David Cay Johnston Quotes

For five months, Trump's campaign manager was Paul Manafort, advisor to dictators and near dictators including a pro-Moscow regime in Ukraine that was ousted by a popular uprising.

He appointed as chief executive of his campaign, and, later, White House strategy chief, Steve Bannon, a known anti-Semite who, in his time at Network, published racist articles and bizarre conspiracy theories...

Trump never faced tough questions as a candidate where he could not walk away or give nonsense answers without repeated follow-up. This is a serious problem for the future of American democracy in the television era, when appearances matter more than reality.

[H]e does not have a clue about the Constitution's system of checks and balances.

Trump doesn't know anything. ...Trump's own words and conduct ...and his comments on many issues ...show how appallingly ignorant he is.

I... watched Trump run briefly in 2000 for the nomination of the Reform Party... during that brief campaign Trump declared he would become the first person to run for president and make a profit. ...For the 2016 run, a large share of Trump's campaign money was spent paying himself for the use of his Boeing 757... in addition to his smaller jet, his helicopter, his Trump Tower office space, and other services supplied by Trump businesses.

In 1990, I broke the story that, instead of being worth billions, as he'd claimed, Trump actually had a negative and escaped a chaotic collapse into personal bankruptcy only when the government took his side over the banks...

While at my last paper, I won a for exposing so many tax dodges and loopholes that a prominent tax lawyer called me the "de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States."

[B]ecause labor returns have gone down there's not enough ... to buy goods and services. ...The next thought should be ...capitalists will change because people have to buy their products. No, if your a global level capitalist, it doesn't matter. As long as there aren't riots in the streets, you can sell your goods in other countries.

We decided in 1980 to go down a different path when we elected Ronald Reagan. We have gotten the results that Mr. Reagan said, if you listen to him carefully in 1980, we would get, which is that those people that are wealth holders would realize the income from that wealth, and they have. Their actual tax rates, for people at the very top, are 60% lower than what they paid in the 1960s. But at the same time, by getting rid of unions... by having these "free trade deals," which are really deals to drive down the cost of labor; we have driven down the wages and the salaries of the vast majority of Americans... We have also weakened these environmental laws... that were pretty good. So we've put in place a whole mechanism in which we favor profit over labor. ...When you look at the data you can see it ...Returns to labor in the Federal Reserve data go [down with time] and returns to capital have been rising, and since 2009 it's like looking at one of those jet fighters going straight up.

George Will had a column in The Washington Post this week in which he said that the proof that the failed after 50 years was people trusted the government under LBJ and now they don't any more. ... [I] would argue... the facts show just the opposite. People don't trust the government anymore because they recognize it does not work in their interest, it works against their interest...

The Attorney General, Eric Holder testified, in March of 2013, to Congress that he was afraid to prosecute the banks because it would cause economic disruption. ...I've been going after him in Newsweek for that and he has backtracked, but for months, an Inspector General's report shows, he claimed that they had gone after more than a billion dollars and over 500 people involved in mortgage fraud... still... a drop in the bucket. ...In fact, there were less than a hundred cases involving $95 million ...a drop in a drop ...and he kept telling this lie. So we... now have a government that does not go after people who are engaged in criminal frauds because they are considered so powerful, that if they were prosecuted it would damage the economy. My God!

We are... seeing... failure to enforce the law. I have written for 15 years about a way that real estate in partnerships cheat. It's easy to spot but you have to do the work... The guy who figured it out was given all sorts of awards by the IRS. No one will do it. The governor of New York, who should be in the forefront... because it costs the state as much as $700 million in a peak year, refuses to do this, and... his administration has... literally lied, claiming repeatedly that they're looking for this, but there's no court case of any kind.

When you and I were young and a company laid people off, you would see the president, not the CEO... in those days, say "...I'm gonna work for a dollar a year" or "I'm going to take no bonuses until everybody is rehired." Today it's... "Ooh, I fired 10,000 people. I'll get a bigger bonus!"

Back in 1996 I was the principle reporter at The New York Times on a huge series... that changed the way executive pay was reported. We showed how the head of had gotten a $100 million pay one year and he only paid taxes on about $2 Million... [H]e had built a fortune of just shy of a billion dollars at that point, tax free... [T]here were members of the board of directors of Coke that did not understand how much money they had paid him.