The 28 Best Passages From the Leaked DNC Oppo File on Donald Trump

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The 28 Best Passages From the Leaked DNC Oppo File on Donald Trump

If you’re not a masochist like me—I read through the entire 200+ pages of the DNC’s opposition research on Trump that was (probably) leaked by Russian hackers—the opening line of the paper gives a fair description of everything to come:

“One thing is clear about Donald Trump, there is only one person he has ever looked out for and that’s himself. Whether it’s American workers, the Republican Party, or his wives, Trump’s only fidelity has been to himself and with that he has shown that he has no problem lying to the American people. Trump will say anything and do anything to get what he wants without regard for those he harms.”

What’s most striking about the document is that nearly everything in it is sourced with material that any one of us could find online, and not the work of some shady D.C. firm “obtaining” files never meant to see the light of day. There are plenty of nuggets from the past few decades, but it’s mainly a Trump-centric recap of what John Oliver has taken to calling “The Fiery Two-Party Pileup on the Hellbound Fuckspressway.”

A lot of material in the document has been hashed over several times by the media already, but given the torrent of nonsense constantly emanating from The Donald, some of these statements have been buried under the dirt from whatever new hole he just started digging. Here are 28 of the best passages from this 211-page political monstrosity.

1. Ivana Trump Accused Him of Rape in a Deposition During their 1990 Divorce

She then made the very Donaldeque statement that the assault occurred not in a “criminal sense,” but she later confessed to feeling “violated.” The ordeal was described as a “violent assault” by Harry Hurt, author of the 1993 book Lost Tycoon, as he described the scene like so:

“After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Donald Trump confronted his then-wife, who had previously used the same plastic surgeon. ‘Your fucking doctor has ruined me!’ Trump cried.”

Not to make light of domestic abuse, but this seriously sounds like a scene straight out of Arrested Development. Michael Cohen, special counsel at The Trump Organization responded to criticism of this saga last year with the following…I guess you could call them words:

“You’re talking about the front-runner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as private individual who never raped anybody. And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse…You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law.”

But that’s not all folks, Cohen sent an e-mail to The Daily Beast threatening

“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,’ Cohen said. ‘So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?’ ‘You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up… for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet…you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it.”

Trump is so slimy that he even took advantage of Ivana’s unfamiliarity with the legal system, as she told Nancy Collins on ABC News in 1995:

“My prenuptial, I did not understand what I was signing. I was younger and I did not speak very well English and I really- my parents never had one. It did not exist in communistic Czechoslovakia. I really wasn’t sure. What I thought that I was signing was to give the rights to the family for their money, that I would not claim the money of the family, like, say, the fathers and grandfathers and all that stuff. That’s what I understood I was signing.”

2. Little Donald Trump Was a Dick Too

The New York Times spoke to Laura Manuelidis, who lived behind Mr. Trump on Wareham Place.

“[She] Recalled that when a ball bounced into the Trumps’ grassy yard, he would not throw the ball back but instead would yell, ‘I’m going to tell my dad; I’m going to call the police.’”

3. Donald Trump Did Not Go to Wharton Like He Says He Went to Wharton

Last year, the Washington Post exposed that he merely took undergraduate classes there, and was not enrolled in its prestigious MBA program.

4. Donald Trump Sucks at His Job

The National Journal reported in 2015:

“If [he] invested his eventual share of [his] father’s real estate company into a mutual fund of S&P 500 stocks in 1974, it would be worth nearly $3 billion today, thanks to the market’s performance over the past four decades. If he’d invested the $200 million that Forbes magazine determined he was worth in 1982 into that index fund, it would have grown to more than $8 billion today.”

This is particularly brutal in light of last week’s report that Trump’s properties underperformed the market by 57 percent, amounting to $13.2 billion in losses since 1976.

5. No, Donald Trump REALLY Sucks at His Job

Wolf Blitzer reported in 2004:

“This will be the second time the Trump casinos have filed for bankruptcy. In 1992, the three casinos he then owned, the Taj Mahal, Castle, and Plaza, all in Atlantic City, ended up in Chapter 11, burdened by more than $1 billion in debt.”

Press of Atlantic City dove into these bankruptcies even further last year:

“But the bankruptcies — starting with Trump Taj Mahal, which bankrupted about a year after Trump opened it using $675 million in patently unsustainable junk bonds — were less displays of cool resourcefulness than frantic episodes of Trump scrambling to bail on bank debt and keep his perennially overleveraged casinos from going belly up.”

Trump brought the same intensity and passion to his job that a toddler brings to a temper tantrum, as the Washington Post described in 1992:

“Instead, the bankers and investors to whom Trump owed money made a series of deals that left him wealthy. They let him keep some properties and took control of others, and they reduced Trump’s personal debt by about $ 750 million, more than four-fifths of the total. They didn’t do it out of charity. Rather, the lenders were reluctant to confront Trump in bankruptcy court, where they would face years of delay and massive legal expenses. In the end, lenders said, they feared they would recover less money in bankruptcy than they could get by striking compromises with Trump.”

The New York Times disclosed that in 1993, Trump had to ask for a $10 million loan from his siblings.

“He had no collateral to provide his brother and sisters, all three of whom wanted a guarantee that he would repay them. The Trump children’s anticipated share of their father’s fortune amounted to about $35 million each, and Donald’s siblings demanded that he sign a promissory note pledging future distributions from his trust fund against the $10 million he wanted to borrow.”

6. Donald Trump’s Bankruptcies Ripped Off the Little Guy

From that same Press of Atlantic City piece:

“It wasn’t just faceless bankers who got burned in the bankruptcies. In the 2009 case, unsecured creditors — low-level investors, contractors, small-time vendors — got less than a penny on the dollar for their claims against Trump Entertainment Resorts (Trump resigned as chairman four days before the bankruptcy filing).”

7. Americans aren’t the Only Little Guys Trump’s Business Ventures are Designed to Screw Over

Alan Garten, general counsel for Trump, to Bloomberg in 2015:

“Developers in the Philippines, Turkey, Panama, Canada, India, and Uruguay pay Trump millions in licensing fees to put his name on buildings he neither built nor owns, with an aim to sell condominiums and hotel rooms at higher prices. These deals provide nearly risk-less revenue streams for Trump, which, along with income from properties he owns, helps pay down existing debts and fund new projects.”

8. Donald Trump isn’t a Billionaire and never was

In 1990, Forbes estimated that Trump had $3.2 billion in debt, was worth around half a million dollars, losing roughly $40 million a month, and they valued his total assets at $3.7 billion.

Timothy O’Brien reported in the New York Times in 2005:

“Three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances, people who had worked closely with him for years, told me that they thought his net worth was somewhere between $150 million and $250 million. (Donald’s casino holdings have recently rebounded in value, perhaps adding as much as $135 million to these estimates.)”

O’Brien detailed how Trump uses bullshit accounting to fudge his own numbers:

“Donald’s Palm Beach course, for example, has about 285 members who paid $250,000 for memberships, for a total of $71.25 million. Donald borrowed about $47 million to build the course and a new clubhouse. So he banked about $24 million on the deal, before other costs. He leases the land beneath the course from Palm Beach County; he doesn’t own it. But Donald carries the course on his books as an asset worth $200 million.”

Trump sued O’Brien for $5 billion, accusing him of libel, but the judge threw the case out. Trump’s response to O’Brien’s reporting in 2005 was as expected:

“You can go ahead and speak to guys who have 400-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I’m a great builder.”

9. Irony is Funny

From the general background section on Trump:

“On August 5, 2014, Trump sued Trump Entertainment Resorts in an attempt to remove his name from Trump Plaza and Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, and then Trump Entertainment Resorts filed for bankruptcy for a second time on September 9, the fourth time one of Trump’s companies filed for bankruptcy.”

To bring this full circle, Trump then told Crippled America in 2015:

“I put my own name on my buildings and on my products, and I stand behind them. People have come to expect top quality from anything that carries my name.”

10. Trump Probably Perjured Himself Pretending Not to Know Who a Russian Mobster Was

As the New York Daily News reported in 2015:

“A newly-revealed video deposition shows real-estate mogul Donald Trump confused when asked under oath about his relationship to a twice-convicted felon with ties to the Mafia. Trump has long faced allegations of connections to the mob, but his relationship with Felix Sater — who pleaded guilty in 1998 to racketeering in a fraud scheme involving the Genovese and Bonanno crime families — represents a more direct link between the presidential candidate and organized crime. ‘If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,’ Trump testified in the video deposition, which was obtained by ABC News. But Trump reportedly named Sater as a senior business adviser in 2010. The Russian émigré carried a Trump Organization business card with the title ‘Senior Advisor to Donald Trump’ and appeared in numerous photos with Trump.”

11. Donald Trump Has Actually GULP Been Pretty Consistent on Healthcare

Telling Larry King in 1999:

“I really say: What’s the purpose of a country if you’re not going to have defensive and health care? If you can’t take care of your sick in the country, forget it, it’s all over. I mean, it’s no good. So I’m very liberal when it comes to health care. I believe in universal health care. I believe in whatever it takes to make people well and better.”

And Greta Van Sustren in 2009 about the Affordable Care Act:

“Well, I think it’s noble, except I just don’t know how a country that’s in such debt — we are really a debtor nation right now, and I just don’t know how a country in this kind of trouble can afford it. It’s very — I love the idea, but can this country afford it?”

His 60 Minutes appearance last year touched on the issue and Trump maintained a fairly consistent position:

“Obamacare is a disaster if you look at what’s going on with premiums where they’re up 45, 50, 55 percent. … Everybody’s got to be covered. … I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. … [The uninsured are] going to be taken care of. … The government’s gonna pay for it.”

Ok let’s move on, I need to take a shower now. (Side note: never doubt the Democrats ability to make someone else’s case for them in an attempt to tear them down).

12. Trump Isn’t Self-Funding His Campaign

MSNBC noted:

“According to the latest federal filing, Trump’s campaign has raised $5.8 million. However, the bulk of that sum — 67%, or $3.9 million — has come from approximately 75,000 individual contributions. Meanwhile, Trump has poured $1.9 million of his own money into his campaign, which represents about 33% of that total haul.”

13. Donald Trump’s Logic on Torture is Really Something

Arguing on behalf of water boarding to his lap dog Sean Hannity in 2015:

“Well, first of all, I think it works. I have no doubt that it works. Maybe not in all cases and maybe they’ll give false information sometimes, but I have no doubt that it works.”

And telling a crowd in Columbus last year:

“Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.’ … ‘It works. Believe me, it works. And you know what? If it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway, for what they’re doing. It works.”

14. Trump Wants an American Version of Fidel Castro’s CDR That Terrorized Neighborhoods across the Country

Here’s Trump yelling to a crowd in Myrtle Beach last year:

“People move into a house a block down the road, you know who’s going in. You can see and you report them to the local police. You’re pretty smart, right? We know if there’s something going on, report them. Most likely you’ll be wrong, but that’s OK. That’s the best way. Everybody’s their own cop in a way. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to do it.”

15. Trumpie Sanders

To Larry King in 1991:

“Well, what they did is they just kept cutting the tax rates, cutting the tax rates. And I’m not talking about for the middle income or the poor. Leave ‘em. Keep ‘em low. And I shouldn’t say this, but high-income people should pay high percentages, but have the ability to spend vast amounts of money on bringing their tax rates down to nothing. If a man is in the 50 or 60 percent bracket, he’s going to invest. If a man’s in the 25 percent bracket or the 30 percent bracket, which is what you have now, there’s no real reason for him to invest. He’ll say, ‘Hey, look, I’ll pay the tax and that’s it.’ So what’s happened.”

King asked him if he’s saying the rich are under-taxed and the echo of “I shouldn’t say this” pushed out a classic Trump hedge:

“I’m saying the rich should be taxed at a much higher rate and should have the incentive that, if they want to spend some money by investing in housing, investing in other things, they can get their tax rate down to nothing, if need be.”

16. Trump Wanted to Legalize Drugs

The Washington Post proclaimed that in April 1990:

“Trump said at a luncheon in Florida that the United States should legalize drugs and use the money collected to educate the public on the dangers of drug use. ‘We’re losing badly the war on drugs,’ Trump said at the time, according to an article in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. ‘You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.’”

You’ll never guess where this is going, but, in the summer of 2015, he told CPAC that Colorado’s legalization of marijuana was “bad and I feel strongly about it.”

17. Trump Can’t Tell the Difference between a Key Ally and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard

Hugh Hewitt asked Trump if he was familiar with General Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds force, and Trump answered by requesting the answer:

Trump: Yes, but go ahead, give me a little, go ahead, tell me.
Hewitt: He runs the Quds Forces
Trump: Yes, O.K., right, the Kurds, by the way, have been horribly mistreated.

Quds is a division within an army, the Kurds are an ethnic group who have been our most effective ground forces in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Even though they sound alike, this is far from an innocent mistake, and the clearest proof that Trump is in way over his head on foreign affairs, but hey, what do I know? He’s the one who “knows more about ISIS than the generals do.”

18. Trump Opposes the War in Afghanistan, Then Remembers Why We Invaded In the First Place

From CNN last year:

“We made a terrible mistake getting involved there in the first place. We had real brilliant thinkers that didn’t know what the hell they were doing. And it’s a mess. It’s a mess. And at this point, you probably have to (stay) because that thing will collapse about two seconds after they leave. Just as I said that Iraq was going to collapse after we leave.”

Then having the audacity to come back on CNN 14 days later, blathering:

“We made a mistake going into Iraq. I’ve never said we made a mistake going into Afghanistan.”

19. Trump BLASTED Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act

Ranting to Evans & Novak on CNN in 1997:

“At the same time, the 1986 tax law change was a total disaster. It was dumb. It was expensive. It cost the United States billions and billions of dollars. And it was foolish. I mean you had some senators that had no idea what they were doing when they passed that. And it shouldn’t have happened. RTC was created. Trillions of dollars in property were just thrown out, thrown out the window and bought for very little money by some very smart people. And it should have never happened.”

20. When Your Wives and Maids Raise Your Kids, Child Care is Easy

Washington Post, 2015:

“You need one person or two people, and you need some blocks and you need some swings and some toys. You know, surely, it’s not expensive. It’s not an expensive thing. I do it all over, and I get great people because of it… It’s something that can be done, I think, very easily by a company.”

21. Trump Proposed an Idea That Would Make Bernie Sanders Cum

The Club for Growth dug this one up from his 1999 Presidential Exploratory Committee to invalidate him as a conservative:

“I would impose a one-time, 14.25% tax on individuals and trusts with a net worth over $10 million,’ Trump said. ‘For individuals, net worth would be calculated minus the value of their principal residence. That would raise $5.7 trillion in new revenue, which we would use to pay off the entire national debt.’”

Trump also suggested that we close the carried interest loophole, earning him praise from Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman, and Warren Buffet. This election stopped making sense a while ago.

22. Trump Was Always Religious, But Didn’t Believe in God until the 90’s

Here he is like every stoned kid at every college party in America to the Chicago Tribune in 1989:

“No. I don’t believe in reincarnation, heaven or hell – but we go someplace. Do you know, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where.”

Then to Dianne Sawyer on Good Morning America in 1999:

“I believe in God. I’m religious. I’m religious in my thought. And I just hope, in fact, that we’re all right in believing that there is a heaven, and perhaps in believing that there is a hell. I mean, we have to be here for something. We have to be doing this for some reason. There has to be a reason. And I believe that there is in fact a reason, and I believe heaven could be that reason.”

Then telling Bloomberg last year:

“I’ve gone to gay weddings. I’ve been at gay weddings. I have been against [gay marriage] from the standpoint of [the] Bible, from the standpoint of my teachings as growing up and going to Sunday school and going to church and I’ve been opposed to it and we’ll just see how it all comes out.”

23. Trump Wants To Build A Pipeline That He Says We Don’t Need

As he (I can only assume) lovingly whispered into Sean Hannity’s ear as they cuddled on top of a pile of Trump steaks in August of 2015:

“They should approve [the Keystone Pipeline]. Number one, it’s jobs. Immediately, you’re building it, it’s jobs, it’s good. It’s not going to hurt anything in terms of environmentally. It’s hard to believe that that has not been approved. But get it approved. More oil coming in, the more we can have where we don’t have to go to foreign places, really foreign places to get the oil. So, there’s a simple one. It’s going to create jobs. It’s overall good. But we don’t even need it, in one sense, because we have so much under our own land we can do it, but we have to get rid of some of the restrictions.”

24. The Proletariat’s Salaries Are Too Damn High

Bitching on Varney & Co last October

“You have to keep our country competitive. One of the reasons companies are leaving is because salaries are too high. You look at what’s going on in Vietnam and in China and so many different places, so we have to be very, very careful with that.”

25. Trump Forced a Widow Out of Her Home So He Could Build a Limousine Parking Lot

John Stossel did a 20/20 investigation in 2004, stating

“When Donald Trump wanted a bigger parking lot for limousines outside one of his casinos, he tried to get this widow to sell him her house for $1 million. She said no. So Trump then got his allies in government to condemn her house and force her to sell it for a quarter of his original offer.”

In that same piece, he interviewed Trump:

Stossell: “You’re bullying these people out because…”
Trump: “I’m not, excuse me, that’s wrong. For you to use the word ‘bully,’ John, is very unfair.”
Stossell: “Well, that’s not what’s happening here?”
Trump: “No, absolutely not. Not at all. And I think it’s a pretty sick assumption.”
Stossell: “In the old days, big developers came in with thugs with clubs. Now you use lawyers, you go to court, and you force people out.”
Trump: “Excuse me. Other people maybe use thugs today, okay? I don’t.”

26. He Bought a Golf Course, and Installed a Plaque Commemorating a Non-Existent Civil War Battle

As the New York Times reported last year:

“Between the 14th hole and the 15th tee of one of the club’s two courses, Mr. Trump installed a flagpole on a stone pedestal overlooking the Potomac, to which he affixed a plaque purportedly designating ‘The River of Blood.’‘ Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,’ the inscription reads. ‘The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’’

Richard Gillespie, the executive director of the Mosby Heritage Area Association’s response to those claims?

“No. Uh-uh. No way. Nothing like that ever happened there.”

27. “A Well Educated Black”

Gawker exposed this line from Trump back in 1989

“A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. I think sometimes a black may think they don’t have an advantage or this and that… I’ve said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage.’’

And from 1991

“Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

28. I Just…I Can’t Anymore, I Give Up

Donald Trump to Newsroom in 2011:

“Well, first of all, I don’t bill myself as a top negotiator. You’re calling me, I don’t call you, you know what I mean? I don’t know if I’m a good negotiator or not, but I never billed myself as a great negotiator. I don’t like to talk that way.”

Save for the seemingly hopeless plurality keeping this cancer alive, Trump has something to upset people of all political stripes. His history of falling anywhere between Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz on the ideological spectrum has opened him up to criticism from anyone with a mostly functioning brain, and that is before you even get to the fact that he is a fraud, misogynist, racist, sociopath, etc…this Ponzi scheme wearing a man’s clothes has manipulated America’s white nationalists into getting him one step from the Oval Office, and now it’s up to civilized society to save the day on November 8th. Don’t be late.

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