The Trump Kleptocracy with David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post
The Bill Press Pod
BP Pods
4.7 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2019
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Trump: "It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it." "The point is that you can never be too greedy." To find out how this is playing out, Bill talks with David Fahrenthold, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post who has spent years exposing Trump's finances.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends and neighbors, and welcome back to the Bill Press Pod. |
| 0:10.5 | You know, it's not just Donald Trump's presidency that people are talking about these days. |
| 0:15.3 | It's also Donald Trump's properties. |
| 0:18.5 | With news, for example, that Vice President Mike Pence stayed at Trump's golf course |
| 0:22.9 | in Ireland 181 miles away from his meetings in Dublin. And news that the Air Force is regularly |
| 0:31.2 | bunking its crews for multiple-day stays at Trump's golf course in Scotland. And news that Attorney General Bill Barr's throwing |
| 0:41.0 | his staff Christmas party at Trump's hotel in Washington, which raises the question, is Donald |
| 0:48.3 | Trump just using the presidency of the United States to promote his own brand and line his own pockets. |
| 0:56.0 | Well, nobody knows better because nobody knows more about the Trump Business Empire |
| 1:01.0 | than David Ferenholt, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post. |
| 1:07.0 | I sat down with David Ferenholt at the new offices of the Post on K Street in downtown |
| 1:13.3 | Washington. David, it's good to see you. Thank you. Good to be here. So I looked at your website. |
| 1:21.9 | I looked you up in Google and it says that you are here at the Washington Post and that your beat is the Trump Organization. |
| 1:29.9 | Okay, I'm a member of the White House Correspondence Association. My beat is the Trump presidency. |
| 1:35.6 | Is there any difference between the Trump presidency and the Trump Organization? And how can you tell? |
| 1:42.5 | Well, yes, there is a difference, but the difference is getting |
| 1:45.3 | smaller every day. So we've spent the last couple of years trying to write about this business, |
| 1:51.5 | this sort of unusual real estate hotel business that Trump owns and how it's interacting with the |
| 1:57.2 | presidency. And for a long time, the main way it was interacting was that Trump was hurting his own brand. He was driving away customers that used to fill his hotels and causing revenue to go down. Lately, he seems to have been helping the brand by visiting becoming his own best customer and by having his officials go and stay at his hotels. So that's been a change in the beat that the Trump |
| 2:18.3 | administration and its top officials are some of his best customers. So the two are getting |
| 2:24.0 | closer together. Is his mission as president to promote his own brand and line his own pockets? |
| 2:32.8 | I think, I wouldn't say that is his only mission, |
... |
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