John T. Reed’s news blog

It has long been said in DC that the cover-up is often worse than the original bad behavior. True. Ask Martha Stewart. Not the Big Lie, but the Endlessly Repeated Lie But Hillary has created a whole new version. It’s not Hitler’s Big Lie or the real-estate-guru-get-rich-quick Attractive Lie. This is the “if I tell the same barefaced lies enough times, you will ultimately believe me and ignore all evidence to the contrary, even when they keep juxtaposing my lies next to the video clips of the FBI Director squarely calling them false.”It is good that Trey Gowdy is a...

There is a new TV series titled “Designated Survivor” starring Kiefer Sutherland. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_f1v0Nx5Sw) Because it is about a guy who becomes president accidentally and unexpectedly—like “Mike Medlock” in my Unelected President novel—I took a special interest in this. I have not seen the series, of course. No one but insiders have. And there is no need to prove the series is bad to sell my books. Both can be excellent and I hope they are. Success of Designated Survivor might help sales of my book by whetting people’s appetite for this genre—unlikely persons becoming president unexpectedly. But having just written...

When your political base is poor and downtrodden, you must keep them poor and downtrodden forever. The corollary is that your base needs to be dumb enough not to figure that out.That, in turn, means the Oval Office will be filled by people chosen by the least successful who are so low IQ that they cannot see what’s being done to them. Or maybe they are in denial or don’t want to believe it.Whatever the reason, it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad or a country. They don’t need a majority of Americans to be poor and...

We have a $58 billion trade deficit with Mexico. Trump as president would have the emergency power to stop imports from Mexico. Let’s say the Wall costs $10.4 billion. $10.4 B ÷ $58 B = 17.9%So Trump shuts down U.S.-Mexican trade for 17.9% of the year (17.9% x 365 days = 65 days.) At the end of it, the President of Mexico would deny he paid for the Wall, but he and his countrymen would have lost $10.4 billion of net trade with the U.S. Trump would claim he thus made Mexico pay for the Wall. So Trump truly would...

He is weighing which will hurt him more: releasing or not releasing. It’s sort of how bad do you think they are? If the average answer is not as bad as they actually are, don’t release.If I were him, I would say, “I release them to Obama’s IRS every year. They have no great problem with them. If they have no great problem, what more do you need to know?”The tradition is just that, not a binding requirement.His tax returns are probably aggressive. I wrote the book on that, literally: Aggressive Tax Avoidance for Real Estate Investors, now in its...