Donald Trump is a Ponzi Scheme
In this extra-long and extra sleep-deprived episode of Gaslit Nation, we spend 70 minutes discussing the non-revelation of Trump’s tax fraud and the broader ramifications of a career criminal occupying the White House.
Hillary Clinton:
Maybe he doesn't want the American people–all of you watching tonight–to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax.
Donald Trump:
That makes me smart.
Hillary Clinton:
So if he's paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health. And I think probably he's not all that enthusiastic about having the rest of our country see what the real reasons are, because it must be something really important, even terrible, that he's trying to hide.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books, The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
And we are reminding you that we have a special challenge going on for all of us. It's not just sleeping through the night; it's a really exciting challenge where we are going to be talking to voters. I will be joining you. So what it is, is the 1000 phone calls Gaslit Nation challenge. It's getting to be October, right? So it's go time. Do not listen to the polls. Yes, our election systems remain vulnerable, but we need to do the essential work. We have to leave it all out on the field. The way we protect ourselves and protect what's left of our democracy is by ensuring that Biden and Harris win by a landslide. We need a landslide victory, and the way we're going to get a landslide victory in November is by voters talking to voters.
Andrea Chalupa:
So we are asking you to please tweet @GaslitNation and tell us what you are doing to specifically talk to voters. We're limiting the challenge, now that it's October, to phone calls and text messages only. The time for postcards, I mean, if you're still doing postcards, we'll accept that too. I don't know when that expires. So if you're still doing postcards, do postcards, but we're looking to hear from people out there across the country, what you're doing to talk to voters. Don't tweet at us that you're getting out to vote by being on Twitter, because that's not it, that's not where the fight is. The fight is voter to voter: making phone calls, sending text messages and yes, doing postcards, if that's still a thing. I don't know when that stops, I know we're moving towards real, real serious, get out to vote now with just phone calls and text messages.
Andrea Chalupa:
So the goal for October is for all of us to join together and make a thousand phone calls or a combination of a thousand phone calls and text messages. If you have the ability to pick up the phone and call a stranger, that's a skill that's going to serve you in a lot of areas of life. All right? So please embrace that challenge. It's literally the least you can do right now. We're not asking you to storm the beaches of Normandy, we're just asking you to join me in making a thousand phone calls to voters in October because we absolutely have to ensure that Biden and Harris win by a landslide. That is how we get our democracy back.
Andrea Chalupa:
And so tweet at us and we're going to be collecting those tweets, and when the election is over, we're going to select three people to come on Gaslit Nation in the New Year and we're all going to have a good laugh or a good cry, and then talk about how we're going to rebuild our democracy and Trump-proof and Putin-proof our country. So remember, join me in October in making a thousand phone calls and/or text messages to talk to voters directly and get out the vote. That is how we win.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, agree. And just to add to that, we are obviously well aware of all the mechanisms of stealing the election, rigging the election and so forth–we've been covering them–but turnout, nonetheless is critical even in that kind of environment. Turnout is transparency. A landslide is leverage so that if Trump attempts to cheat or if he simply refuses to concede, that is something that displays the actual will of the people versus whatever kind of propaganda he's going to put forward. It's also a cherished right. It's something they're obviously trying very hard to take away. If voting didn't matter, they wouldn't make it so difficult to do. So please, get out and vote and follow these suggestions and challenges that Andrea has just given you.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. And please go to gaslitnationpod.com and go to the Gaslit Nation 2020 Survival Guide right there on our homepage and use that as your checklist for all the critical races we need to support right now. Donate what you can to those races. Just go down the list, make phone calls. Adopt some of those key races, make phone calls for them. Do whatever you can right now. We're running out of time, we all have to fight like hell right now and understand all the work we're all doing together through October. We're planting extremely powerful seeds. So if you need reasons to be optimistic, look at America–being a post civil war nation with the South seceding–look at America now, you have Florida as a swing state, deep South Florida. You have Stacey Abrams and her voting protection coalition going into Mississippi to turn it into a swing state.
Andrea Chalupa:
You have Virginia, the hotbed of the Confederacy, as a blue state. You have Texas becoming a swing state. So all of this work that we've done has been building a progressive union, election cycle after election cycle. So we're planting really powerful seeds all through October by making our 1000 phone calls and/or text messages. That's the work we need to do right now.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep. And on that note, we will turn to our alleged president, the illegitimate president, tax dodger, mobster, aspiring autocrat, dictator, et cetera, who has recently had more confirmation of his criminality revealed, this time by the New York Times, who have given us more information about what's been in those missing tax forms for, I guess the last 20 years. And I will let Andrea give you the summary of that before we start giving our thoughts.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. We have a million things to talk about in this tax story. Some of it you may have heard and some of it no one else would dare to point out, and that's why you come to Gaslit Nation. So just a quick summary from the New York Times on part one of their big tax bombshell: “President Trump paid no US income tax for much of the past two decades. Tax returns that the president fought to keep secret and were examined by the New York Times cast a harsh light on his finances. He regularly reported losing far more than he made, allowing him to reduce his federal income tax bill many years to zero. The year he became president, he paid $750. The president is locked in an audit battle with the IRS.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Mr. Trump claimed a $72.9 million tax refund as his Atlantic City casino business collapsed. The move effectively erased the taxes he had paid on hundreds of millions earned from The Apprentice and from branding deals. The IRS has been auditing the refund for a decade and could force to pay it back with interest and penalties, a sum that could exceed a hundred million.”–[laughs] My God.–”Financial pressure on the president is only growing. Mr. Trump has reported losses at many of his signature properties, including $55.5 million at his Washington hotel, since it opened in 2016 and $315.6 million at his prized golf resort since 2000. He appears to have sold off most of his stocks and has relied heavily on debt. More than $300 million in loans he personally guaranteed will soon come due. He received more money from foreign sources than was known. With financial challenges mounting, Mr. Trump depends increasingly on businesses that can pose a conflict of interest.
Andrea Chalupa:
“His properties have become bazaars for collecting money from foreign officials, and he earned millions in licensing fees from international projects in his first two years in office, including $3 million from the Philippines,”–which has a dictator in power.–”$2.3 million from India”–which has a crazy far-right government in power.–”and $1 million from Turkey.”–which has a dictator in power.– “Vast write-offs help fuel a gilded life. Though declaring big losses, Mr. Trump can live a life of wealth and write it off. His image is central to his business and he has taken tax deductions on residences, table linens, private air travel, and over $70,000 in hairstyling for TV. On many projects, he also wrote off about 20% of his income for unexplained ‘Consulting fees,’ some of which match payments to Ivanka Trump.” So what I love about the tax bombshell is that it forces the New York Times and it forces the mainstream media to finally put Ivanka under a microscope of corruption. And it just blows apart how complicit she is. So we're going to go into that later in the show.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. I mean, I hope that, that's the outcome. What I fear, and I'm already seeing elements of this being put forth, there was a tweet by Anthony Scaramucci that stated this is, that they feel sorry. He feels sorry for the family members who just get caught in the crossfire. And we need to be extremely clear that not only are Ivanka and Don Jr. long time accomplices to Trump's crimes, as we've mentioned on previous episodes, they were nearly indicted for felony fraud. It took a campaign contribution from Trump's lawyer to Cyrus Vance in New York who is currently in charge of the taxes now for them to avoid prosecution. These kinds of low key bribes are very common with Vance. Ivanka, as we've laid out numerous times, has been an accomplice to the horrific policies that this White House has created during the last four years.
Sarah Kendzior:
She was never a moderating influence. She was never intended to be. And Kushner, much more so than Trump, is the individual who has been designing policy along with his accomplices abroad, which include a variety of oligarchs from the former Soviet Union, Netanyahu–the indicted criminal Netanyahu, who is a long time friend of the Kushner family, going back to Jared's' youth–MBS of Saudi Arabia, where you see Kushner helping in things like the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi. These are not innocent people. These are not children. They are the same age as me and Andrea, and they need to be treated as adults who have made horrific decisions, who have betrayed their country, who are devoid of conscience and who are an extreme threat and who should have never been allowed to have any kind of security clearance, never been allowed to be installed in the White House.
Sarah Kendzior:
This was a violation of anti-nepotism ethics rules. And I mean, we'll go on and on and on from there. But yeah, I mean, when Andrea said this forces the New York Times to look at this, I mean, that's been the case all along. The first time that they looked at Trump's taxes was not out of some kind of great investigative digging, it was because Mary Trump gave them the form. And that was the Pulitzer Prize winning article they wrote about his debt and his tax fraud a little over a year ago. They were basically spoonfed a Pulitzer from Mary Trump. And that's because people have been very reluctant with Trump to follow the money, because when you really follow the money, you don't find someone who is inept. You don't find someone who is incompetent. You find someone who is deeply immersed in organized crime and in coverups of organized crime. Someone who has structured his businesses, whether real estate and casinos in the earlier part of his "Career" to reality TV later, in order to launder money and to whitewash the crimes of, first, the Italian mafia, and then later on the Russian mafia, which then extended to his collaboration with the Kremlin, particularly under Putin in the 21st century.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I describe all of this in Hiding in Plain Sight, so if you would like the story before the news breaks, I encourage you to read my book. There've been others who've been digging through his finances and coming to these same conclusions for a long time. People like Wayne Barrett and David K. Johnston doing this back in the 80s and 90s, people like Craig Unger and Malcolm Nance, doing it more recently. So this is all out there and it's good that the New York Times is doing this series. It's good that they're putting these articles out, but it basically is confirmation of what we already know. And I have more to say on that, but I know you have thoughts too, so feel free to jump in.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ha! Well, yes, we have miles of things, a big old, deep dive on this today because as anybody knows, rule number one is follow the money and what the big New York Times tax fraud bombshell exposing Donald and Ivanka Trump–two major pillars, of course, of the Trump Crime Family–what this big bombshell also reminds us of is that as we warned you from the beginning of the show, the Mueller investigation was low hanging fruit. They just picked off the little bitty pieces that were easy for them and they didn't risk their lives, they didn't risk their careers, to go after the big fish, Ivanka Trump and Donald, the Don of the Trump Crime Family. And we're paying the price for it, and 200,000 people are dead and counting. That's an important reminder here as well. So we're going to go down this rabbit hole of the Trump Crime Family's tax fraud with some background and some additional reporting coming out.
Andrea Chalupa:
Trump's father, Fred Trump, who once got arrested at a KKK rally, him being the emotionally violent racist and misogynist that he was, he gave his idiot son, Donald at least $400 million in cash. $400 million. So that's where Donald Trump's journey to White House begins. I just keep thinking what you and I would do with $400 million. We'd have like the Gaslit Nation independent media empire across like every ... fighting corruption across all continents. So Forbes reports Trump is worth $2.5 billion, that's properties, licensing deals, his various homes, including a palace in New York. A palace. In addition to being worth $2.5 billion, he owes $1.3 billion in debt. So Forbes looked into this and they're like, actually we think it's more than just half a billion, it's $1.3 billion that Trump owes in debt. He would have to unload half his fortune to pay that off.
Andrea Chalupa:
Even though he is yes, technically a billionaire according to Forbes, the real scandal they point out “is that he's only paying $750 a year in taxes. This isn't even socialism for the rich, this is just plain stealing. Trump is a crook.” Forbes also says, “Trump's operating income is real and documented, laid out in paperwork from local tax offices, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the president’s business partners. Don't be fooled, the news is not that the president is broke. The Times story notes that tax returns do not list someone's net worth. The news, instead, is that Donald Trump seems to have avoided paying much in taxes, despite significant operating profits at certain properties. In other words, he figured out how to share very little of his fortune with the country he now leads.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes.
Andrea Chalupa:
“In addition to that, he's managed to rack up hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and he's taken hundreds and thousands of dollars from US taxpayers”–his entire family with all their jaunts around the world and treating our government like their own personal piggy bank, because that is what kleptocrats do. I'll let you chime in.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes. I have something to say on this, which is, this is not novel in any way. This is literally what Trump was trained to do by his mentor, Roy Cohn. And I've said over and over again that to understand Trump, you need to understand Roy Cohn, who was a lawyer for Joe McCarthy, a lawyer for the five leading organized crime families of New York, a person deeply embedded in New York high society, New York media, functioned with threats and blackmail to control political figures, to control press. And he became Trump's mentor starting in 1973, when he represented him in a court case about racial discrimination, and from there basically built Trump into the person that he is today. And one thing you need to know about Roy Cohn was that his dream was dying owing the US government an enormous amount of money. And then in 1986, he did! He died owing the US government millions of dollars.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is a point of pride for them. They're not going to feel bad that they were caught. Trump is not going to be ashamed or humiliated, and he's going to market this to his base. As we said in this clip from the beginning of the show from the debate with Hillary Clinton, he feels like he was too smart to pay taxes. But you also have to understand how they conceive of wealth. It's not accumulation. Wealth is not something to be handed down to the next generation or an investment in the future or anything like that. The crime operation, the laundering, that–basically the accumulation of raw power–that is what they actually value. That is what they want to pass on to Ivanka and to Jared and to others. And what Roy Cohn managed to do and what Trump also does is live a very luxurious lifestyle, one always beyond his means, a lifestyle that is powered by fraud and threat and is untouchable by law.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so people need to examine not only Cohn and Trump's crimes, but the complicit actors that enabled them, which in this case includes the IRS, the Department of the Treasury and other broken US institutions. They have known this the whole time. There have been Treasury investigations into Trump's finances for, I think,,my entire life, on and off. And the same is true of the FBI; they've known this. The same is very likely true of Congress today. I think that Hillary Clinton was also aware of it. That's why she told everyone in a debate. You can also notice the utter lack of follow through. I mean, think about this for a second.
Sarah Kendzior:
She is a loathed and deeply scrutinized presidential candidate in terms of how the mainstream media sees her, and she makes this claim about Trump. She makes this claim that he has paid no federal taxes, which is a major claim. And if she had gotten that wrong, she would have been excoriated for lying. And instead of following up on that–instead of doing rigorous research into, did Trump really not pay taxes for decades?–they moved straight to, like, email scandal part two with the help of James Comey in October of 2016 which is when she made that claim. So yeah, you know, there are so many things that are deeply frustrating about this story, but to me, the shocker is not at all what Trump did: it's the continued level of complicity, of enabling. And we've seen this, as Andrea just mentioned, with people finally catching up with what we said about Mueller way back in 2018 that this was a placeholder investigation.
Sarah Kendzior:
This was an investigation that had no real intent of bringing down the Trump Crime Family, of investigating the broader financial nexus behind it which leads to the Russian mafia, which leads to people like Semion Mogilevich–the head of the Russian mafia–who Mueller himself had brought up as the biggest threat to Western democracy in a 2011 speech called The Evolving Crime Threat. They absolutely knew what was going on. They refused to act. They refused to protect this country. They let a known mafioso become the President of the United States and brought in his crime family and their extended network to gut this country from the inside. And so that's where we are now. That's where we are now with less than 40 days to this election.
Andrea Chalupa:
The stolen election by Donald Trump–by the Trump Crime Family–is a marriage between the Russian mafia in the West and the Russian mafia in the East. When Trump was in the thick of it, getting his laundered millions, hundreds of millions, his laundered fortune from Russian oligarchs and shady characters in that orbit, a Barnum and Bailey showman by the name of Mark Burnett approached Putin to do a reality show. That never got off the ground, but what did get off the ground is a reality show featuring Putin's Russian mafia asset, Donald Trump, which packaged him to the world as a real businessman who is developing this business empire of all these apprentice children–Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric–and that's where the Trump's got their sheen of being the monopoly man, of being a wealthy, successful family, even though it was just a house of cards. It was all smoke and mirrors.
Andrea Chalupa:
But Mark Burnett, with the help of NBC. And NBC has a long list of being complicit in all of this and how he got here, Mark Burnett and The Apprentice and all of that is featured in part two of the New York Times story. We of course have broken that down as well on this show back in the day when we first launched.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. That's something that we've detailed in this show before. I wrote about this in my book: II think the role of Mark Burnett in rehabbing Trump is one of the most understudied aspects of this, how The Apprentice was launched. The fact that people like Felix Sater were bringing Don Jr. and Ivanka to the Kremlin in 2006, at the same time that Trump was advertising those Trump properties where the Russian mafia is allegedly laundering their money through The Apprentice. So that's why the book is called Hiding in Plain Sight. It’s because of all of these ventures and the professionalism of the complicity, that you have people who are really the best at what they do in entertainment, in PR, in media, putting together this illusion of a business tycoon that was extremely effective, I think, in some parts of the country in convincing people about who Trump was, that he was this successful businessman.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's one of those things that's very weird to me being an ‘80s kid, because I'm sure you remember this too: Donald Trump was a caricature. He was the embodiment of not just ‘80s greed, but ‘80s crime. I was watching the show, Eerie, Indiana (which I love by the way, please bring back Eerie, Indiana) when I was 12. This was, like, my favorite show. And it was on from 1991 to 1992. And so I've been watching it with my nine-year-old son. And we watched this episode where a guy named “the Donald” comes into the town of Eerie, Indiana, brainwashes the entire town so that they're buying things on credit and not understanding why they're doing it. Then it turns out that the fineprint reads that they're going to sell him their souls. And it's revealed that the Donald is the devil. And the person who saves the day at the end of this Eerie, Indiana episode is an IRS agent who finds out about the Donald's incredible tax fraud and tax evasion and sends him back to hell.
Sarah Kendzior:
So if this is the plot of a children's show...like, as a child, I was expected to know not just who Donald Trump was, but that he was an infamous tax cheat and that he was an incredibly evil, soul-stealing criminal. This was like the mainstream portrayal of him. It was on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was on Sesame Street. This was basically just brought into our minds collectively. And so it took a lot of effort to rebuild that, but it still kind of blows my mind that like people in our age group don't remember this, but especially that people older than us, people who were reading newspapers and magazines and not just learning about Donald Trump through pop culture references, that they were so easily duped by The Apprentice. So yeah, I write about that a great deal in Hiding in Plain Sight. I have other thoughts about the taxes. Should I just go ahead and ... [laughs] this is such an incoherent episode. Should I just go ahead and say them, or did you have any thoughts on that?
Andrea Chalupa:
I've got miles of text here. Before we move on from Mark Burnett and The Apprentice, Mark Burnett, of course, rehabilitating Trump's image. So one thing that's incredible is how NBC comes back again and again as being one of the media giants that helped bring us this horrific moment in time. I mean, Donald Trump is president of the United States, of course, not just because of his own smoke and mirrors corruption, but also just the deep, embedded misogyny. So we had NBC giving us this whole fake Trump family, right? And then you had NBC trying to kill the Harvey Weinstein story, which would have brought down that mogul sooner. And then you had Matt Lauer–the raging misogynist of the Today Show, the face of the Today Show–who got away for so long with abusive behavior, including carrying out some weird pinata-like interview of Hillary Clinton, which wasn't even productive or interesting or inspiring, it was just abuse on stage.
Andrea Chalupa:
And meanwhile, he was throwing softballs at an actual criminal, her opponent in 2016. So I just want to point out that NBC, they helped get us here, just like Jeff Zucker’s CNN running those Trump rallies all the time, just like the New York Times, breathlessly covering Hillary's emails and running that horrific story saying that the FBI saw no connection between Trump and Russia and very much being the handmaiden to Comey's October surprise. Don't get us started on Comey and his whole rehabilitation tour with The Comey Rule on Showtime, which I'm sure they called it that because we had an episode called the Comey effect on how his idiotic moves in 2016, from refusing to sign a letter with the Department of Homeland Security warning Americans about the Kremlin's attack on our democracy to, yes, of course his October surprise letter, re-opening Hillary's non-scandal email scandal, and also breaking protocol and having some crazy press conference calling out Hillary's private use of emails.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ivanka Trump has used private emails for government business, so as Melania, where is Comey on that today? So all these things combined is just...I feel like we're just stuck in a time machine going back and forth. Gaslit Nation is a time machine. I think that's what we have to just come to terms with.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's because people won't confront a lot of the evidence. They won't confront the hard factual evidence in front of them. They won't dig deeper. It's this bizarre thing where we'll make claims...you can make a claim just based on common sense that Trump is a likely criminal. Trump is an aspiring autocrat. Trump is breaking the law. Those should not be thought of as hysterical or alarmist claims ever, because you could look at his entire lifetime as a public figure immersed in organized crime, a pathological liar, I mean, it's out there. He wants you to see it. As I've said, many times he wants to get caught, he just doesn't want to be punished. But they not only would refuse to acknowledge these basic truths about him–another one, by the way, is Trump is a racist and they refuse to say that–they didn't want to dig deeper into some of the more challenging aspects of his finances and of his financial background.
Sarah Kendzior:
One of which is the fact that in 2016, the German publication Bild published online a series of documents showing that Trump had not paid federal taxes since 1977. And so this echoes that claim that Hillary Clinton had made in the debate. So you see in late 2016 this claim being made twice, and this time backed up with documentation and almost nobody looked into it. So I'm just going to give our audience a little bit of background in this because I really think this is the time to do deep digging on these files. The files came from the Czach security services–basically the Stasi of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic–which had been monitoring Donald Trump and Ivana (who was Czechoslovakian) since they got married in 1977. And so this is a very typical thing for the security services of Warsaw Pact countries to do, especially with wealthy Western visitors who come in there. It's a way of getting information. It's a way of getting power and leverage over America.
Sarah Kendzior:
And they, of course, would share these kinds of materials with the Soviet Union because at that point in time, they were functioning as Soviet satellite States. And so I'm going to just read a brief bit from Hiding in Plain Sight, which you could go get for yourself. It says, "Surveillance is to be expected. Kompromat is not unique. What is not typical, however, is for documents to claim that beginning in 1977, Trump would remain ‘completely tax exempt for the next 30 years’, thanks to a mysterious arrangement between his company and the American government, that he was contractually bound to have three children with Ivana, which he did and that he was being groomed to run for president in 1988, which he nearly did." And then I note that Trump has not released his tax returns, and now we have the tax returns from the 21st century.
Sarah Kendzior:
We have them from 2000 onward, but we do not have them from this period of time in which he was allegedly in some sort of arrangement with the government to not pay taxes. And so I go on to say, "No member of the US government has commented on the CSSR files, despite the perplexing nature of the claims inside them. The only journalist who did a followup on the file's existence was British reporter, Luke Harding. Harding tracked down check officials who affirmed that the files were real and told him ‘It wasn't only us who paid attention to him. The first department of the STB,’”–that's basically the Czech security services.–"were interested in him. I don't know if the first directorate shared information on Trump with the KGB. I can't verify or deny.’ The question of whether Trump in 1977 at the height of his tutelage under tax dodger, Roy Cohn, struck up some incredible agreement where he would pay no taxes to the United States until 2007 is not just unanswered, but unexamined.
Sarah Kendzior:
The answers could be found. The IRS should know. Given the number of times Trump business dealings have fallen under investigation by federal agencies, including the Department of Justice and the Treasury, other government agencies may know too, but the American people do not. And the question of why we do not know remains as enormous and as disconcerting as the information in the Czech files themselves." So I wrote that, gosh, I don't know, a year and a half ago, I think, in terms of this book actually being written. And now finally we have some documentation, but not referring to that period of time. And that period of time, as I said before, is very important because as Trump was brought into the world of mafia money laundering, and I should say that to some extent, he really was born into this world, but striking out on his own into it in the mid 1980s.
Sarah Kendzior:
When the Russian mafia began to move into Trump Tower, using it as a dorm, when Trump was increasingly partnering with shady actors from the former Soviet Union, that's a time to look at his finances. And it's not like he's going to list these things on his tax returns. He's not going to list his mafia bribes or payouts on the tax returns, but they do give information as to debt. They give information as to expenditures. And if he is not paying any federal taxes at all–which of course echoes what Hillary Clinton said–you have to ask, why? What was the nature of this agreement? What was he agreeing to do for the government in return? And there's been a lot of speculation that Trump was a confidential informant for the FBI, in particular for the New York FBI. And I think that this is an extremely euphemistic way to phrase this.
Sarah Kendzior:
And first of all, we don't know if this is true. I think it could be, but I don't know. I don't have the evidence and I'm not going to pretend to. But what you really need to look at is the fact that Trump was a partner of multiple crime syndicates, as well as carrying out crimes in his own right, and that the FBI and intelligence agencies and other federal officials like the Department of the Treasury were fine not only allowing him to do that for decades on end, but allowing him to run for president three separate times–in 2000, in 2012 and in 2016–nearly run for president in 1998 and in 1996, immerse himself in US politics and be willingly available for oligarchs, dictators and mafiosos around the world. So in other words, this guy was a profound national security risk for, like, at least 40 years and they let him get close to the presidency over and over again.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I don't see why you would do that unless you are complicit in this desire to destroy the United States, to strip it down and sell it off for parts to both domestic and foreign backers, or if you're being threatened. And I think the threat here would have to be so enormous for you to comply with this, to not come forward with what you know, to not try to put some sort of stop to it. And people will make up all of these excuses. They'll talk about FBI protocol. They'll talk about how you have to go by the book, and I've always said, you cannot go by the book when the book is burning. So if there is information that America needs to know, not only about Trump's crimes but about complicit actors within our institutions (and here, I'm thinking of people like Rudy Giuliani and others who are close to the New York FBI throughout the 80s, 90s, 2000s and afterwards), we need to know all of that.
Sarah Kendzior:
We need to know the full story, no matter how awful it makes our institutions look, because it's not a matter of look and image, it's a matter of what you did. And what you did was destroy our future. What you did was destroy our country and put all of our lives at jeopardy. What you did is contribute to the deaths of now over 200,000 Americans and the probable destruction of the planet under this alliance of autocrats, under this coalition of corruption that seeks to profit off of catastrophes like climate change, this cabal of disaster capitalists, you helped enable that. And I think the only thing that helps get us out of this is the truth. And I believe that with my heart and soul, no matter how horrifying the truth of this situation is, we all need to know it.
Sarah Kendzior:
And you see this desire for the truth from every facet of American political life, whether you were on the far-left or the far-right, whether you are listening to us at Gaslit Nation or whether you are listening to QAnon, which is also very interested in government corruption and has all sorts of theories about "the deep state," many of which are unfounded. The main one that's unfounded is that Trump is trying to save everyone from this sort of corruption. But what you see there is the effect of 40 years of incredible dysfunction and dishonesty and disregard for our basic humanity, for our rights to live and breathe as free citizens in this country. They don't care. We need the full truth, and I don't care who gets taken down in that process. We need to know why they did the things they did, why they were implicit, why they were cowardly and why they felt we were just so disposable, our futures are so disposable, that they would let this crime cult carry out these horrific initiatives for decades on end.
Andrea Chalupa:
This keeps happening. This happened with the Bush warmongers failing to save us from 9/11 and marching us into war based on lies in Iraq so Halliburton can make a bunch of money killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, and that whole instability power vacuum they created an Iraq gave birth to ISIS, which spread its terror across the middle East. So they keep doing this. Look at the economic crash with the SEC being a revolving door. That's just how it works: you have the wolves that are supposed to be guarding the hen house eating all the chickens. Look at this one whistleblower who was trying to alert everyone that Bernie Madoff was a lie. He sent the SEC a document called “The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a Lie” and they laughed at him and ignored him. And he turned out to be correct.
Andrea Chalupa:
Bernie Madoff, Ponzi Scheme, the largest financial fraud in history just set off a massive bomb, wiping out people's fortunes overnight. This keeps happening because corruption is an industry. Everything that Mueller outlined in his speech that you mentioned in 2011 tells us how corruption is an industry, how you have these fancy law firms in major capitals around the world, including ours, including London. You have these fancy accounting firms moving all this money, hiding all this money in all these shell companies. So we're going to get to all of this, but it's the same industry over and over again, and just new characters revolving in. And it's not surprising that there's a lot of overlap with these characters. It's not surprising that we're dealing with Barr, who keeps making an appearance with these corrupt Republican presidents. Okay. So we're going to keep going with Trump's taxes obviously, because there's just so much to unpack here.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I have one more thing to say, I guess, about the taxes. I have one more point before you want to go into, what you've got left.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're, like, fighting over talking about Trump's taxes.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's insane. It encapsulates so much. And one thing it brought to mind, I've heard over and over again, Americans aren't protesting, Americans never stood up against Trump, which is a total lie. We've actually had the largest demonstrations in American history–including the 1960s and the civil rights movement–during the last four years. We have never seen so many protests. We have never seen protests in so many numbers and of course we saw them again this summer and that's one of the reasons that they are clamping down on them and trying to criminalize protest right now. But one protest everyone seems to have forgotten about was the Tax March, which was held on April 15th, 2017. And so that was a series of demonstrations in over 150 cities throughout the United States with the goal of getting Trump to release his tax returns. And there were also marches to get him to release his tax returns all over the world because people understood back then what we've always been saying: this is a transnational crime syndicate.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is a threat, not just to the United States, but to everybody. And so it's just crazy to me when I see this kind of feigned naivete of, “oh, I didn't know how bad it was” or “I didn't know what he could have been hiding.” It's like, we had a march for this. We protested for this. And that march was part of a series of marches held in the winter and spring of 2017, including the Women's March, the March for Science, the March for Climate, the March for Truth (which Andrea helped organize, which was to get an investigation into Trump's ties to the Kremlin). And what is so fascinating to me is that these marches basically stopped, not completely, but really slowed down when Mueller was appointed to run this investigation, after Comey was fired and Mueller was put in charge and Americans were given this grand delusion of a savior and of a competent G-man that was just going to come in and bring the truth to light and investigate his financial ties.
Sarah Kendzior:
And it was quite clear by about spring of 2018 that that is not what Mueller was there to do. Initially, as Andrea said, this was low hanging fruit. You have Trump asking the Kremlin for Hillary's emails. You have Donald Trump Jr. tweeting out evidence of the crimes. You have Felix Sater and Michael Cohen saying they're going to install Donald Trump in the White House with the help of Vladimir Putin in emails that they had. The public had all this information. You have all this information about Trump from his 40 years as a public figure, all of this investigative journalism; it should not have been difficult. But instead they strung people along. They did a couple of initial arrests of Manafort and Flynn, and then, nothing, they didn't question Ivanka. They didn't question Kushner. They didn't question Trump. And it was a placeholder investigation meant to run out the clock.
Sarah Kendzior:
It was meant to both build up people's hopes falsely and it was backed by a propaganda operation that included not just troll bot farms, but pseudo-legal experts ensuring everybody of secret sealed documents and counterintelligence investigations that, in reality, did not exist. And I also think there obviously were people who are genuinely duped by this, who really did think this is true and didn't mean to cause harm, I think, in saying that Mueller was going to do a good job. But it was also meant to suppress protest, to make people feel that the system still worked and they didn't need to rise up and they didn't need to fight back. And then again, the same thing happened with the election–with the midterm election–where all of that energy that you had seen from demonstrations got channeled into bringing out the blue wave. And that was a good thing. That's what people should do.
Sarah Kendzior:
You should vote. You should canvas. You should do that. But the goal of having that blue wave was the same as wanting an investigation. It was accountability. We wanted to see criminals in our government being brought to account, being held account, and they have not been. And it is just the most disheartening thing to see. And we did try to warn you. We said, beware of savior syndrome, beware of the Mueller probe, obviously be aware of Bill Barr whose entire career is being a coverup guy. I mean, we just go round and round and round and as more information comes out, deeper information comes out, it comes out at a time where Trump has purged agencies, packed courts, flagrantly said he's going to rig the selection, has outright said he's going to remain in office no matter what.
Sarah Kendzior:
And the mechanisms of leverage that we once had have been dissipating as a result of people's faith in baseless institutions. And so yeah, let that be a warning for you all and just, good job on the Tax March. And I'm not saying that sarcastically. That's the kind of energy that we need, is the energy of early 2017 when people were riled up, they weren't going to take this shit. They were out there telling you what mattered to them, what their values were, what our rights are as Americans, and they weren't going to settle for anything less. So mentally try to bring yourself back to that time before the Mueller probe and everything that followed. Get that energy back, because you're going to need it when November comes.
Andrea Chalupa:
And you can find that energy at the Gaslit Nation 2020 Survival Guide on gaslitnationpod.com and also at the Women's March in Washington, DC and I'm sure wherever you live, see where locally a women's march is happening on Saturday, October 17th. So let's all put that energy into the world and shine our light and fight this evil. So back to the big tax fraud story, which also underlines the fact that yes, Trump is a bad businessman. From Forbes, “The Times reports that Trump bought Doral for $150 million and then shelled out an additional $213 million on it, suggesting a total investment of $363 million. Forbes estimates its worth $153 million. By that math, the president is now $210 million in the hole.” So basically Forbes is calculating that $1.3 billion in debt that Trump has here.
Andrea Chalupa:
“In mid September Forbes reported that Doral and the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC seemed to be struggling financially. The Times story confirms that and adds more specifics. The DC hotel opened in 2016 and by 2018, Trump had already declared losses of $55.5 million there, according to the Times. Still, the property is worth something. One investor offered $175 million for it before the coronavirus decimated the hotel industry. The Trumps turned that offer down.”–because they're idiots–”Forbes now figures the hotel is worth closer to $168 million. It seems certain that it is continuing to hemorrhage cash.” From the New York Times: “Transcripts of his main federal tax form, the 1040 from 1985 to 1994, were obtained by the Times in 2019. They showed that in many years, Mr. Trump lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer.” All right, let that sink in. As we literally told you in 2016, leading up to the 2016 election, mass murdering terrorist Putin, arguably the richest man in the world with his stolen billions and the court of Russian oligarchs he controls, has invaded our country through his Russian mafia asset, Donald Trump.
Andrea Chalupa:
This leads us to Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank, some background. Deutsche Bank, the bank that helped Hitler in building his mass murdering empire as Hitler invaded most of Europe murdering millions of people, including six million Jews. Deutsche Bank was the bank of the Nazi empire. Now Deutsche Bank is continuing to build off its legacy of blood money by laundering money for mass murdering regimes like Putin's Russia and the Russian mafia. Remember that huge bombshell investigation released by a consortium of investigative journalists just the other week? Here's a refresher from CNBC: “Germany's largest lender, Deutsche Bank, appears to have facilitated more than half of the two trillion of suspicious transactions that were flagged to the US government over nearly two decades.” Deutsche Bank, the preferred money-laundering blood money bank. Once a Nazi bank, always a Nazi bank. The New York Times now on Andrew Weissmann's book:
Andrea Chalupa:
“Once the White House knew that Mueller's team was going after Deutsche Bank, ‘any financial investigation of Trump was put on hold, we backed down,’ Weissmann said, and he was one of Mueller's top deputies on the Mueller investigation.” And now from Newsweek: “Deutsche Bank loaned Trump more than $2 billion over the course of two decades at a time when other banks appear unwilling to do so, according to an earlier Times report in February. Justin Kennedy, son of retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, was global head of the real estate capital markets division at the bank and became close with the future president while continuing to lend him money. Kennedy worked at Deutsche Bank's US branch from 1998 to 2009.” So, wow. It's all so crazy. And so from Rolling Stone citing a Mother Jones report from the summer that, “Trump's debts added up to $500 million with Deutsche Bank remaining by far the largest creditor having extended Trump huge amounts of money.” Ugh. [laughs] It's such a swamp.
Andrea Chalupa:
Newsweek, "’Substantial personal debt is one of the most common reasons security clearances are denied because it's so easily exploited or leveraged by foreign intelligence services,’ said former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander. A White House whistleblower claimed in 2019 that the president's daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, were granted security clearances over the objections of officials who feared they were susceptible to foreign influence, financial problems and a slew of other issues.” That's a lot of kompromat there. Here is Jason Leopold of BuzzFeed News: “Here's something you rarely see, a suspicious activity report sent to Treasury’s FinCEN. Perhaps even rarer, it was sent to FinCEN by Bank of America, raising red flags about Deutsche Bank and the volume of Russian money flowing into the US financial system in 2016.” Here's Natasha Bertrand's interview with former FBI agent Peter Strzok in Politico:
Andrea Chalupa:
“At the time the FBI opened the case, Trump's financial disclosure forms detailed his ownership of more than 500 limited liability companies (LLCs). Investigators would need to route through those records to identify areas in which Russia might have financial leverage over Trump, not only now, but 30 and 40 years ago. ‘That's a massive, massive undertaking,’ Strzok said. And despite his belief that tracing money was the most critical investigative trail the probe could follow, even more than proving contacts with Russia, he writes, Strzok is fairly confident the thread was never tugged at, let alone unraveled, after he was removed from the investigation in August 2017.” And that is from Natasha Bertrand's review of former FBI agent Peter Strzok's book in Politico. We'll link to all those sources that I've just read from in our show notes for this episode. So the closest we will ever get to unearthing all those LLCs–those shell companies–comes courtesy of this surreal TV appearance in 2016 by Putin's operative, Paul Manafort, now serving his own sentence for money laundering and tax fraud.
Speaker 5:
So to be clear, Mr. Trump has no financial relationships with any Russian oligarchs?
Paul Manafort:
That's what he said...I...that’s what I...that's obviously what our position is.
Andrea Chalupa:
And again, this brings us back to Bernie Madoff, the world's largest hedge fund is a fraud. When reality caught up to Madoff, it was revealed in the investigation that he had nearly $1 billion in total assets and that's just a reminder that though Trump remains a billionaire, he is, by Forbes estimates, $1.3 billion in debt. And this all matters because, as the Times points out, “Now Trump's tax records make clear that he is facing a battery of threats to his business and his own financial wellbeing. Over the past decade, he appears to have filled the cash flow gaps with this series of one shots that may not be available again.” So Trump was desperately trying to plug the holes of his debt with whatever cash he could grab. “Mr. Trump's businesses reported cash on hand of just $34.7 million in 2018, down 40% from five years earlier. The man is debt rich and cash poor.” So basically Donald Trump is a Ponzi scheme.
Andrea Chalupa:
I want to speak now directly to future historians. Maybe there is a history major or a PhD student in the future who unearth the transcripts of a podcast by two overlooked writers whose warnings were dismissed and ridiculed. To that future historian, I want to simplify this dangerous moment in time that you're trying to wrap your head around. How did it come to this? The answer is simple: America is so deeply racist and misogynistic that it let a Ponzi scheme become president. Wait, there's more. From the Times: “What's more, the tax records show that Mr. Trump has once again done what he says he regrets looking back on his early 1990s meltdown, personally guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, a decision that led his lenders to threaten to force him into personal bankruptcy. This time around he is personally responsible for loans and other debts totalling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Should he win re-election, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.” Now, if Russian dirty oligarchy money holds that debt, if it's from Putin's court of oligarchs, then Putin–arguably the richest man in the world–doesn't need to collect that cash. He needs to avoid accountability. So does his court of Russian oligarchs. “Half a billion dollars to buy and install the president of the United States. How can you put a price on the world? To quote an email cited in the Mueller report sent to the head of Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund (the sender is redacted), that email said, ‘Putin has won.’” If Russian oligarchs close to Putin laundered hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump, they do not need those bills repaid in cash or assets, they need America weakened and destroyed from within for Russia to be able to continue its aggression abroad, avoiding accountability like sanctions, chipping away and weakening the Western Alliance.
Andrea Chalupa:
What was the other major story that shared the top of the front page of the big New York Times tax returns bombshell? The other story was an article about Russia hacking our election systems, including the systems that aggregate the total vote counts, evolving their methods to include ransomware. Russia needs to collect on Trump's debt by keeping Trump in power, destroying America and the Western Alliance. If Russia and the Trump Crime Family steal another election this November, we're in for a fight, at least for a generation. Once Russia is in, it's very hard to get them out. Just ask you Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Venezuela and Belarus. Back in March before everything shut down due to the pandemic, The Daily Beast reported that Russian backed secessionist efforts were starting back up again with a focus on California, from The Daily Beast:
Andrea Chalupa:
“Four years ago, one of the most outlandish aspects of Russia's interference efforts centered on cultivating and inflaming separatist movements across the US, especially in places like Texas and California. Now, it looks like it's happening all over again.” So the Kremlin helped tilt the scales in the Brexit vote. The Kremlin funds far-right anti-EU political parties across Europe to divide the EU from within. This is well documented and reported on. We did a great interview about the Kremlin’s puppet strings being pulled in the Brexit vote. That was with the Orwell prize winning investigative journalist, Carole Cadwalladr. Look that up. It's called “Brexit and Trump are the Same Crime”. So the Kremlin-funded secessionist movements here in the US. It's the same thing as Brexit. It's the same thing as the Kremlin funding these anti-EU far-right parties across Europe. They are the same crime. People need to wake up, that what happened to the UK and Brexit could happen here in the US with California, Texas and other States.
Andrea Chalupa:
If that sounds far-fetched, then go to the Gaslit Nation show notes for this episode and look up the reporting. Look it up, okay? This is all really happening. We're not making this stuff up for our own amusement. So Trump and his debt are yet another weapon in Russia's political warfare against the United States. They're trying to divide and destroy us from within like Russia's US secessionist Black Arts, Trump and his debt are just another pressure point to use against us. They're in, they're here, they’re determined to stay.
Sarah Kendzior:
One thing I want to stress is that this is the culmination of crimes. 2016 was the culmination of a coup, not the beginning of one, which is why you've seen these exact same operations playing out in all sorts of States. As Andrea just mentioned, these similarities between what happened in the 2016 election in the US and what happened with Brexit, the incursion of all of these oligarchs and mafiosos into various Western democracies as well as collaborating with pre-existing autocratic States, that had been in motion for decades. And you can kind of see the beginning of it in the ‘80s with a lot of actors who came out of Iran Contra, but just everything Andrea just mentioned. Like, if you look at Deutsche Bank, it's not bad enough that you have justice Kennedy’s son working there, you have Trump's money being handled by him there, that's also where Kushner was allegedly laundering money, including 2016 campaign money.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's also where Jeffrey Epstein had his money. It is the same places, it is the same people, over and over again. When you bring up Bernie Madoff, you then have to look at this Wall Street criminal culture that really came to ahead in 2008 with the global financial collapse. But its origins lie in the 1980s. They lie in the deregulation in the Reagan era and people like Carl Icahn who literally trained Wilbur Ross and who worked with Steven Mnuchin, the people currently handling the Treasury and Commerce. These are all corporate raiders tied to a mafia machine and they were always influencing US politics. They were meeting with people like Reagan, and they were meeting with George H. W. Bush. It's very interesting to look at photos from those eras.
Sarah Kendzior:
You look at someone like Ray Cohn meeting with Reagan, and you have to think to yourself, who looks like they're in charge of this meeting? Does it look like Reagan is, or does it look like Cohn is? Does it look like Reagan is in charge or does it look like Rupert Murdoch is in charge? There are so many examples of this and what we see now is just, it's blatant. They are literally in the White House instead of just pressuring it from the outside. And that of course makes the situation much more dangerous because on one hand, they're obviously in there to abuse executive power to enhance their personal wealth, but it's also to dodge prosecution. There were investigations into Trump that were ramping up a bit in 2014 and 2015 into things like his Taj Mahal casino dealings. There were definitely investigations into Epstein that were coming to light in 2015 and 2016, despite him being convicted previously and whitewashed and celebrated by the media.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so that was a turning point and you missed the exit. Now we're just living in the wreckage. And the final thing I'll say on this, which I said in the previous episode, is Trump is different than the fascists of history. He has different goals. Usually a fascist leader wants to embody the state, wants to expand the state, wants to keep the state intact while denying people, of course, their rights and their freedoms. Trump is the opposite. Trump does not care if the United States is destroyed as long as he personally is not destroyed. And that is a very, very dangerous situation. It completely changes how we consider leverage, how we consider protest, how we consider law. People really need to grasp this and they also need to ask the question of who else shares this view? How many people that are now leading government agencies or embedded in government institutions have this same utter lack of loyalty to the United States and utter disregard for its future? Because that's what we're going to be seeing in years to come.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's not just these secessionist movements that we've mentioned before, but just purposeful destruction, picking at the scraps, especially as climate change comes bearing down and people's sense of what a place is worth, what a business is worth, that's all going to be transformed. And these disaster capitalists are honing in like vultures and we are the prey. So yeah, you can continue from there.
Andrea Chalupa:
And that's a great segue into Ivanka Trump. Ivanka Trump is in so much trouble, finally. Let's hope.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, no kidding.
Andrea Chalupa:
She has avoided accountability because Ivanka Trump represents the right kind of woman in the eyes of white male patriarchy, just like Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's pick to take Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat on the Supreme court which is just an insult to feminists. So these women represent the right kind of women in the eyes of white male patriarchy. They're both pleasant to look at if you're a white male who loves his white male patriarchy, and they're both praised for their breeding. They're good breeders, as they say. Women's values in a white male patriarchal society comes down to motherhood. Butt what's wrong with that? Being a mother is the most important and hardest job in the world. The major difference is that we do not center men around raising children like we do women because we live in a white male, patriarchy where women are judged first and foremost by how they look and how they breed.
Andrea Chalupa:
So let me stress again, the Ivanka Trump tax fraud story underlines how the white male patriarchy keeps letting Ivanka Trump get away with crimes because, in their eyes, she's the right kind of woman. Cy Vance could have indicted Ivanka Trump for scamming investors in Trump SoHo. Instead, a family lawyer handed Cy Vance a campaign donation. The Mueller investigation could have and should have indicted Ivanka who brought on Putin's operative Paul Manafort, as campaign chairman, who was central to the operation of the Trump campaign, which stole the 2016 election with the Kremlin's help as outlined in the Mueller report, including a focus on Cambridge Analytica, that intentionally suppressed black votes in key States in a sophisticated social media targeting campaign.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ivanka led the transition team which Michael Flynn said told him to call the Russian ambassador and Ivanka financially profited from her role in the White House, getting Chinese trademarks and trotting around the globe, treating our taxpayer's money as her own personal publicity account, marketing herself as a world leader, photo bombing Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde. And Ivanka broke the Hatch Act blatantly, proudly, by speaking at the Republican National Convention, not just a political event, but a lie-filled propaganda event that was held at the taxpayer funded White House, a violation of a separation of political activities and official federal work. There's more to the Ivanka criminality story and we'll continue to go into that on further episodes. We must note that in the creepy relationship Ivanka has with her father, in 2016 her father wanted Ivanka to be his vice president, according to a new book.
Andrea Chalupa:
So as we keep telling you, Ivanka is her father wrapped up in a prettier package, which makes her far more dangerous. We're not just fighting our hearts out to defeat Trump in November, we're going to continue fighting our hearts out to defeat Ivanka Trump in 2024. We keep warning you, it's going to happen. And if she continues to avoid accountability like she has thus far, it will happen. The press is filled with Mark Burnetts who will happily rehabilitate a sparkly blonde who's the right kind of woman, according to the prevailing white male patriarchy power structure that we're stuck under currently. So, we remain vulnerable and Ivanka Trump is a major threat–and continues to be a major threat–to our democracy. We're going to end this episode of rage with Trump's appearance at RBGs historic moment of being the first woman and first Jewish person to lie in state. Trump and his birther wife, Melania, visited RBG when she was being honored at the Supreme court.
[audio clip of crowd booing Donald Trump and chanting “Vote Him Out”]
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Direct Relief at directrelief.org, which is supplying much needed protective gear to first responders working on the front lines in the US, China and other hard hit parts of the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
We encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria, donate at rescue.org.
Sarah Kendzior:
And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans, already under pressure from the Palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at the orangutanproject.org.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes; it helps us reach more listeners. And check out our Patreon; it keeps us going. And also subscribe to our new YouTube channel.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Gisenberg, Nick Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York based firm Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
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