June 15, 2020

Donald Trump Has Always Been Such a Liar That His Lawyers Once Came Up With a Special System to Deal With It

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on October 12, 2016.

If Donald Trump has the “world’s greatest memory,” as he claimed in November 2015, he certainly hasn’t shown it off to his lawyers.

In fact, one of those lawyers, New Jersey casino specialist Patrick McGahn, once described how he and Trump’s fellow counsels always met with Trump in pairs because of Donald’s propensity for lying. “We tried to do it with Donald always if we could, because Donald says certain things and then has a lack of memory,” McGahn said in a deposition during the bankruptcy proceedings for the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

McGahn said he typically did this with all public figures, but he singled out Trump for his particularly casual relationship with the truth. “Hey, Trump is a leader in the field,” McGahn said. “He’s an expert at interpreting things, let’s put it that way.”

“That’s interestingly put,” his questioner noted.

Trump apparently has recurring memory problems when he meets with lawyers. He told NBC News last November that he had the “world’s greatest memory,” during a controversy surrounding his false claim to have seen thousands of Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey. But just three weeks later, he told a lawyer deposing him for one of the Trump University fraud lawsuits that he couldn’t even remember his own comment. “I don’t know that I said it,” Trump said.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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