 to American Issues Take One. I'm Tim Apachele, your host. In today's title and topic, how foreign countries paid up 8 million to Trump. Specifically, we're talking about how foreign countries over the course of his presidency enriched Donald Trump. Gifts, paying rents in excess of what the market would bear. Countries specifically like China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Donald Trump was enriched by being president. Although he gave up his salary of, I think it's 250,000 a year, he made millions of dollars by foreign countries and not foreign countries. So to discuss that, I have with me my co-host Jay Fidel and our special esteemed guest, Chuck Crumpton. Happy 2024, gentlemen, welcome. Thank you, Tim. Nice to see you guys. Nice to see you too. Jay, the Chinese government, the embassy, Chinese banks, they all stayed at Donald Trump's properties. One property was the Trump International in Washington, D.C., Trump International in Las Vegas, Trump Tower in New York near the United Nations building, and of course then there's Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. But all these foreign countries occupied his space, his hotels, and paid great sums of money to occupy. Certainly, I think more above and beyond what the market would bear. Would that constitute, in your opinion, a gift? Yeah, I don't think there's any question about it. Well, we don't have any guidance from the Supreme Court on it and that's regrettable. By the way, let me add that of the $7.8 million that Jamie Raskin and the Oversight Committee in the House found, 5.5 of it came from China, which is interesting because China is an adversary and it's really important that we control the amount of gifts and money that are coming in from other nations, especially autocracies, especially adversaries. The other thing I want to mention is that this $8 million was over a period of only two years, 2017 to 2019, because the committee was unable to obtain information from Missouri's, Trump's accounting firm for beyond outside that period. And when Comer became the chair of the committee, he immediately stopped the flow of information from Missouri's, which means the committee only had limited data to draw its conclusions, to conclude that it was $7.8 million. It's probably much more, more countries, more periods of time, more, more. Only they can only find 7.8 because they were stopped. You know, in my introduction, I was negligent not to mention that in the United States Constitution in Article I, there is what is called the Emolience Clause in which basically says no president shall accept gifts of any value from foreign entities. So if you're John Q. Public, is the response, well, so what? Every president has done this since George Washington, but that's not the case. Well, why should we be concerned about Donald Trump receiving gratuities, gifts versus the so what factor? Not every president. I mean, that's a, we're lulled into that, but we were lulled into a, you know, a mode of assuming everybody is corrupt, but that's not true. Abraham Lincoln received two tusks from a country in Africa worth a lot of money, it was ivory. And he went to Congress and he asked Congress if he could accept these as a monuments and Congress said no. And I think they're the Smithsonian now. So, you know, the problem is that people over the Trump years have gotten used to his lies. They've gotten used to his corruption. And so they don't see this as anything significant, but it is significant because, pursuant to your question, because it compromises the United States. And a chief executive is taking money without saying anything from a foreign government, including governments that we are at odds with. And we don't know about it. And he is making his decisions based on being compromised. Furthermore, those countries feel that he owes them something. So their, you know, diplomatic position vis-à-vis the United States is entirely different. It's not arms length. And so what we have is a secret corruption on an international scale and it's wrong. And that's why the Founding Fathers put it in there. Well, that's interesting. They did put it in there, but yet we have Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who took a lot of gifts and it doesn't seem to apply. The Constitution doesn't seem to apply to the one who interprets the Constitution. Well, we should talk also about Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. He is directly relevant to that and he probably won't recuse himself. So if you want to have confidence and want to believe in the Supreme Court, it's very hard to do it these days. Yeah. Chuck, why do you think the Founding Fathers made a point to prohibit the President of the United States from receiving foreign gifts? Remember at that time, we were very concerned about how foreign entities may try to start another war with the United States. In fact, 1812 was just that war. But why do you think the Founding Fathers felt that was important? You know, I think another way of looking at this, I think Jay has just really pretty much answered that question. But another way of looking at it that amplifies Jay's answer is if you look at it from the perspective of what power alliances you're building in order to control decision-making, whether you call them bribes or corruption or whatever, doesn't matter. What they were concerned about is the development of factions that could erode the ability of the majority to govern without interference, without risk, without being prevented from accomplishing the objectives of that governance. And that's exactly what's at stake here. In other words, the trade-off is not just corruption and bribes, the trade-off is the establishment of relationships that allow decision-making to be done not only in secret and adverse to the best interests of the collective, but to prevent the majority and the democratic orientation, not party, but democratic system orientation from being able to exercise any influence or power or authority at all. So it's essentially a power shift mechanism. That's the problem. Let me add one thing to that, Chuck. The notion is that the president is the sole channel for diplomacy. He controls the State Department. He controls communications with other countries and so forth. And that's why it is illegal, for example, a member of Congress or a private civilian to go out into the diplomatic world and conduct negotiations on behalf of the United States. We can't have that kind of fragmentation. We have to know who's responsible, who's doing it, and we have to know that person is not corrupted. And that person is the president. It's got to be carefully managed. It's got to be pristine. And this is part of all that. So, Chuck, the Supreme Court in January 2021 basically did not take the case on. They dismissed it. Do you think that this emolience clause will come up as a future issue for future presidents? It hasn't affected the Biden administration. Do you think it rears its ugly head again? Specifically, if Donald Trump were to gain the president's office again, what might that look like? I think it's a great question because it goes to the political strategies. The strategies of the MAGA GOP identify with certain issues. Some people call them talking points, but they're not. They're social justice issues. And those issues, they will exploit, they will disinform, they will distract, they will use any of the deceit mechanisms and the power shifting mechanism that they can influence with the support and participation, not just the acquiescence, the support of the media to do that. So, again, we're looking at power shifting here. And it's ironic that it's being done not by relationship building, like Lincoln did in building alliances to enable the US to get by slavery and to actually have sufficient alliances to protect just enough of the democratic institutions to make slavery illegal, at least on its face. Now, we have people who instead, whose strategy is to divide and break down rights. We have a Supreme Court whose strategy is to take away rights. If you are trying to use your religion as an excuse to discriminate against people who would be constitutionally illegally protected against that discrimination, the Supreme Court says, yeah, go right ahead. If you're a football coach and you wanna get your Christians out there on the field and kind of pressure them into joining the group and engaging in prayer, go for it. If you wanna deny people website or wedding cake access because they're gay or whatever, go right ahead with that. But where does that stop? If the power shifting is based on dividing rights for the oppressed from the rights of the oppressors and only enforcing the rights of the oppressors against the oppressed, you have no rule of law. And we have not. We have zero nada. If you were looking for a country to live in in which the rule of law had a chance to survive, this would not be on that list at all. Okay, thanks, Chuck. Jay, optimistic view. Jay, in addition to the constitution, the Emolience Clause, there is a 1966 federal law called the Foreign Gifts and Decoration Act, which no one is supposed to accept a gift in excess of $415. Now, I'm sure that was $1966, which who knows what that would be of value in 2020 or 2023 or whatever. But Donald Trump received a lot of gifts directly from golf clubs, from Prime Minister Abe of Japan, a 2018 World Cup soccer ball by, guess who? Vladimir Putin, a Falcon head goat plated Asian Egyptian God head of Horus from the Egyptian president. And not to be outdone, $6,400 of gifts from the Saudis. It was a jewelry collar. And there's a picture of Donald Trump receiving it from the Saudis. Not just payments from his hotels, but direct gifts in direct violation of the Emolience Clause. As we used to say some time ago, K-Passa, why in your opinion do you think these gifts were ignored? Well, by the way, they're still missing. They're looking for those gifts. And I don't know if any of them are still lurking around Mar-a-Lago, but what should we say about the direct gifts that he received? Check the bathrooms first. I was gonna say the same thing. You must have read my mind. It's behind the shower curtain. It's all there. You know, if you're trying to insinuate him that Trump has been corrupt all the way along, you've done a great job. But that's not a surprise. You know, he has been corrupt in his real estate practice. He's been corrupt in everything he's dealt with and he's manipulated the people around him and the courts around him. He is a picture of corruption. So it would have been amazing had he reported these things. He wouldn't, he didn't. And he established a president for a future president. And the Supreme Court has established a president for a future president. We now have corruption built right into our DNA thanks to all of them. And the news just came out moments ago that to clarify things for everybody and make it absolutely crystal clear exactly what's going on here. Donald J. Trump has just this very moment applied for a middle name change. He will now be Donald I. Trump or Ditt, Donald Immune Trump. Well, there it is. There's the transition I was looking for to leave this topic because I think we've discussed it enough and transition over to the immunity defense that Donald Trump's lawyers yesterday in front of three federal, were they judges? I think they were judges. And argued that Donald Trump is immune from all criminal or civil prosecution as president of the United States. And he could do new wrong and cannot be prosecuted after he leaves office. Gentlemen, I had to do a nasty plunge after I saw how the attorney was arguing that. To the credit of one of the judges stating specifically that if the president of the United States were to hire a member of Steel Team Six and assassinate one of his political enemies, would that be okay? Not to give you the answer or spoil the show here, but Chuck, to you, how do you want to summarize Trump's attorney's response? He said, if you can't impeach him, you can't get him criminally. And of course, because as long as you don't have two thirds of the Senate, you can't impeach, right? Impeachment is not a criminal proceeding. It doesn't have criminal evidentiary standards. It doesn't have criminal proof standards. It bears no relation to a criminal proceeding at all. To connect and condition criminal exposure and impeachment has absolutely no basis in law at all. But- Okay, well, this is already on Robin. The Department of Justice put out a memo saying, you can't criminally prosecute a sitting president. Yet when the president leaves that office, you can't prosecute because of immunity. So there's, isn't that just kind of a daisy chain of bad logic? Well, the first one is wrong in the first place, right? Because if a sitting president is doing a press conference and somebody stands up, probably likely a non-white Asian woman reporter and asks the question he doesn't like and he assassinates her before the entire audience. Can he be immune from that because he's in office and because of that DLJ memo? Hell no! According to his attorneys, the answer is definitively yes. Well, of course, because they don't have the word no in their vocabulary for that question. So it doesn't matter what the question is. They only have two answers to everything. And if it is, yes, Trump is immune, it's a yes. If it's a is Trump not immune, it's a no. It's a one-trick ponies, just like he is. They only have one trick. They lie, bully, cheat, steal, and make sure that you exercise life as a zero-sum proposition. You can only get at the expense of others. Your gain is their loss and their loss, therefore, is your gain. That's the way life works. And yet he leads in the polls. Okay, Jay, your take. This is all politicized. This is all in face of the election coming up. If you make him immune, all these proceedings stop dead in their tracks. And if you do that, that certainly helps him on the election, doesn't it? On the other hand, I'm remembering the first part of our discussion today, the emoluments clause. What the Supreme Court did on two of the three cases before it is said, well, we're gonna just hold up on that until Trump, it's too early. We're gonna hold up on that till Trump is no longer president. And then they made their decision after Trump was out of office. And when he was out of office, they said, oh, this is moot, it's too late. I love when they do that. I love when they do that. And so there is another option here, Chuck. They could just sit on it and they could wait on the immunity question until after the election, assuming Trump wins, then he can instruct the DOJ at the very least to stop the prosecutions, the federal prosecutions. I'm not sure how that affects the state prosecutions. It probably doesn't. But as president, he does not have a lot of ways to stop those prosecutions. We know that he intimidates people. He has this stochastic rhetoric, these political back room threats. So if he's president, he'll be able to stop it. Therefore, the middle ground or at least the clever ground for them is to not rule on it until after he's president. The other possibility, Chuck, is that they can redefine what immunity means. I mean, after all, we live in a world where language doesn't mean what you thought it meant your whole life. The word insurrection, for example, has taken on a whole new meaning. And so has the word office holder. Take on people, make it up. And so they could make up a whole new panoply of definitions of the word immunity. They could say, well, he's not immune if he shoots the reporter. He's not immunity if he shoots somebody on Fifth Avenue. But for this other category of things, he is immune. I mean, one of the things that was raised in Port yesterday was suppose he instructs a SEAL team five and to go out and assassinate a political rival. Maybe that, I don't know which side that would fall on. What I'm saying is there's another possibility and that is to redefine the term. They could do both. And the easiest way to do both, defer it, send it somewhere else and redefine it is to give him what has been given to many government officials called qualified immunity. That turns upon whether the official has a reasonable belief that they were acting within the course and scope of their authority at the time. It doesn't turn on whether they were or were not. It turns on whether they had a reasonable belief that they were. They could redefine and give him qualified immunity and send it back for further factual determinations and they could craft the language to make it very, very difficult for the lower court to not find that he had qualified immunity. Take something which is not dependent on intention and make it intentional and this will drive the notion of see enter mindfulness into the definition. And then you have a difficult trial, question of fact when you don't know how it comes out and nobody knows what that means. And so you have essentially gutted the term. Well, what's interesting there is you present a really, really interesting mental competence question. And that is can a devout narcissist have a reasonable belief? I don't think so. I think a psychiatrist would have to tell you they're not capable of forming a reasonable belief because their only belief is the self-ordered structure that's based on DC at the very root of it. Does that in effect support the idea that he has total immunity? No, it's the opposite because he can't form a reasonable belief so he can't have a reasonable belief. Yeah. You guys are talking about bringing psychiatrists into a courtroom on the question of immunity. That can go anywhere and everywhere. That's about as amorphous. For every expert psychiatrist, you can find five experts will say something different. There's no there there. And so you have this question of fact that is essentially unresolvable and subject to all kinds of argument and opinion. And it never comes home to roost, but it does go up for appeal. Legally, but not politically. Politically, if you put the issue of Trump's psychiatric condition in front of the populace before the election, you might actually make a difference because that's the one area where he's most vulnerable. And yeah, you're gonna get psychiatrists on both sides, but you're going to put that issue in front of people that his psychiatric condition is relevant to his ability to govern instead of the politicals. Well, Chuck, what I hear you saying is we expect our presidents, before they become presidents, to undergo a battery of physical medical tests to see if they're serving their four years or eight years. What's wrong with the idea of a battery of psychological tests more than the ability to count sheep or count backwards? Why should a person who is psychiatrically subject to a disorder, not just a trait, but a disorder, why should they be qualified to hold office if the disorder is not effectively treated? That's my point, thank you. Institutionally, put him in for 72 hours and examine him. I mean, it seems like every dictator that's ever come to power in any country seems to suffer from narcissism and psychosis. Not necessarily in that order. I put to you that- And that is exactly why neither Chuck nor I are ever gonna run for president. Yeah, right. We don't pretend to be psychiatrists. Yes, true, you don't, you don't. I thank you, Chuck, for bringing that to the forefront. You don't pretend to be. Okay, so Jay, you sound surprised when attorneys or courts or judges seem to take the plain English language and twist it into something that's not. But why should you be surprised that in the first week of Donald Trump's administration there was an individual, I think it was a communication strategist, Kellyanne Conway that took the term alternative facts that meant that anything goes because just because it's a fact doesn't mean it is a fact that there could be alternative lies that we now call alternative facts. We seem to be surprised by that, but that's what's taking place, is it not? Yes, I was surprised when she developed the notion of alternative facts. And I have been surprised ever since that in large part the media buys into it. They say, oh, okay, well, that's just another point of view. Well, when she said that, we should have screamed. The entire media should have screamed. And when there are lies going on, it's more than just reporting the 30,000 lies. It's a matter of calling them out. It's the most important thing on the block. What we have inculcated, the notion of lying into government. We have politicized lies. We have weaponized lies. And we can't survive as a democracy if we do that. So yes, the answer is, we have tolerated lies. We have tolerated outrageous claims and we shouldn't. Yeah, we're normalizing it. We're normalizing it, thank you, Chuck. That is correct. Or we're being desensitized to the avalanche of the number of lies that we can't process. In Donald Trump's case, I believe it's over 30,000, 30,000 recorded lies during his four years. And to your point, Chuck, it was only 30,000 because he only served four years. That goes to just something that's sort of nibbling at the edge of our discussion. And that is if he gets away with this immunity, the crazy throat on the wall immunity claim. And if he gets away with, you know, not being disqualified under section three of article 14, he is gonna be operating under a mandate and there will be nobody, nothing to stop him. He will eviscerate government. He will eviscerate anybody who opposes him, any rival. It will be, you know, autocracy. And in that case, what I see is the 30,000 lies will seem small, everything will be a lie and everything will be corruption. You know, Jay, we're running out of time and I just want one last thought from you. After the hearing yesterday, Donald Trump got in front of the, you know, the media and basically said, it's gonna be bedlam. It will be bedlam in this country if the courts decide against him. There we go again, the word bedlam in this case, which means madness or chaos. And certainly the implication or the implied meaning of bedlam and as it, we've talked about before, stochastic speech, speech that implies there's gonna be violence if things don't go Donald Trump's way, your thoughts. Well, I mean, you're talking before the show about the comparison of bedlam and Paren d'un in French and where the inmates were running the asylum and, you know, if the person on the street knew more about the history of bedlam and for that matter, Sharon d'un, that person would not be so sympathetic to a situation where the inmates would be running the asylum. However, to the average person on the street, bedlam means violence and chaos and craziness and it is stochastic speech. He is calling for violence. He has done that on a regular basis. And, you know, I'd like to say there ought to be a law. And sadly, they only find out the need for a law after, you know, his stochastic speech works. But, you know, he and Lindsey Graham have said and others have said that if it doesn't go Trump's way, you know, there will be violence on the streets. And that means Second Amendment violence because the people, you know, who are on their side of the playing field are the ones that have the guns. And so we will have violence and guns on the streets. So this is very, very scary. And, you know, if I had been Tonya Chuckton, I would have made a gag order much stronger than this. But what are you gonna do? We still have the First Amendment and he still does this and he understands it better than we do. But there's no question as on January 6th that he is calling for violence. Yeah, I believe the quote was, be there it will be wild. And they did show up and it was as predicted. Chuck, your thoughts about Donald Trump's word choice after the hearing yesterday saying that if the decision doesn't go his way, it will be bedlam. You know, I think you gotta remember Sharon Dunn as well because what Trump is talking about is not just insane chaos of which he's the leader and he feels completely comfortable, but he is the inmate running that asylum. So it's both bedlam and Sharon Dunn in which he's the leader of the inmates running the asylum and they're hand-picked inmates and they are insane. They are not morally grounded. They are violent. They're criminal as is he. That's the, it's not just an asylum. It's a criminal in asylum of uncured people. So when I talk about putting his psychiatric condition under the microscope, I'm talking about exactly what you just brought up. You know, one of the things I like about Think Tech Hawaii is there's no ambiguity here. Just none at all. And with that, we've run out of time. I'd like to thank my esteemed guest, Chuck Crumpton for attending today. And of course always my co-host, Jay Fidel. Why don't you join us next week? And also, if you like this show and you thought it had some worthwhile moments, which I hope you did, why don't you follow us and click like? We really appreciate it. And until next week, Aloha.