money: casinos.

In early 1980, he received a phone call from Alan Lapidus, an architect who was a friend of Fred Trump. Lapidus gave Donald Trump a hot tip—there was a parcel of land available in Atlantic City that was zoned for use by a casino hotel. Gaming had been legalized in New Jersey in 1978, and casinos in Atlantic City were already reporting big business. At the time, Trump was deep into plans to turn Bonwit Teller’s flagship department store into Trump Tower—a transformation achieved with the help of Roy Cohn, who fought in the courts to win Trump a huge tax abatement. Still, Trump jumped on the casino idea and had a lawyer reach out to the owners to negotiate a lease deal.

In August 1980, the Trump Plaza Corporation was incorporated in New Jersey, and nine months later it applied for a casino license. Trump wanted to build a 39-story, 612-room hotel and casino, but the banks refused to finance his adventure. So, instead, he struck a partnership with Harrah’s Entertainment in which the global gaming company and subsidiary of Holiday Inn Inc. put up all the money in exchange for Trump developing the property. In 1984, Harrah’s at Trump Plaza opened, and Trump seethed. He had wanted his name to be the marquee brand, even though Harrah’s had an international reputation in casinos and he had none. He even delayed building a garage because his name was not being used prominently enough in the marketing.

According to court papers, Harrah’s spent $9.3 million promoting the Trump name, giving the New York developer a reputation in the casino business he’d never had before. And Harrah’s quickly learned the price—now, with Trump able to argue he knew casinos, financing opportunities that did not exist before opened up, and he was able to use Harrah’s promotion of him as a lever against the entertainment company. Soon after that first casino opened, Trump took advantage of his new credibility with financial backers interested in the gaming business to purchase the nearly completed Hilton Atlantic City Hotel for just $320 million; he renamed it Trump Castle. The business plan was ludicrous: Trump had not only doubled down his bet on Atlantic City casinos but was now operating two businesses in direct competition with each other. When Trump Castle opened in 1985, Harrah’s decided to ditch Trump and sold its interest in their joint venture to him for $220 million.

Still, he wanted more in Atlantic City—specifically, the Taj Mahal, the largest casino complex ever, which Resorts International was building. This made the Casino Control Commission nervous because it could have meant that the financial security of Atlantic City would be riding on the back of one man. But Trump brushed those concerns aside at a February 1988 licensing hearing—after all, his argument went, he was  Donald Trump. He would contain costs, he said, because banks would be practically throwing money at him, and at prime rates. He would be on a solid financial foundation because the banks loved him so much, unlike lots of other companies and casinos that used below-investment-grade, high-interest junk bonds for their financing. “I’m talking about banking institutions, not these junk bonds, which are ridiculous,” he testified.

But Trump’s braggadocio proved empty. No financial institution gave him anything. Instead, he financed the deal with $675 million in junk bonds, agreeing to pay an astonishing 14 percent interest, about 50 percent more than he had projected. That pushed Trump’s total debt for his three casinos to $1.2 billion. For the renamed Trump Taj Mahal to break even, it would have to pull in as much as $1.3 million a day in revenue, more than any casino ever.

Disaster hit fast. As had been predicted by some Wall Street analysts, Trump’s voracious appetite cannibalized his other casinos—it was as if Trump had tipped the Atlantic City boardwalk and slid all his customers at the Trump Castle and Trump Plaza down to the Taj. Revenues for the two smaller casinos plummeted a combined $58 million that first year.

Meanwhile, another Trump disaster was brewing. Eastern Air Lines, which had been struggling, put its northeastern air shuttle up for sale. Trump persuaded the banks to lend him $380 million to purchase the route, and in June 1989 the Trump Shuttle began flying.

Trump introduced the airline with his usual style—by insulting the competition. At an elegant event at Logan Airport in Boston, Trump took the stage and suggested that the other airline with a northeastern shuttle, Pan Am, flew unsafe planes. Pan Am didn’t have enough cash, he said, and so it couldn’t spend as much as the Trump Shuttle on maintenance. “I’m not criticizing Pan Am,” Trump told the assembled crowd. “I’m just speaking facts.” But Trump offered no proof, and others in the airline industry seethed; talking about possible crashes was bad for everyone’s business.

He promised to transform his shuttle into a luxury service—bathroom fixtures were colored gold, and the plane interiors were decked out with mahogany veneer. He was spending $1 million to update each of the planes, which were individually worth only $4 million. With those changes, he boasted, he would increase the shuttle’s market share from 55 to 75 percent.

But just like with casinos, Trump was in a business he knew nothing about. Customers on a one-hour flight from Washington to New York didn’t want luxury; they wanted reliability and competitive prices.

Trump Shuttle never turned a profit. But it didn’t have much of a chance; even as he was preening about his successes, Trump’s businesses were falling apart and would soon bring the shuttle crashing down with them.

Bragging About How Much He Owes

At 1:40 p.m. on October 10, 1989, the four-blade rotor and tail rotor broke off of a helicopter flying above the pine woodlands near Forked River, New Jersey. The craft plunged 2,800 feet to the ground, killing all five passengers. Among them were three of Trump’s top casino executives.

With the best managers of his casinos dead, Trump for the first time took responsibility for running the day-to-day operations in Atlantic City. His mercurial and belligerent style made a quick impact—some top executives walked, unwilling to put up with his eccentricities, while Trump booted others. The casinos were struggling so badly that Trump was sweating whether a few big winners might pull him under. He once hovered over a baccarat table at the Plaza, anxiously watching a Tokyo real estate tycoon who had won big at the casino in the past; executives at the casino were humiliated, since Trump was signaling that he was frightened customers might win. (The Japanese tycoon lost that night.) By early 1990, as financial prospects at the casinos worsened, Trump began badmouthing the executives who had died, laying blame on them, although the cause of his problems was the precarious, debt-laden business structure he had built.

By June 1990, Trump was on the verge of missing a $43 million interest payment to the investors in the Taj’s junk bonds. Facing ruin, he met with his bankers, who had almost no recourse—they had been as reckless as Trump. By lending him billions—with loans for his real estate, his casinos, his airline and other businesses—they could fail if Trump went down. So the banks agreed to lend him tens of millions more in exchange for Trump temporarily ceding control over his multibillion-dollar empire and accepting a budget of $450,000 a month for personal expenditures. In August, New Jersey regulators prepared a report totaling Trump’s debt at $3.4 billion, writing that “a complete financial collapse of the Trump Organization was not out of the question.”

In September, Trump informed his bankers that he would not be paying the $1.1 million in interest due and asked that they defer $245 million of future loan payments. Once again, the banks could do little but agree. The shuttle business was put up for sale, as was his $29 million yacht, the Trump Princess. (In 1992, Trump defaulted on his debt for the shuttle and turned it over to his creditor banks.)

By December, Trump was on the verge of missing an interest payment on the debt of Trump Castle, and there was no room left to maneuver with the banks this time. So, just as he had in the past, Trump turned to Dad for help, according to New Jersey state regulatory records. On December 17, 1990, Fred Trump handed a certified check for $3.35 million payable to the Trump Castle to his attorney, Howard Snyder. Snyder traveled to the Castle and opened an account in the name of Fred Trump. The check was deposited into that account and a blackjack dealer paid out $3.35 million to Snyder in gray $5,000 chips. Snyder put the chips in a small case and left; no gambling took place. The next day, a similar “loan” was made—except by wire transfer rather than by check—for an additional $150,000. This surreptitious, and unreported, loan allowed Donald Trump to make that interest payment. (The Castle later settled charges by the Casino Control Commission of violations from this escapade and paid a $65,000 fine.)

It didn’t matter—Trump’s casino empire was doomed. A little more than a year after the opening of the Taj, that casino was in bankruptcy court, and was soon followed there by the Plaza and the Castle. Under the reorganization, Trump turned over half his interest in the businesses in exchange for lower rates of interest, as well as a deferral of payments and an agreement to wait at least five years before pursuing Trump for the personal guarantees he had made on some of the debt. The total debt remained huge, weighing down the reorganized company for years. In 2004, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts—the new name for Trump’s casino holdings—filed for bankruptcy, and Trump was forced to relinquish his post as chief executive. The name of the company was then changed to Trump Entertainment Resorts; it filed for bankruptcy in 2009, four days after Trump resigned from the board.

In his books and public statements, Trump holds up this bankruptcy as yet more proof of his business genius; after all, his logic goes, he climbed out of a hole so deep few others could have done it. He even brags now about how deep that hole was. Trump falsely claimed in two of his books that he owed $9.2 billion, rather than the actual number, $3.4 billion, making his recovery seem far more impressive. (When challenged on the misrepresentation during a 2007 deposition, Trump blamed the error on Meredith McIver, a longtime employee who helped write that book. Trump testified that he recognized the mistake shortly after the first book mentioning it was published; he never explained why he allowed it to appear again in the paperback edition and even in his next book. McIver went on to garner some national recognition as a Trump scapegoat—nine years later, when Trump’s wife, Melania, delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention that was partially plagiarized from Michelle Obama, the campaign blamed McIver. But despite all this supposed sloppiness, Trump has never directed his trademark phrase “You’re fired!” at this loyal employee.)

Rich in Name Only

Huge corporate failures are the stuff of headlines, but Trump’s mistakes in business have included plenty of small deals as well. In 2008, he defaulted on a $640 million construction loan for Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago, and the primary lender, Deutsche Bank, sued him. Trump countersued, howling that the bank had damaged his reputation. In a snarky court reply, Deutsche Bank said, “Trump is no stranger to overdue debt.” (The suit was ultimately resolved, with Deutsche Bank extending the terms of the loan; another lender, Fortress Investment Group, had to suck up losses from its foray into Trump’s Chicago project.)

Trump has also based huge projects on temporary business trends. For example, for a few years during the George W. Bush administration, wealthy expatriates from around the Middle East flocked to Dubai. In response, Trump launched work on a 62-story luxury hotel and apartment complex on an artificial island shaped like a palm tree. But, as was predictable from the start, there were only so many rich people willing to travel to the United Arab Emirates, so the flood of wealthy foreigners into the country slowed. The Trump Organization was forced to walk away from the project, flushing its investments in it.

Beginning in 2006, Trump decided to take a new direction and basically cut back on building in favor of selling his name. This led to what might be called his nonsense deals, with Trump slapping his name on everything but the sidewalk, hoping people would buy products just because of his brand.

Trump hosted a glitzy event in 2006 touting Trump Mortgage, then proclaimed he had nothing to do with managing the firm when it collapsed 18 months later. (Trump tried again, rechristening the failed entity as Trump Financial. It also failed.) That same year, he opened GoTrump.com, an online travel service that never amounted to more than a vanity site; the URL now sends searchers straight to the Trump campaign website. Also in 2006, Trump unveiled Trump Vodka, predicting that the T&T (Trump and Tonic) would become the most requested drink in America (he also marketed it to his friends in Russia, land of some of the world’s greatest vodkas); within a few years, the company closed because of poor sales. In 2007, Trump Steaks arrived. After two months of being primarily available for sale at Sharper Image, that endeavor ended; the head of Sharper Image said barely any of the steaks sold.

Amusing as those fiascos are for those of us who didn’t lose money on them, the most painful debacles to witness were many involving licensing agreements Trump sold to people in fields related to real estate. There is the now-infamous Trump University, where students who paid hefty fees were supposed to learn how to make fortunes in that industry by being trained by experts handpicked by Trump; many students have sued, saying the enterprise was a scam in which Trump allowed his name to be used but had nothing else to do with it, despite his claims to the contrary in the marketing for the “school.” The litigation has already revealed plenty of evidence that the endeavor was a scam. Particularly damning was the testimony of former employee Ronald Schnackenberg, who recalled being chastised by Trump University officials for failing to push a near-destitute couple into paying $35,000 for classes by using their disability income and a home equity loan.

Around the country, buyers were led to believe they were purchasing apartments in buildings overseen by Trump, although his only involvement in many cases was getting paid for the use of his brand. For example, in 2009, Trump and a developer named Jorge Pérez unveiled plans for Trump Hollywood, a 40-story oceanfront condominium that they boasted would sell at premium prices and feature such luxuries as Italian cabinetry. But with the entire real estate market imploding, condo buyers were looking for bargains, and sales were minuscule. In 2010, lenders foreclosed on the $355 million project. Even though Trump’s name was listed on the condominium’s website as the developer, he immediately distanced himself from the project, saying he had only licensed his name.

A similarly sordid tale unfolded for Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico, a 525-unit luxury vacation home complex that Trump proclaimed was going to be “very, very special.” His name and image were all over the property, and he even personally appeared in the marketing video discussing how investors would be “following” him if they bought into the building. Scores of buyers ponied up deposits in 2006, but by 2009 the project was still just a hole in the ground. That year, the developers notified condo buyers their $32 million in deposits had been spent, no bank financing could be obtained, and they were walking away from the project. Scores of lawsuits claimed the buyers were deceived into believing Trump was the developer. Trump walked away from the deal, saying that if the condo buyers had any questions, they needed to contact the developer—and that wasn’t him, contrary to what the marketing material implied.

The same story has played out again and again. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, people who thought they were buying into a Trump property lost their deposits of at least $100,000, with Trump saying it was not his responsibility because he had only licensed his name.

Investors in another failed Floridian property, Trump Tower Tampa, put up millions in the project in 2005 believing the building was being constructed by him. Instead, they discovered it was all a sham in 2007, inadvertently from Trump, when he sued the builder for failing to pay his license fees. The investors lost their money, and finally got to hear Trump respond to allegations that he had defrauded them when they sued him. In a deposition, lawyers for the Tampa buyers asked him if he would be responsible for any shoddy construction; Trump responded that he had “no liability” because it was only a name-licensing deal. As for the investors, some of whom surrendered their life savings for what they thought was a chance to live in a Trump property, Trump said they at least dodged the collapse of the real estate market by not buying the apartments earlier.

“They were better off losing their deposit,” he said.

So said the man who now proclaims that Americans can trust him, that he cares only about their needs and their country, that he is on the side of the little guy.

In US evangelical capital, a new progressiveness and differing views on Israel

For many on the Christian right, the state of Israel has been seen as a key to fulfilling prophesy. A new generation has other ideas

May 19, 2018

by Josiah Hesse in Colorado Springs

The Guardian

This week, the Trump administration completed its move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

At the opening ceremony, two of the American speakers were evangelical superstars: Pastor Robert Jeffress, the author of several doomsday books about Israel, and John Hagee, who interpreted recent lunar eclipses as evidence that the end times were nigh. The Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro, meanwhile, declared that Trump had “fulfilled biblical prophecy”.

The ceremony coincided with massive protests, in which 60 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces.

Thousands of miles away, in her home outside Colorado Springs, Kimberly Troup sat in a cluttered basement office. She is an evangelical Christian who takes to heart the Bible verse in which God speaks of the Jewish nation: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.”

Accordingly, she has devoted 22 years to Israel. She is now the US director of Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, an advocacy group with a Zionist ideology. Two other CFIC employees work with her. This week, they have been very busy.

Ever since she was a child, in Kentucky, Troup has been immersed in Israel. Her father saw the creation of the state in 1948 and the six-day war of 1967 as evidence of biblical prophecy surrounding the end of the world. Troup believes in such prophecies, though she does not pretend to know when they will occur. She sees it as her Christian duty to care for Israel, to defend it against “Arabs” who are “not interested in peace”.

As she described her position an associate, previously silent, spoke up, quoting the book of Isaiah: “You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth.”

Christians around the world have always had an intense interest in the Holy Land. It has often been believed that the restoration of the Jews in Palestine will bring about a holy war between good and evil (as prophesied in the Book of Revelation), after which God will set up a holy kingdom on Earth.

In the 1970s, Troup’s father was one of millions who purchased a book called The Late Great Planet Earth, which interpreted events in Israel as evidence that the great war of Armageddon would happen by the late 1980s. The non-fiction bestseller of the decade, it was followed by the wildly popular end times conspiracy tome The New World Order, by the televangelist Pat Robertson, and then the Left Behind novels and films, which concerned violent clashes in Israel that would bring about biblical prophecy.

To outsiders, these pieces of doomsday pop culture seem like far-fetched lunacy. For millions of Christians, they are a roadmap to the end of the world.

‘We’ve been through all this before’

The recent move of the US embassy has solidified the notion – not shared by the Palestinian people – that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, an essential piece of the end times puzzle. In a recent poll of evangelicals from LifeWay, more than half of respondents said end times prophecy was the reason they supported Israel.

However, even in Colorado Springs, which in the heyday of the George W Bush administration was unofficially known as the “Evangelical Vatican”, such interpretations of the move are not universal.

“We’ve been through all this before,” said Bruce McCluggage, a former evangelical who now identifies as a “follower of Christ”. Throughout his youth, in the 1970s and 80s, McCluggage was part of the Christian movement that interpreted the signs of Israel as evidence of the last days. But for McCluggage, after a slow-burn of things not coming to pass, that conviction slowly faded.

“It was a classic tool used to witness to people,” he recalled. “We’d ask: ‘If Jesus returned today, would you go to Heaven?’ It was kind of a threat … and we thought, with Israel coming together, we could hasten the return of Jesus.”

With long blond hair and a stout little chin beard, McCluggage still looks like a member of the California Jesus People, a movement of post-hippie Christians who were obsessed with end times prophecy. (The term “left behind” comes from a popular song of the era, I Wish We’d All Been Ready, by Larry Norman, the godfather of Christian rock.) He still attends church, prays and reads his Bible, but has slowly distanced himself from the Christian right.

Today, he sits in the Wild Goose Meeting House in downtown Colorado Springs, a venue known for its “post-evangelical” or “progressive evangelical” contingent. It looks like any other hip modern coffeehouse, serving expensive pour-over coffee and craft beers to an indie rock soundtrack. Books with titles like Christianity After Religion and The Rebirthing of God line the shelves; events like What Would Jesus Brew? – beer-centric Bible study – regularly take place.

The hallmarks of the old Christian rightwing culture are still present: it’s very white, middle-upper class, and peppered with soldiers in fatigues. The town has five military installations. But the shop is representative of a shifting attitude toward Christianity in downtown Colorado Springs – one that doesn’t have much interest in the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding Israel.

“There are plenty of young millennials downtown that would call themselves evangelical, even conservative, but are a very different breed from their parents,” said Russ Ware, co-owner of the Wild Goose, who grew up evangelical but no longer identifies that way.

“They’re mostly not Trump supporters; they have a spectrum of views on LGBT issues, and they’re not on board with the end times theology … There is definitely a kind of end times fatigue with this generation.”

This “post-evangelical” generation was raised on a steady diet of low-budget movies and pulp novels that injected a potent fear of the coming Rapture, a dynamic most eloquently described by the late Billy Graham. “I pick up the Bible in one hand,” he said, “and I pick up the newspaper in the other. And I read almost the same words in the newspaper as I read in the Bible. It’s being fulfilled every day round about us.”

In the 1990s, Christopher Stroop was one such evangelical. He has now abandoned his faith and leads a social media campaign seeking to galvanize “exvangelicals” with hashtags like #emptythepews and #raptureanxiety. He said he had “definitely seen a lot of ex-evangelicals talking about being triggered by the Jerusalem news”.

It’s not only post-evangelicals who are dubious about the end times scenario. Kimberly Troup believes Israel will be the center of Armageddon, but she doesn’t think it’s all happening now. The author of her father’s favourite book released follow-ups that predicted ever-later dates for the Earth’s demise. She is dubious about anyone who claims to know when the world will end.

“The great fear was moving the embassy to Jerusalem would be the start of World War Three and Armageddon,” she said. “There’s a little rumbling, but nothing new. We’ve had this for 600 years. It’s gonna be business as usual …

“It feels worse than it is because you only hear about the bad stuff on the media.”

What are the End Days? A study in deception

May 19, 2018

by Frederick Norris

‘Armageddon’ is actually purported to be a battle. According to Pentecostal interpretations, the Bible states that Armageddon will be a battle where God finally comes in and takes over the world and rules it the way it should have been ruled all along. After this vaguely-defined battle of Armageddon, Pentecostals firmly believe that there will follow 1000 years of peace and plenty which, according to their lore and legend, will be the sole lot of their sect and no other.

The actual scene of the fictional battle is referred to by Pentecostals as being clearly set forth in Revelation 16:14-16. It is not. The specific citation reads, in full:

  • “14. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.
  • “15. Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.
  • “16. And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”

This sparse mention of Armageddon has given rise to the elaborate but entirely fictional legend of the Final Battle between the forces of good and evil. There is no mention in Revelations 16: 14-15 whatsoever of Parusia or the second coming of Jesus, the apocryphal Anti-Christ, the Rapture or the many other delightful inventions designed to bolster the Pentecostal elect and daunt their adversaries. These adversaries consist of all other branches of the Christian religion with especial emphasis placed on Jews and Catholics. The Pentecostals also loathe Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, and an endless list of anyone and everyone whose views clash with theirs, such as scientists and any academic who views the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel as anything but tissues of lies.

The Antichrist

The Antichrist is described by Pentecostals as the “son of perdition” and the “beast”!

They claim that this interesting creature will have great charisma and speaking ability, “a mouth speaking great things”.

The Antichrist, they allege, will rise to power on a wave of world euphoria, as he temporarily saves the world from its desperate economic, military & political problems with a brilliant seven year plan for world peace, economic stability and religious freedom.

The Antichrist could well rise out of the current chaos in the former Soviet Union. The prophet Ezekiel names him as the ruler of “Magog”, a name that Biblical scholars agree denotes a country or region of peoples to the north of Israel. Many have interpreted this to mean modern day Russia. It could also be Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, perhaps one of the Baltic States or even the lewd and dissolute Socialist Sweden.

His power base will include the leading nations of Europe, whose leaders, the Bible says, will “give their power & strength unto the beast.”

The Bible even gives some clues about his personal characteristics. The prophet Daniel wrote that the Antichrist “does not regard the desire of women.” This could imply that he is either celibate or a homosexual. Daniel also tells us that he will have a “fierce countenance” or stern look, and will be “more stout than his fellows”–more proud and boastful.

Unfortunately, the so-called Book of Daniel was written during the reign of the Roman Emperor Nero, not many decades earlier as its proponents claim, and has been extensively modified by early Christian writers to predict the arrival of their personal Messiah, or Christ, on the Judean scene. The so-called “wonderful” prophetic statements put into the mouth of Daniel are absolutely and wondrously accurate…up to the reign of Nero and then fall as flat as a shaken soufflé afterwards

It is well known that Pentecostals loathe homosexuals, among many other groups not pleasing to them, and would like nothing better than to shove them into a bottomless pit filled with Catholics, rock and roll fans, teenaged mothers, Communists, gun control advocates, Tarot card readers, Christian Scientists, abortionists, Wayne Newton fans, Asians, Jews, African-Americans and Latino Surnamed Hispanics.

The seven year peace-pact (or covenant) that is engineered by the Antichrist is spoken of a number of times in the Bible, and may even have already been signed in secret. The historic peace agreement signed between Israel and the PLO at the White House on September 13, 1993, vividly illustrates how dramatically events in the Middle East are presently moving in this direction eager Pentecostals, awaiting their Celestial Omnibus, will inform anyone who is interested and a greater legion of those who are not.

Under the final terms of the fictional Covenant, Jerusalem will likely be declared an international city to which Judaism, Islam and Christianity will have equal rights. Scripture indicates that the Jews will be permitted to rebuild their Temple on Mt. Moriah, where they revive their ancient rituals of animal sacrifice.

According to modern prophecy the Antichrist will not only be a master of political intrigue, but also a military genius. Daniel describes several major wars that he fights during his 7-year reign, apparently against the U.S. and Israel, who will oppose him during the second half of his reign.

For awhile, most of the world is going to think the Antichrist is wonderful, as he will seem to have solved so many of the world’s problems. But, three-and-a-half years into his seven year reign he will break the covenant and invade Israel from the North.

At this time he will make Jerusalem his world capitol and outlaw all religions, except the worship of himself and his image. The Bible, according to the Pentecostals, says that the Antichrist will sit in the Jewish Temple exalting himself as God and demanding to be worshipped. If this passage, and many others of its kind, actually appears in the King James Version of the Bible, no one has ever been able to find it

It is at this time that the Antichrist imposes his infamous “666” one-world credit system.

It must be said that the Antichrist does, in point of fact exist. He can be seen on a daily basis on the walls of the Cathedral at Orvieto, Italy in the marvelous frescos of Lucca Signorelli. He looks somewhat like a Byzantine depiction of Christ with either a vicious wife or inflamed hemorrhoids.

Pentecostals strongly believe that U.S. public schools “departed from the faith” when in 1963 the Bible and prayer were officially banned. Now, Pentecostals believe with horror, thousands of these same schools are teaching credited courses in “the doctrines of devils”–the occult and Satanism.

Even a cursory check of curriculum of a number of American public school districts does not support this claim but then the Pentecostals have stated repeatedly that they represent 45% of all Protestants in America. The actual number, excluding the Baptists, is more like 4%.

What they lack in actual numbers they more than compensate for by their loud and irrational views so that at times it sounds like the roar of a great multitude when in truth, it is only a small dwarf wearing stained underwear and armed with a bullhorn, trumpeting in the underbrush

Frantic Pentecostals estimated that according to their private Census for Christ there are over 200,000 practicing witches in the United States and allege there are literally millions of Americans who dabble in some form of the occult, psychic phenomena, spiritualism, demonology and black magic. Their statistics claim that occult book sales have doubled in the last four years.

What is seen by terrified Pentecostals as The Occult today is no longer the stuff of small underground cults. They believe that many rock videos are an open worship of Satan and hell that comes complete with the symbols, liturgies, and rituals of Satanism, and the Pentecostals firmly and loudly proclaim to anyone interested in listening, that “millions of young people” have been caught in their evil sway.

Popular music is termed “sounds of horror and torment” that Pentecostals firmly believe is literally “driving young people insane and seducing them into a life of drugs, suicide, perversion and hell.” It is forgotten now but the same thing was once said about ragtime and later, jazz. If this had been true, perhaps the real reason behind the First World War, the 1929 market crash, the rise of Franklin Roosevelt and the lewd hula hoop can be attributed to Scott Joplin and Ella Fitzgerald.

It is also to be noted that the immensely popular Harry Potter series of children’s books are loudly proclaimed as Satanic books designed to lure unsuspecting children into the clutches of the Evil One. Any sane person who has read these delightful fantasy books will certainly not agree with these hysterical strictures. In point of fact, it would be exceedingly difficult to locate any person possessing even a modicum of sanity who would believe any of the weird fulminations of the Pentecostals.

Outraged Pentecostals now firmly state that in the beginning years of the Twenty First Century, “even the most shameless acts of blasphemy and desecration are socially acceptable.”

“Acts of blasphemy and desecration” sound like human sacrifices carried out on nuns at bus stops during the noontime rush hour or lewd acts with crucifixes performed by drug-maddened transvestites on commercial airlines.

In his weird Book of Revelation the lunatic John of Patmos claimed he foresaw that in the last days the world would turn away from God in order to worship and follow Satan.

Such a prophecy would have seemed believable to previous generations, but not so in our more enlightened and secular humanist day. Hard-core Satanism has been called by rabid Pentecostals noise-makers as: “the fastest-growing subculture among America’s teens”, and the revival of witchcraft and the occult is “one of the World’s fastest growing religions!”

 

 

 

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