Trump has no record of public service or self-sacrifice. People can criticize Hillary, but I doubt being Secretary of State was a picnic. It's a job that can illicit nothing but criticism. Some elites in the country have actually tried to improve the country or the world. The Clintons have their foundation, there is Bill Gates, Jimmy Carter, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.
This should be a central question of the campaign: what have you done for the country? Now Trump is rushing to get some meager donations to veterans.
I would have slightly more respect for Trump and his supposed billions if he showed some measure of self-sacrifice: that he refused to accept ANY campaign donations (as he originally promised) and that he accept no salary if elected president.
He'd probably demand a raise.
~~ ~ 2.
"All the comments about how this is a "hit piece" and an ineffective one at that are just delightful. Trump is running for President on the suspect premises that he is 1) a successful businessman with talent that would translate to being president, and 2) possessed of special powers that would make him uniquely suited to negotiating with the Chinese.
Evidence that he is neither of those is relevant information that voters can use to make their own decisions. It isn't about whether this is effective, persuades his supporters, is a cheap shot, etc. Donald Trump makes certain claims. This article contains information about those claims and allows you to go from being a low information voter to a slightly less low information voter."
Trump has managed to convince his fans that he is an astute businessman, when he is little more than a high stakes gambler with an army of lawyers.
Credit where credit is due.
The world of high end real estate developers is entwined with the mega banks. Yet Trump has managed to convince his supporters that he is not part of that privileged world.
Credit where credit is due.
Trump lives in a world where his vast wealth shields him from his mistakes. So he thinks he is a great Dealmaker. And he has convinced his supporters of his magnificence.
Give him credit for being a great salesman, making the biggest sale to a huge crowd of Americans, including you?
~~~
Donald Trump Soured on a Deal, and Hong Kong Partners Became Litigants
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Supporters of Donald J. Trump waiting for him at a campaign rally in April in Bridgeport, Conn. He has often portrayed himself as uniquely capable of wringing concessions out of China.Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
Donald J. Trump, who has made reversing America’s trade imbalance a pillar of his campaign, often portrays himself as uniquely capable of wringing concessions out of China through hard-nosed business tactics he has honed over the years.
In fact, he says, he has a personal track record to back up his boasts.
“I beat China all the time,” Mr. Trump declared in a speech the day he announced his candidacy. “I own a big chunk of the Bank of America building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas that I got from China in a war. Very valuable.”
Mr. Trump does have an investment in the building, an office tower near Rockefeller Center. But court documents and interviews with people involved in the deal tell a very different story of how he ended up with it.
It began when a group of Hong Kong billionaires, including one who has been called the Donald Trump of China, helped rescue Mr. Trump from the verge of bankruptcy by investing in one of his properties in Manhattan.
For years, the carefully cultivated relationship between Mr. Trump and his Hong Kong partners proved lucrative for both sides, and stands out as perhaps the closest that Mr. Trump has come to international diplomacy.
To strike the deal, Mr. Trump had to attend elaborate dinner parties featuring foreign foods he did not want to eat. He delayed the closing because of Chinese spiritual beliefs and hunted around New York for a “feng shui” master to help with the building décor, instead of indulging his tastes for marble and gold, according to former associates of Mr. Trump who were involved in the deal.
But when his Hong Kong partners sold the property without his support, Mr. Trump waged a bitter, long-shot legal battle against them. And far from winning his share of the Bank of America building, according to court documents, he had to settle for it after losing in court. In the end, Mr. Trump’s alliance and eventual rivalry with some of Hong Kong’s richest men proved to be a tale of Mr. Trump at the extremes. It showcased his unflagging confidence in his ability to turn a bad financial situation around. But it also underscored his willingness to destroy a fruitful relationship with aggressive litigation.
Their partnership began in 1994, after the collapse of the real estate market left Mr. Trump deeply in debt. He could not afford to make the bank payments on a 77-acre swath of land near Lincoln Center known as Riverside South, let alone to develop the property.
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1290 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. Mr. Trump has an investment in the building, an office tower near Rockefeller Center.Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
In need of cash, he agreed to meet with intermediaries from a consortium of Hong Kong billionaires who were willing to buy the land, assume Mr. Trump’s debts and pay him 30 percent of the profits, as well as fees for helping to manage the development of the site, which they agreed to finance. It was by far the best offer he received. The group included Henry Cheng Kar-shun, one of the world’s richest developers, and Vincent Lo, who is Mr. Trump’s Chinese counterpart in more ways than one.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Lo comes from a wealthy family. He is well known for creating a hip restaurant area in Shanghai called Xintiandi, or “new heaven on earth,” an upscale brand he has replicated across China. His life has been chronicled by tabloids and society pages, especially his divorce from his first wife and his marriage to a beauty pageant winner, Miss Hong Kong of 1977.
Despite their similarities, Mr. Trump hesitated when he received an invitation to travel to Hong Kong to negotiate the deal. He does not like to travel, and he feared that negotiating on the Hong Kong developers’ turf would put him at a disadvantage and make him appear weak, said Abe Wallach, Mr. Trump’s executive vice president of acquisitions and finance at the time.
But face-to-face meetings are crucial in Chinese business culture, where personal bonds and political connections, collectively known as guanxi, are relied upon to avoid and resolve business disputes, sometimes more than the legal system. Eventually, Mr. Trump’s aides convinced him that he had to make the trip.
In Hong Kong, the golf games, dinner parties and intensive talks featured the awkwardness and cultural miscues that can crop up in any high-stakes international negotiation. Mr. Lo and Mr. Cheng invited Mr. Trump to play golf, but Mr. Trump was appalled when they told him they usually bet more than $1,000 on each hole. They ended up betting $100 per hole, and Mr. Trump wound up losing more than he won, Mr. Lo recalled in an interview this month.
“He’s a good golfer, but we had the local knowledge — he probably was jet-lagged,” Mr. Lo said.
Mr. Lo and Mr. Cheng invited Mr. Trump to dinner at the home of Mr. Cheng’s father, an uncommon honor in Chinese culture. But the evening was a trying experience for Mr. Trump.
“He didn’t like the food, and couldn’t use chopsticks,” recalled Mr. Wallach, who was there. “The first course was a whole fish, with the head still on. You could see the face of the fish and the teeth, which really looked grotesque. The servant put the fish in front of Donald. Donald said, ‘The honor belongs to Abe.’ I took my chopsticks and began to pick at it.”
Mr. Cheng and Mr. Lo also half-jokingly proposed an informal drinking contest, which Mr. Trump, a teetotaler, declined.
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Henry Cheng Kar-shun, one of the world’s richest developers, at a news conference in 2011 in Hong Kong.Credit Imaginechina, via Associated Press
The Hong Kong partners were wary of Mr. Trump’s well-earned reputation for litigiousness. But for more than a decade, Mr. Trump avoided conflict with them. Indeed, he often deferred to them. Chase Manhattan Bank, which held Mr. Trump’s mortgage, initially scheduled the closing of the deal during China’s Ghost Month, during which some believe the spirits of the dead roam the earth.
“The Chinese told me that we would have to wait until after the fifteenth of September to close the deal,” Mr. Wallach wrote in a chapter of an unpublished book he is writing about his years with Mr. Trump. “Trump went apoplectic.” But he said that Mr. Trump went along.
(Mr. Lo said that any delay had been caused by a need to complete paperwork, and that he and his business partners were not superstitious.)
The project proved extremely profitable, as the New York real estate market rebounded. In 2005, the Hong Kong partners sold the development for $1.76 billion. Although it was believed to be the largest residential real estate transaction in the city’s history, Mr. Trump was furious, and contends to this day that his partners did not consult him first.
“I said: ‘Why didn’t you come talk to me? Whatever price you got, I could have gotten more money,’” Mr. Trump recalled in an interview this month.
Mr. Lo said that Mr. Trump had been informed of the decision, and that in any case it would have been very hard to shop such a large property around without Mr. Trump’s becoming aware of it.
Instead of accepting his share of the proceeds, Mr. Trump sued his partners for “staggering breach” of fiduciary duty in a lawsuit that demanded $1 billion in damages. Mr. Lo, who felt that Mr. Trump should have been appreciative of the deal he had received, called the lawsuit “a shock.”
And when the Hong Kong partners sought to invest the proceeds from the sale in Bank of America buildings in San Francisco and New York, Mr. Trump sought an injunction to scuttle the deal.
The judge ruled against him. Instead of receiving the cash he wanted, Mr. Trump had to accept a 30 percent share in the profits from the two Bank of America buildings, tied up in a partnership that is slated to last until 2044. But today, Mr. Trump counts that legal defeat as a victory.
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Vincent Lo, a businessman whose life has been chronicled by tabloids and society pages, in 2011 in Shanghai.Credit Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“Through more luck than talent, I ended up much better because the buildings have increased in value,” he said. “In the end, it was fine.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump’s litigation over Riverside South dragged on for at least four years. He forced his partners to produce more than 166,000 pages of documents in court and accused them of various transgressions, including fraud and tax evasion.
During the litigation, Mr. Lo was forced to keep his trips to the United States secret, out of concern that Mr. Trump’s lawyers would serve him with court papers that would force him to remain in the United States.
Outside court, Mr. Trump’s battle seemed to take the shape of a personal rivalry with Mr. Lo, who had just bankrolled a Chinese reality television show called “Wise Man Takes All.” It loosely resembled Mr. Trump’s show “The Apprentice,” although Mr. Lo appeared just once on the show and handed out start-up capital to the winners instead of jobs.
Mr. Trump announced that he was going to take a version of “The Apprentice” to China to compete with Mr. Lo’s show, although Mr. Trump’s show there does not appear to have gotten off the ground. In an interview, Mr. Trump asked a reporter how Mr. Lo’s show had turned out, then answered his question: “Let’s put it this way. It wasn’t ‘The Apprentice,’ which was a big success.”
Mr. Lo said his show had met his real goal of promoting entrepreneurship in China.
After the lawsuit, the Hong Kong partners moved swiftly to cut all ties to Mr. Trump. Mr. Lo sold his shares in the partnership to the Cheng family, which sold to Vornado Realty Trust, now the owner of a 70 percent interest in the Bank of America buildings.
But in the interview, Mr. Trump sounded almost wistful about his former partners, marveling at the money they had made together and at the fact that they no longer spoke. He acknowledged that his former partners might have gotten the best deal possible on Riverside South, after all.
“It’s too bad that this happened,” Mr. Trump told a reporter.
“If you speak to Vincent and Henry, tell them I think they are fantastic people,” he said. “You let them know that Donald Trump has great respect for them, O.K.?”
Eight thousand miles away, in his penthouse office in Hong Kong, Mr. Lo laughed when told of Mr. Trump’s comment. He made clear that he had not forgotten being sued for $1 billion.
“Well, that’s him,” Mr. Lo said. “To file a lawsuit is nothing. It’s just like having lunch.”
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来源: 非否 于 2016-05-31 10:38:00 [档案] [博客] [旧帖] [给我悄悄话] 本文已被阅读：1878 次 (3118 bytes)
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http://cn.nytimes.com/usa/20160531/c31trumpchina/
特朗普VS香港财团：“咆哮狂人”的商战败绩
FARAH STOCKMAN, KEITH BRADSHER 2016年5月31日
(节选）
把扭转美国的贸易逆差作为竞选支柱的唐纳德·J·特朗普(Donald J. Trump)常把自己说成具有独一无二的能力，可以用多年磨练出来的精明的经营策略迫使中国让步。
“中国一直都是我的手下败将，”特朗普在宣布参选的当天发表讲话时说。“我拥有美洲大道1290号美国银行(Bank of America)大楼的很大一部分股份，那就是我在一场大战中从中国手里夺过来的，非常值钱。”
特朗普的确投资了位于洛克菲勒中心(Rockefeller Center)附近的这栋办公楼。但关于他最终是如何拿到那些股份的，法庭文件和对参与该交易的人士进行的采访为我们呈现出了一个截然不同的故事。
法庭文件显示，他在美国银行大厦 的股份并不是胜诉赢来的，而是败诉后不得不勉强接受这样的安排。特朗普与香港部分顶级富豪结成的同盟到头来变成了对抗。这个故事最终证明了特朗普的极端之 处。它即表明了他永远相信自己能够扭转糟糕的财务状况，也突显了他愿意用一场强硬的诉讼来摧毁一段富有成果的合作关系。
一开始，香港的一群亿万富翁投资了特朗普在曼哈顿的一个房地产项目，帮助拯救了濒临破产的特朗普。他们的合作始于1994年。当时，房地产市场崩盘导致特朗普债台高筑。他无力支付林肯中心(Lincoln Center)旁边那个狭长地块的银行款项，更别说开发那个项目了。该地块名为河滨南(Riverside South)，占地77英亩。
特朗普爱打官司的名声得来不虚，香港的合作伙伴对此颇为警惕。但在十多年里，特朗普避免与他们发生冲突。事实上，他经常听从他们的意见。
随着纽约房地产市场的复苏，这个项目被证明利润非常丰厚。2005年，香港的合伙人以17.6亿美元的价格将项目出手。尽管当时被认为是该市历史上最大的住宅类房地产交易，特朗普依然很愤怒，并且至今坚称合作伙伴没有先咨询他的意见。
特朗普没有接受自己应得的那一份收益，而是提起诉讼，控告合作伙伴“严重违反受信义务”，要求获得10亿美元的损害赔偿。
法官裁定特朗普败诉。没有如愿拿到钱的他，不得不接受两栋美国银行大楼所产生利润的30%。这笔钱被拴在了一种合作运营中。该合作关系将持续到2044年。但如今，特朗普称那次败诉是一场胜利。