That is the question Paul Waldman asks in a thorough piece that went up at The Washington Post this afternoon, with the full title of Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?
There is lots of material here. Waldman points out the discrepancy about how supposed scandals of the two nominees are covered, with multiple reporters assigned to cover any aspect of anything about Hillary Clinton, whereas perhaps some individual reporter or three comes up with something about Trump which gets mentioned in passing, not pursued further, and then dropped.
The end result of this process is that because of all that repeated examination of Clinton’s affairs, people become convinced that she must be corrupt to the core.
There is, Waldman points out, a lot of negative coverage about Trump, but usually about his latest crazy statements (or tweets), meaning his very long history of corrution gets ignored.
So Waldman does us a favor, by putting together in one place a fairly complete list, which he describes as “partial”, which I quote in its entirety:
Trump’s casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money
Trump’s habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for him, many of whom are struggling small businesses
Trump University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into Trump U was quashed.
The Trump Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which Trump allowed a couple of grifters to use his name to bilk people out of their money
The Trump Network, a multi-level marketing venture (a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins
Trump Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did
Trump’s employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work
Trump’s use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work
Trump’s history of being charged with housing discrimination
Trump’s connections to mafia figures involved in New York construction
The time Trump paid the Federal Trade Commission $750,000 over charges that he violated anti-trust laws when trying to take over a rival casino company
The fact that Trump is now being advised by Roger Ailes, who was forced out as Fox News chief when dozens of women came forward to charge him with sexual harassment. According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.
Please go to the original where Waldman provides hyperlinks to document the charges he lists.
Waldman acknowledges that each of these stories get covered, but then ignored, not pursued the way stories are about Clinton:
If any of these kinds of stories involved Clinton, news organizations would rush to assign multiple reporters to them, those reporters would start asking questions, and we’d learn more about all of them.
This has led to a simplistic framing of how much of the media is viewing and portray the two candidates, Trump as crazy/bigoted and Clinton as corrupt. And that is distorting the understanding of the American people.
And it means that to a great extent, for all the controversy he has caused and all the unflattering stories in the press about him, Trump is still being let off the hook.
Indeed.
Go read the entire piece, follow the links, then pass it on widely.