Donald Trump Has a Long, Long History of Not Picking Up the Check

Donald Trump has a long history of failing to deliver on promises, and not just when it comes to politics: The man seems incapable of picking up the tab.

After pleading not guilty to 37 criminal charges for mishandling classified documents, Trump stopped at the popular Miami restaurant Versailles to meet with supporters. During his visit, he could be heard shouting, “Food for everyone!” But he left after just 10 minutes—not long enough for anyone to order anything—without paying a single bill, the Miami New Times reported.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that Trump was just a little pressed. He was just arrested for federal crimes! He might need some alone time to decompress.

Nope.

Trump is notorious for leaving a trail of unpaid bills wherever he goes. Hundreds of people have accused him of failing to pay them for services, ranging from a glass company in New Jersey to workers at his resorts, real estate brokers, and even law firms who represented him in suits for unpaid bills.

In his 2004 book Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, the former president instructed readers to “always question invoices.” But it sounds like his personal approach is more “Just ignore invoices.” He has been sued for failing to pay dozens of vendors who have worked his resort properties as well as his now-defunct, fraudulent university.

And this penny-pinching didn’t start when he became a businessman. Artist and designer Lucy Klebanow recounted a date she had with Trump in the early 1970s. In a 2016 essay for Salon, Klebanow said Trump took her out to an expensive restaurant but didn’t have cash to pay the bill. He promised to pay her back—but never did.

And it looks like the apple didn’t fall far from the tree: Donald Trump Jr. reportedly proposed to his ex-wife, Vanessa, with a ring he got for free. According to the New York Post, he agreed to make promotional appearances for the jewelry company in exchange for the ring.

Then, in 2018, Vanessa divorced Don Jr., in part because he was so cheap that she “had to rely on her mother for financial help for her personal needs,” Page Six reported, citing an anonymous source. Apparently, the family that saves together stays together.

Donald Sr.’s broken promise at Versailles, however, is also part of a larger trend. As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump writes, his failure to pick up the tab in Miami isn’t just about frugality. Trump loves to make big promises in front of cameras—which often, in turn, leads to positive coverage in both traditional media and online, even though he rarely follows through. For Trump, it’s a win-win: Get a short boost of positive press coverage without having to pay a dime.

Speaking to Georgia’s Republican Party last weekend, Donald Trump made the case that storing America’s nuclear secrets in an unlocked bathroom was good, actually. “The only good thing about it is it’s driven my poll numbers way up,” Trump said in a defiant speech. 

Trump was right, sort of. The indictment has helped him further consolidate his lead in a Republican primary that he has been consistently dominating for months. He has raked in millions after sending out dozens of fundraising emails decrying a politically-motivated “witch hunt” from “misfits, mutants, Marxists, & communists.” (That said, he raised nearly twice as much in a similar fundraising push earlier this spring after being indicted for hush money payments sent out during the 2016 election.)  

But there are growing signs that being indicted for endangering America’s national security is damaging Trump politically, even if it isn’t harming his chances of securing the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.  An ABC News/Ipsos poll released earlier this week found that 61 percent of voters believed the indictment was “serious,” as opposed to just 28 percent who viewed it as “not serious.” The number of voters who believed that he should be charged was somewhat lower: Just 48 percent, compared to 35 percent who believe the Department of Justice should have refrained from charging the former president. 

Given the early stage of the Republican primary, Trump’s strong support among Republicans has driven much of the coverage of the indictment. But the ABC/Ipsos poll also pours some cold water on this as well: 38 percent of GOP voters believe that the charges are serious, a significant if not overwhelming number. But as David Leonhardt writes for The New York Times, Trump’s numbers among Republicans and Independents are trending in the wrong direction. “The number of Republicans bothered by his legal problems seems to be growing,” Leonhardt writes. “So is the number among independents. More voters are bothered by the case against him — on charges of taking classified material and trying to conceal that he did — than by the earlier New York State charges related to hush money for a sexual encounter.” 

These are both very bad signs for Donald Trump, even if the indictment has only made him stronger in the Republican primary. To win a general election against Joe Biden, Trump will need to consolidate support among both skeptical Republicans and Independents, even if Biden remains stubbornly unpopular. The indictment, moreover, may get worse for him, not better. Democrats have largely stayed silent about it and have not aggressively pressed the case that Trump wantonly and recklessly endangered America’s national security but that may be changing—a growing number of advisers and aides are frustrated by Biden’s kid gloves approach to the indictment and it’s likely that the party will take a more aggressive tack in the coming days and weeks. And the indictment isn’t going anywhere: The case against Trump will proceed slowly over months and may stretch well into the 2024 election. Trump’s problems are only going to get worse, in other words.

Yeah, the right to choose is good and all.… But have you thought about how many more laborers we’d have if people would just suck it up and give birth?

Such is the inquiry Wisconsin’s Republican speaker of the Assembly encourages us to consider.

“I think how many Americans today would be alive in our workforce, doing all the things that helped make America great, if we hadn’t had such easy access to abortion,” Representative Robin Vos said on Tuesday at an event. “I think it’s bad for society.”

Vos hedged the remarks, noting there ought to be a “natural middle ground,” citing his support for a bill to provide easy access to birth control. Nevertheless he continued, saying that “if you get pregnant, I feel like then you’ve made the commitment to deliver that child, and that’s what should happen in my world.”

The remarks followed Wisconsin overwhelmingly electing Janet Protasiewicz to the state Supreme Court in April, flipping the court’s control to the left for the first time in 15 years; the election came in voters’ anticipation of the court ruling on abortion rights and electoral districts in Wisconsin.

Vos also vowed that the state will not expand Medicaid access as long as he is speaker. He made the comments while being perched in front of a banner emblazoned with “UnitedHealthcare,” namesake branch of the world’s largest health care company and eleventh-largest company generally by revenue—ahead of Exxon, Toyota, and Microsoft.

“As long as I am speaker of the Assembly, Medicaid expansion will never happen,” Vos pledged.

“I see absolutely no reason. I can’t imagine it. I think I would resign first before I would vote for that. So, it will never happen.”

While Vos argued there is no utility to Medicaid expansion, that doesn’t appear to be true. The state government found some 312,000 Wisconsinites were completely uninsured in 2020. Wisconsin’s Department of Human Services estimates Medicaid expansion would expand coverage to 89,700 people. Wisconsin is one of just 10 states that have not chosen to expand Medicaid yet; in doing so, it could save $1.6 billion by unlocking enhanced federal funds through the program.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley admitted that he doesn’t actually know if the audio recordings that he said reveal Joe Biden accepting a bribe even exist.

Republicans have spent all week accusing the president of accepting a bribe from Ukraine (conveniently at the same time Donald Trump was arrested for stealing and hiding classified documents) and referring specifically to a set of recordings that prove their claim. The GOP learned about these supposed recordings as part of the House Oversight Committee’s months-long investigation into the Biden family, which has yet to produce any actual evidence linking Biden to wrongdoing.

House members were allowed last week to see a redacted version of an FD 10-23, a form the FBI uses to note unverified information from confidential sources. Grassley had called Monday for the FBI to release the unredacted version of the form, which he said mentioned 17 audio recordings of Biden and his son Hunter Biden accepting a bribe from an executive at Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian oil company where Hunter Biden served on the board for a few years.

But speaking on a podcast Wednesday, Grassley admitted he doesn’t know whether or not the tapes are real.

“I’m oversight of the FBI,” the Iowa Republican said, referring to his work on the Senate Whistleblower Protection Caucus.

“I want to know [if] the FBI, are you doing your work? I want to see your work. Have you listened to these tapes? And if you haven’t, why haven’t you? In other words, do the tapes even exist?”

Grassley isn’t even the only Republican to acknowledge the tapes might not be real. Senator Ron Johnson told Fox News Thursday that “we don’t know” if the tapes exist. House Oversight Chair James Comer, who has led the charge against Biden, said Wednesday he doesn’t know if the recordings are “legit.”

And yet these tapes have been the basis for almost every accusation leveled against Biden this past week. Republicans are pushing a conspiracy first started by Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump that the Biden family accepted a $10 million bribe to remove former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in 2016 to stop a probe into Hunter Biden’s role at the oil company Burisma Holdings.

This claim has been widely debunked by Ukrainian officials, U.S. State Department officials, American intelligence experts, and Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.

The North Carolina representative who switched her party affiliation to Republican, paving the way for the state’s cruel 12-week abortion ban and decimating abortion access in the South, is now lying about the abortion she had years ago.

Tricia Cotham was a staunch advocate for abortion rights while she was still a Democrat, promising to codify reproductive rights after Roe v. Wade fell. In 2015, she spoke out against making patients wait 72 hours before they can get an abortion, citing her own experience getting one.

“My first pregnancy ended in an induced physician-assisted miscarriage. While I served in this chamber,” she told the state legislature. “Abortion is a deeply personal decision. It should not be a political debate. My womb and my uterus is not up for your political grab.”

But in a weekend radio interview while at the North Carolina Republican Party convention, Cotham denied having an abortion, saying instead she had a miscarriage.

“I had a miscarriage, and a miscarriage in medical terms is called a spontaneous abortion,” she said. “And instead of saying—first of all, they should not be talking about my miscarriage, that is just very painful and wrong. But they are repeating this message that I had an abortion. And that is false. And that is completely frustrating, and they keep on doing it, and that’s below the belt.”

A common Republican talking point is to portray medically assisted miscarriages and abortion as different things. This allows them to pretend they care about people who get pregnant, because they can say they aren’t actually banning medically necessary procedures.

Except, treatment for a medical miscarriage and abortion are the same: Either a health care provider will give the patient medication to induce the miscarriage and expel the fetus, or a doctor will dilate the patient’s cervix and remove the fetal tissue.

Cotham switched parties in April, an abrupt about-face that two of her former aides described as a “deeply petty, personal” decision. Autumn Alston, an activist who canvassed for Cotham’s last two campaigns (when she was a Democrat), told Jezebel that the lawmaker had felt underappreciated and ignored by the left, particularly abortion rights advocacy groups.

She wanted “to be the new shiny object in the Republican Party,” said Alston, who often advised Cotham too.

Cotham switching gave Republicans a supermajority in the legislature, allowing them to pass a 12-week abortion ban and later override Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of the measure.

So Cotham single-handedly gutted abortion access in the South, celebrated taking rights away from people, and is now making false claims about abortion. And yet she has the gall to say she’s “still the same person.”