When the issue of the presidential candidates’ health suddenly became urgent a few days ago, the Trump campaign announced that Donald Trump had recently had a physical, and he’d be releasing the results. “When the numbers come in, I’ll be releasing very specific numbers,” he said. Then his campaign said that they’d be giving his medical records to Dr. Mehmet Oz, who would discuss them with Trump during an appearance on his television show, which tapes today for broadcast tomorrow.
Then Dr. Oz said he might not probe too deeply with Trump (“I’m not going to ask him questions he doesn’t want to have answered”), and lo and behold, today the campaign said that he and Dr. Oz were actually just going to chat about wellness ‘n stuff. When will we be getting Trump’s actual medical records? “Shortly,” they said. And “soon.”
It’s now being reported that at the taping, Trump handed Oz a one-page summary of his exam, prepared by the raffish Dr. Bornstein.
Coming from him, I imagine it included testimonials to Trump’s superhuman strength and sexual magnetism. But if you’re waiting for anything like a complete medical history on Trump, I wouldn’t hold your breath.
I say that because we’ve seen this many times before. There’s some policy plan or personal information about Trump that reporters are asking for, his campaign promises that it’ll be released very soon, then the press’ attention moves on to other things, and the campaign never delivers. That’s what will probably happen here too.
This is how Donald Trump deals with stories he doesn’t like: He either says he’ll answer at some later date, or just refuses to answer entirely, knowing that eventually, people will stop asking.
Think about his tax returns. At first Trump promised he would release his returns. “I have everything all approved, and very beautiful, and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time,” he said in January. Pressed on exactly when that might be, he said, “At the appropriate time, you’ll be very satisfied.” Then he said he’d release them if Hillary Clinton released her personal emails. But “the appropriate time” turned out to be never, making Trump the first nominee since the 1970s not to release his returns. This isn’t something trivial — in fact, there has never been a nominee whose tax returns we needed to see more than we do Donald Trump’s. He has a large business with hundreds of partnerships and entanglements throughout the world, which raise the potential for all kinds of conflicts of interest.
Today Newsweek released an investigation by reporter Kurt Eichenwald of some of these overseas activities, which brings home just how important it is to know exactly what Trump is involved in:
…the Trump family rakes in untold millions of dollars from the Trump Organization every year. Much of that comes from deals with international financiers and developers, many of whom have been tied to controversial and even illegal activities. None of Trump’s overseas contractual business relationships examined by Newsweek were revealed in his campaign’s financial filings with the Federal Election Commission, nor was the amount paid to him by his foreign partners. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for the names of all foreign entities in partnership or contractually tied to the Trump Organization.) Trump’s financial filings also indicate he is a shareholder or beneficiary of several overseas entities, including Excel Venture LLC in the French West Indies and Caribusiness Investments SRL, based in the Dominican Republic, one of the world’s tax havens.Trump’s business conflicts with America’s national security interests cannot be resolved so long as he or any member of his family maintains a financial interest in the Trump Organization during a Trump administration, or even if they leave open the possibility of returning to the company later. The Trump Organization cannot be placed into a blind trust, an arrangement used by many politicians to prevent them from knowing their financial interests; the Trump family is already aware of who their overseas partners are and could easily learn about any new ones.
The article has lots of detail, showing that Trump and his family have a direct financial interest in many places where his decisions as president could shape events. He has said he’ll just step away from his company and let his kids run it while he’s president, which doesn’t even begin to address the conflicts of interest at work.
The fact that Trump thinks he can get away with this lack of disclosure, and we’ll just take his word for it that everything’s cool and there’s nothing to worry about, is absolutely astonishing. What’s worse is that that’s exactly what has happened up until now.
So what should we do? We in the media should treat these stories about Trump the way we treated the story of Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia. When she got light-headed and stumbled three days ago at that 9/11 commemoration, every major news organization swung into action. They assigned multiple reporters to the story, had them out investigating every aspect of it they could think of, published story after story and filled hour after hour of cable discussions about it, all of which created enormous pressure on Clinton to be as forthcoming as possible. The Clinton campaign has promised that they’re going to release more detailed records about her health, and they’re going to follow through, because they know that if they didn’t there would be a storm of criticism from the media about how secretive she’s being.
The Trump campaign, on the other hand, probably thinks they can just wait it out, when it comes to his medical records or foreign business deals or anything else, because they’ve seen it before. They’ve watched as we devoted enormous amounts of critical attention to the Clinton Foundation, which actually does a tremendous amount of good in the world, while we all but ignored the Trump Foundation, which appears to be little more than an outright scam set up for the purpose of getting other people to pay for giant paintings of Donald Trump and allowing Trump to charge genuine charities to use Mar-a-Lago for events at which they honor him for donations he didn’t actually give them. Were it not for the heroic efforts of the Post’s David Fahrenthold, we’d never know anything about it, because most news organizations just weren’t asking.
Similarly, it’s unbelievable that it’s the middle of September and just now people are finally wondering whether Trump’s intricate web of foreign enterprises might be problematic if he were to become president. So that needs to be investigated too, down to the last detail, so we know exactly what all his interests are and how they might affect American foreign policy and national security.
There are a hundred reporters who have spent the last three days trying to determine if Hillary Clinton ever had a hangnail. At least that much energy should be put into finding out what we need to know about Donald Trump. It should have happened a long time ago, but it’s not too late.
