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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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PANAMA CITY — A worker with a crowbar on Monday pried the word “Trump” from the sign in front of the only Trump-branded hotel in Latin America, after the building’s owner said he’d won a legal fight to take control of it.
The removal of the Trump name from the Trump International Hotel Panama came after a days-long standoff between the majority owner, Cypriot businessman Orestes Fintiklis, and the president’s company.
But the building’s future remained uncertain: The Trump Organization said it could still retake control of the hotel.
Fintiklis had sought to fire the Trump Organization — which has a management contract running through 2031 — because he blames the company and the https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/ivanka-trump-overseas/?tid=a_cntx (Trump brand) for poor revenue. The Trump Organization had refused to leave. There followed https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/panamanian-police-arrest-a-guard-at-the-trump-hotel-as-standoff-escalates/2018/02/27/800151ce-1bd1-11e8-98f5-ceecfa8741b6_story.html?utm_term=.7f69956bf20e (10 days of confrontations), including shoving matches, a power outage and several appearances by police.
On Monday, a Panamanian legal official visited the hotel with an escort of 15 police officers. After a long session in a back room, the legal official left without comment. The Washington Post sought unsuccessfully to determine what, exactly, she had decided.
But, after meeting with her, Fintiklis was definitive. He said he had won.
“Today, this dispute has been settled by the judges and the authorities of this country,” Fintiklis told reporters. He declared that he was so impressed by Panama’s legal system that he would soon become a Panamanian citizen.
When Donald Trump was elected, reporters and editors all over sat down to think through the possible reporting tracks on the Trump presidency: There was his new populist movement, his personality and family, his policy plans.
And then there was the corruption beat: Trump had a long history of enriching himself at taxpayers’ expense, and he and his circle did not come out of a tradition that knew the meaning of the term public service.
But a year ago, there was no reporting to do on the corruption story for a simple reason: The Trump administration hadn’t been around long enough.
Well, now it’s been around long enough.
And in recent weeks there has been an escalating series of stories about self-dealing, money flowing to cronies, and high-stakes policy decisions impossibly tangled with personal wealth. What Trump and his critics appear not to have realized is that this — not conspiracies, porn actresses, or divisive comments — is the starkest threat to his presidency.
A week exactly after his inauguration, seated for dinner at a small, oval table in the Green Room of the White House, Donald Trump said to the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation what might end up being the six most consequential words of his presidency.
“I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”
All leaders want loyalty. All politicians. All presidents. But in the 241-year history of the United States of America, there’s never been a commander in chief who has thought about loyalty and attempted to use it and enforce it quite like Trump. “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy,” Trump once said. It is possible to see Trump’s fixation on loyalty, the pledging of it, the proof of it, the failure to receive it or provide it, as the animating force behind so many of the defining events of his first year in office.
Consider James Comey’s extraordinary dismissal; the “Dear Leader” Cabinet meetings convened for aides to bestow slavish praise; public humiliations of his attorney general and secretary of state; the banishment and subsequent contrition of top adviser Steve Bannon; speculation that Robert Mueller won’t last long as special counsel and the parade of lockstep minions whose forced exits from the campaign or the administration have not squelched their public displays of devotion.
By presidential standards, these episodes are bizarre. But in Trumpworld, they fit a distinct pattern. They all trace back to a notion of loyalty that Trump absorbed when he was young—and has never abandoned.
According to people who know him well, Trump’s definition of loyalty is blunt. “Support Donald Trump in anything he says and does,” Roger Stone, the president’s longest-running political adviser, told me. “No matter what,” former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res said. “Or else,” added Louise Sunshine, a friend of Trump for nearly 50 years. “I think he defines it as allegiance,” biographer Tim O’Brien told me. “And it’s not allegiance to the flag or allegiance to the country—it’s allegiance to Trump.”
Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of and special advisor to US President Trump, is being investigated over his foreign links to a number of countries including Turkey, according a report by American broadcaster NBC News.
“As part of the scrutiny of Kushner’s discussions with Turks, federal investigators have reached out to Turkish nationals for information on Kushner through the FBI’s legal attaché office in Ankara, according to two people familiar with the matter,” the news channel reported.
US Federal investigators are scrutinizing whether any of Kushner’s business discussions with foreigners during the presidential transition later shaped White House policies in ways designed to either benefit or retaliate against those he spoke with, according to witnesses and other people familiar with the investigation.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has asked witnesses about Kushner’s efforts to secure financing for his family’s real estate properties, focusing specifically on his discussions during the transition with individuals from Qatar and Turkey, as well as Russia, China and the United Arab Emirates, according to witnesses who have been interviewed as part of the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 election.
As part of the scrutiny of Kushner’s discussions with Turkish government officials, federal investigators have reached out to Turkish nationals for information on Kushner through the FBI’s legal attaché office in Ankara, according to two people familiar with the matter. According to the report, it is unclear how successful Mueller’s effort to reach Turkish nationals has been or what discussions Kushner had with Turks that are under scrutiny.
