Trump Vulnerability

Eve Gil interviews the author

Ms. Eve Gil is a Mexican writer and journalist from Hermosillo, Sonora. Her work has won many awards including Premio La Gran Novela Sonorense in 1993, the Premio Nacional de Periodismo Fernando Benítez in 1994, the Concurso de Libro Sonorense in 1994, 1996 & 2006, and the Premio Nacional de Cuento Efraín Huerta in 2006.

You are not a journalist, but a very well informed citizen. In which moment did you consider it was so important to write your book about Donald Trump?

In November 2015, while listening to a debate between Trump and his competitors for the Republican nomination it was clear to me he would win. At that moment I knew nothing about him and had no opinions as to what kind of president he might make. I decided to do a little research into his career. The results were so unexpected that I felt compelled to share them in this book.

You have observed Trump's career in times long before he became a presidential candidate. What features got him the country's attention and led to his election as president?

The book discusses two important Trump characteristics. The first is his star power. I mean that literally. A star persistently pushes out light and energy regardless of obstacles. It is almost impossible to snuff out a star. This can be a great quality for a president. But there is another Trump characteristic that weighs against him: his personal motivation. Every Trump action I could find was motivated either by personal gain or money. Compare that to the many people in public service who undertake actions motivated by a duty to promote the general welfare or the greater good. Compare it to the many businessmen who subscribe to the ideal of at least providing a "fair exchange" to those with whom they do business.

There was scant evidence in Trump's career of any such noble impulses. He apparently cared little for either his shareholders, (most of whom lost vast sums of money in his corporations) for the people who lent him money (whom he blackmailed into forgiving much of the money he owed them), for the contractors who worked on his projects (many of whom never got paid) or for his customers (such as the disaffected students in his Trump University.) In other words he was quick to take and very slow to give. Because "taking more than you give" is the mechanism that defines a criminal, it was not that surprising to find (as noted in the book) that he so frequently associated with criminal types such as the Mafia.

What do you consider is more dangerous: to have a narcissist or psychopath president? And why?

Narcissist is a label put on someone who tends to like himself too much. Psychopath is a term given to someone who exhibits antisocial behavior. These are psychological terms and so imprecise as to be of very little value in my opinion. But I am happy to give you another one of Trump's characteristics that is 100% measurable and also incredibly dangerous. That is his relationship with the truth. Simply put, he has none.

In one of the last presidential debates an independent third-party organization rated 88% of Trump's statements to be false. And that may have been an optimistic assessment. Another independent group which followed Trump around on the campaign found he told a lie every five minutes. Trump has taken the art of lying to a new level. This can be seen in his frantic obsession with hiding his past and his lack of transparency.

He was the first presidential candidate in 30 years to refuse to release his tax returns. And then he lied about the reasons for not releasing them.

There were 3 class action lawsuits against him over fraud committed by his now defunct Trump University. During the election he said he would never settle those lawsuits and that he would easily win them when they came to trial. However, as soon as he won the election, he paid off his ex-students $25 million to shut them up and deny them the opportunity to ask questions of him in the legal proceedings.

Trump's father was a member of the KKK, but Trump blithely denies it.

Trump made Bill & Hillary Clinton's non-profit corporation a key point of attack during the election, while hiding the activities of his own non-profit corporation which has been subject to multiple fines for illegal behavior, and which was under criminal investigation even after he became President-elect. His lawyers are right now trying to close it down to put a lid on any further embarrassing disclosures.

Though 70 years old, and happy to criticize Hillary's health during the campaign, Trump has never allowed his own medical records to be seen by voters.

As chronicled in my book, whenever he's been questioned about his Mafia connections Trump develops a bad memory. Trump apologists now caution us "never to take him literally" (whatever that means). Trump is the least transparent person ever to have become president and arguably the one with the most casual relationship with the truth.

In respect to Trump´s links with the mob, in which manner do you believe this can affect American society and even more in the whole world. Does he owe debts to the mob?

There is an old saying: you can know someone by the company he keeps. There is a chapter about this in the book. The fact that Trump's Mafia links were almost completely ignored by the press during his campaign was one reason for his success. The book speculates whether or not Trump will be forced to pardon members of organized crime syndicates currently languishing away in prison with first-hand knowledge of Trump's Mob connections. The potential for blackmail of a sitting US president is a big danger. If Trump makes good on his double-threat to "build a Wall and make Mexico pay for it" and "deport 12 million Latinos", the only certain result will be mass confusion in Mexican-American communities. As is addressed in the book, such upset will undoubtedly increase violent crime while doing nothing to decrease the scourge of drugs in America's inner cities. The strategy of "following the money" gives some insight into how these two Trump actions would directly benefit at least one group. With the Mexican drug cartels thrown into chaos and made to relinquish much of their drug operations in USA inner cities, where will that business go? Back to the American Mafia with whom Trump had so many ties.

Tell me about the people who sympathize with Trump. What kind of individuals are the ones that feel attracted to this character?

Many Americans are dissatisfied with their economic position--many have lost their homes, many have lost their jobs, many are unable to find new jobs, and almost all complain that salaries have not improved for the last 15 years while the cost of living has continually risen. These people are not bad, but they are afraid and mad and would like their situation improved. Hillary Clinton was unable to persuade those people that she could improve their condition. Trump chose a different course. It's so easy to criticize, find fault and lay blame, and Trump has proven himself an expert at belittling people and invalidating good works. In the campaign he blamed just about everyone including "politicians" "Goldman-Sachs Bank," "the establishment," "the military." The sad thing is that Trump has no real plan for improving anything and his first action was to load up his Cabinet with the exact people he was criticizing during the election: billionaire members of the establishment, Goldman-Sachs alumni, and Generals. He thinks he's just going to be able to glow everything right in January, whereas he will very quickly find out it's not going to be so easy.

Trump is often compared with Hitler. Personally I think the modern world has not yet met a ruler as Trump could become. He makes me think more about the kings of the Middle Ages. Who would you compare to a President Trump and why?

That's a great question. Whenever Trump is compared to Hitler, people howl against using those two names in the same sentence. Even though it is true that White Supremacists, KKK, and Nazis support Trump; that does not make him a Hitler. Nevertheless, there is a comparison to be made there. Both the people of Germany in 1935 and the people in Trump's USA were struggling with no solution in sight to economies in terrible shape. Both Trump and Hitler played on the fears and anguish engendered by those conditions. More importantly, they mobilized followers by blaming and attacking wrong sources for the problems: for Hitler it was the Jews; for Trump, it was the Mexicans and the Chinese. As for your comparison with the kings and emperors of the middle Ages, all those rulers had a single measure of success: Was the size of their country larger or smaller after their reign than before it? Their only tool was military action and all of the top 15 kings and emperors of the Middle Ages spent their rule in armed conflicts with neighbors: either attempting to increase their land area or fighting off attacks on their heartland. Many think Trump will put us on that path without well considering that advanced 21st century weaponry makes the effects of armed conflicts 1,000 times more serious than those which occurred 1500 years ago. There is another concept from the Middle Ages that is more relevant: the concept of "noblesse oblige." That is a French idea that the attainment of a leadership position obligates that leader to fulfill social responsibilities, i.e. to work for the greater good, act with kindness, generosity, honor, etc. In an earlier time, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table exemplified that ideal. As far as is known Trump has never shown any sign of it. From books written about him (including the ones he's caused to have been written) Trump has worked almost exclusively for his own personal gain and self-enrichment. When someone like that tells you he's going to help you, it's best to run the other way.

I've noticed that those who have written about Trump often ignore Hillary Clinton or confine themselves to insular and unflattering commentary ... what do you think of Hillary?" How would she be as president, compared to Trump?

That's another great question. Hillary got the roughest deal in this election. "You can't trust Hillary" was an idea created by the Trump campaign, given legs by the press in an ill-conceived attempt to appear to provide "fair coverage", and heard so often that it came to be common knowledge that the election was little more than choosing between the lesser of two evils. The "dishonest Hillary" operation was nasty enough to cool the ardor of many of Hillary's own supporters.

What everyone missed here was the issue of transparency. Whereas Trump was the least transparent candidate in the history of America politics, Hillary was the most transparent. In her 30 years of public service her every misstep and foible had been hashed, rehashed, and then repeatedly investigated. Her tax returns were public going back 30 years. The Clinton Foundation literally opened its books to reporters--just to be transparent. Hillary's email "scandal" turned out to consist of 7 emails out of 30,000 which were not classified as secret at the time they were received. The FBI refused to indict her since no American secret program or personnel had been compromised.

But every day, multiple sources in the Trump campaign, plus websites created by Russian agents wishing to deny Hillary the election repeated the "dishonest Hillary" mantra. And the press canonized it despite the fact that anything and everything to do with her time as Secretary of State, her personal email server, the Clinton Foundation, and her husband's earlier misconduct had been an open book for years. Investigation after investigation failed to find anything actionable, while Trump cheered on his followers with chants of "lock her up, lock her up." In fact neither the various congressional investigations into Benghazi nor the FBI investigations into her private email server discovered anything actionable. Nothing at all.

Did she run a poor campaign? Undoubtedly. Was she poorly advised? Unquestionably. But did she deserve the reputation created by the Trump Campaign? Not in the slightest. We will never know whether she would have made a good president or a bad one. She gave little indication she would have made a great one, but neither was there any sign she'd have been a disaster. She was experienced and levelheaded. She understood the situations facing America and the world and wished to serve the greater good.

Dishonest and honest are two sides of the same coin. The Trump brush painted Hillary as dishonest. So in comparison, how "honest" was Trump? Honest means truthful. It means telling it like it is--not what you'd like it to be, but how it is. A clue to this is that in one of Trump's last debates an independent fact checking organization reported 88% of his claims and statements to be false. 88%. Trump has little interest in facts unless they are self-serving. That is why he would not release his tax returns. That is why he scoffs at the idea of "conflict of interest" with regard to his businesses. That is why he happily outlaid $25 million to pay off the students of "Trump University" to avoid having to answer embarrassing questions in discovery. This does not even touch the surface of his mob ties about which he develops a poor memory whenever the subject comes up.

As president-elect he is, at this writing, repeatedly asserting that he won the election by one of the largest margins in history. The truth is that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over 2.8 million voters. Trump's deficit gives him the third worst vote margin among winning presidential candidates in the 200+ year history of presidential campaigns. The second largest deficit for a candidate who went on to become the president occurred in the 2000 election when Al Gore received 544,000 more votes yet still lost to George W. Bush. Trump's deficit of 2.8 million was five times more pitiful.

A presidential candidate needed 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Trump ended up with 306 and Clinton 232. Three states decided the election in favor of Trump with an average margin of 0.72 of 1% of the vote. (He won Michigan by 0.25 of 1%, Wisconsin by 0.78 of 1 % and Pennsylvania by a hair above 1% of the vote. It's been calculated that a total of only 78,000 votes from those three states were all that stood in the way of a Clinton victory. Not exactly a landslide for Trump.

This brings us to the issue of whether or not Mr. Putin and his Russian hackers affected the outcome of the election. Pundits smugly deny it because the Russians didn't interfere in the physical operation of the voting machines or the actual counting of the votes. But that is a pathetically naive view. The simple answer is: of course they did. Of COURSE the Russians affected the outcome of the election. The CIA, NSA, and FBI all concur that based on their intelligence, the Russian government attempted to interfere with the election by hacking private emails and releasing the data through WikiLeaks and other questionable organizations in order to shift the vote in Trump's favor. The Russians had been working on this for over a year by the time they released almost 20,000 hacked emails through WikiLeaks on July 22, 2016, just 3 days before the Democratic National Convention. The episode shocked the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and resulted in the forced resignation of the DNC chairman Debbi Wasserman-Schultz. The Russians were simultaneously running at least 5 websites disguised as "Trump supporters" for the purpose of funneling false information to American social media. And they were undeniably effective. Twitter reported that there were more than 75 million tweets related to the election. And between the Democratic Primary and the actual election the Number One tweeted topic was the Russian hack and the Wikileaks releases. By far and away the most tweeted subject.

"Trying to affect the election" and "actually affecting the election" are obviously two different things. But here's a test anyone can do. Check the news outlets over the last 90 days of the election. Any outlets. All outlets. Newspapers, magazines, TV, Cable, Radio. And then check the social media. Every day media outlets were full of new Wikileaks coming from the Russian hacks: those "missing" emails, the Debby Wasserman-Schultz dirty laundary, the John Podesta emails, etc. There were no bombshells in any of them, nothing new about Hillary, and certainly nothing to deserve the almost universal inferences calling into question Hillary's trustworthiness. These Wikileaks came from hacks of private emails in Hillary's campaign only. If we'd had access to Trump's emails or those of any of his senior advisors or campaign managers or his alt-right supporters, is there any doubt but that there would have been issues far more incendiary and spectacular with which to charm the electorate? But the Russians had their agenda, and that didn't include placing obstacles in Trump's path. For three months this anti-Hillary barrage defined social media election content. It only needed to sway less than 1/2 of 1% of the electorate to decide the election. And the Russians saw to it that it became the number 1 subject for the entire three months of the actual election. So, yes, the Russians did definitely decide the election.

How do you expect the World will be with a president like Donald Trump? - How would a world where someone like Trump ruled the most powerful and influential country in the world?

It is always possible that Mr. Trump could step up, shed a sleazy past, and become a great U.S. President. Possible but unlikely. Luckily for the USA and for the world, the American political system is a difficult place for a dictator to arise. The founders of the American system of government foresaw the possibility and introduced into the system many checks to unlimited power. The last chapter of my book cautions world leaders to be patient with Mr. Trump. If he truly ends up being a disaster he will not last more than 4 years; and it could be even less.