Sen. Harry Reid called Donald Trump a “human leech”. With RCP’s aggregate Congressional Job Approval Rating currently at 12.8%, Americans believe a lot of US politicians fit that description.
Departing U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev) claims Donald Trump’s history of mismanaging casino kept him from being approved for a gaming license in Nevada. In a Washington Post interview in the Wednesday paper, Sen. Reid at first suggested that the Republican presidential nominee had been denied a gaming license for the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.
The Trump International Hotel does not offer gambling. Harry Reid at first suggested that Trump had applied for the right to house gambling in the complex. Later, he walked back those remarks.
Harry Reid Interview with the Washington Post
In his interview with Ben Terris of the Washington Post, Harry Reid said, “I may not be an expert on a lot of stuff, but I’m an expert on gaming licenses. You can’t have filed 14 bankruptcies, cheat people out of stuff. In gaming circles, if somebody does something bad once, you can’t get a gaming license. He’s done something bad his whole life.”
Ben Terris noted in his story that Donald Trump did win a gaming license from Nevada in 2004, but he chose not to use the license. Despite that fact, Sen. Reid claimed that the Nevada Gaming Commission would not issue a license to Donald Trump now, if he wanted to open a casino in Las Vegas.
Did Not Back Away from Comments
Not only did Reid state that unequivocally, but he doubled-down on that talk with a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday. His line of attack was a little less clear on Thursday, as it left some wriggle room for interpretation.
In his Senate speech, Harry Reid said Donald Trump had “applied for a license a number of years ago in Nevada and was a passive owner. He got one. It was just perfunctory. If he applied for a license after what he did in Atlantic City and what he has done since, he couldn’t get a gaming license in Nevada.”
Harry Reid: 1st Class Political Mudslinger
Despite his spectacles and button-down exterior, Harry Reid is known as a shrewd politician and a skilled mudslinger. Like Donald Trump, he has a reputation for being somewhat loose with the facts, when he wishes to make a point.
During the 2012 presidential election, Sen. Reid suggested GOP-nominee Mitt Romney was not releasing more than two years of tax returns because he has not paid taxes for 10 years. At the time, Harry Reid said the information was sourced from an unnamed investor in Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mitt Romney ran before getting into politics.
Even now, Harry Reid stands by his claims about Romney. He told the Washington Post, “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
New York Times Investigation
The suggestion Harry Reid is trying to make is that Donald Trump’s career in the Atlantic City casino business is stained with bad business, double dealings, and financial mismanagement. It is alleged that Trump took his struggling casinos for millions of dollars in personal payouts, even while his workers went 12 years with only an 80-cent an hour raise.
The loss of Trump Entertainment Resorts stock also cost bondholders $1.5 billion, according to the New York Times. From the mid-1990’s to the mid-2000’s, Donald Trump’s Atlantic City casinos were bleeding money — even at a time when the rest of the AC casino economy enjoyed record booms. The implication is that Donald Trump used his casinos in a vampiric way, taking cash and claiming losses.
USA Today Investigation
In a June investigation by the USA Today, it appears that Donald Trump stiffed hundreds of contractors on the goods and services they sold his casinos. This resulted in a hundreds of lawsuits for unpaid costs, while driving countless Atlantic City businesses into bankruptcy. In a city now beset with unemployment and financial woe, the loss of those job creators continues to be felt to this day.
Though Harry Reid is departing the U.S. Senate, he told the Washington Post he plans to campaign for Hillary Clinton and down-ballot Democrats in the upcoming run-up to the presidential election. When asked what he would discuss, Harry Reid said he would point out the Republican Party’s complicity in the rise of Donald Trump. He said they have been content to let Donald Trump dog-whistle racist comments about Pres. Barack Obama and bigoted comments about Mexicans, Muslims, and other minorities, so long as they thought it might hurt their political opponents.
Trump Echoes Perennial GOP Sentiments
Speaking further on the subject of complicity, Harry Reid said that the Republican establishment might not say such things in the rude terms Donald Trump does, but none of his ideas were original to him. Instead, distortion of issues like climate change denial were a tactic of Congressional Republicans long before Donald Trump became a politician.
Harry Reid said Donald Trump is simply the outgrowth of years of GOP attempts to dog-whistle their own constituency. The GOP legislators felt burned when they put forward a positive agenda in the mid-to-late 1990’s (“The Contract of America”), for which they felt Bill Clinton took credit.
The Politics of “No”
Determined to avoid that pitfall again, they began the Congress of 2009 with the strategy to obstruct Barack Obama’s agenda, thus giving him no accomplishment to campaign on in 2012. When that failed, they doubled-down on that same strategy from 2013 to 2016, when they could have initiated proactive programs the way Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole once did.
Instead of advancing a positive agenda, though, they only sought to obstruct solutions, while feeding the anger of their Republican voters. When conservative and Tea Party voters realized what the GOP leaders had done, that anger turned not only against the Democrats, but against all Washington insiders — including Republicans.
Harry Reid suggested in his remarks that Donald Trump did not create the anger in the electorate right now, but instead exploited it. Reid said, “Donald Trump was created by Republicans in the House and Senate. Every crazy idea he’s come up with was originally with them.”
