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“Donald Trump understands that America is at a crossroads — a tipping point. And we either reverse course or we become Greece — bankrupt and dependent.” — Sean Hannity


that nothing could be further from the truth,” Trump says. “He’s never released his college transcripts. No- body knows anything about his marks or how he got into Harvard. It could be the greatest con job in the history of the world. Now this guy who’s covered up all these facts has got the nerve to call upon Mitt to release 10 years of his tax returns.” Trump’s iconoclastic voice challenges the estab-


lished political wisdom at every turn. Commentator Bradley A. Blakeman, who served


as deputy assistant to former President George W. Bush, explains Trump’s appeal to heartland voters this way: “I think it’s refreshing for them to see some- body so accomplished, and yet so able to speak in a way that they can identify with. And the American people like a dose of truth, too. “They like truth-tellers who aren’t afraid to tell it


like it is, and I think that’s probably Donald Trump’s greatest strength.” Given his remarkable business record, Trump


reinforces Romney’s message that it is time for the economy to have some adult supervision by a leader


whose credentials go beyond a stint in the Illinois state Senate. Trump’s other gift to the Romney campaign: his


ability to fling wide the doors to elite fundraisers. In a race where $10 million is virtual pocket change, both candidates have extended their fundraising much deeper into the campaign than normally expected. When Trump announced that his wife, Melania,


would host a private luncheon fundraiser with Ann Romney at his swanky Fifth Avenue Trump Tower apartment, the event quickly sold out. Demand was so great — they sold close to 500 tickets at over $2,000 each — that they decided to hold the luncheon in shifts, one starting at noon, and another at 1:30 p.m. Ironically, a lot of the money raised at those Rom-


ney events came from the same Wall Street crowd that awarded Obama a disproportionate amount of their campaign donations in 2008. With Trump’s help, and Romney’s own Wall Street connections, the imbalance has been reversed. This cycle, those same financial denizens are writing most of their checks for Romney.


Dueling Surrogates: Warren Buffett vs. D


uring the 2008 election, Barack Obama, facing a financial crisis


with scant experience, leaned on the endorsement of Warren Buffett to bolster his credentials and economic plan. Buffett was touted endlessly by Obama in campaign appearances and in TV ads. Now Donald Trump is shaping up


to be Mitt Romney’s anti-Buffett, a recognized business success who thinks Obama is a terrible president. And the stark contrasts between the two campaign’s leading


surrogates — Warren Buffett for President Barack Obama, versus Donald Trump for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — are almost as marked as the differences between the candidates themselves. Buffett, the billionaire investor of Berkshire Hathaway fame,


is of course famous for “the Buffett rule” — the proposal that millionaires, whose incomes from capital gains are taxed at


52 NEWSMAX | AUGUST 2012


15 percent, should be required to pay a minimum marginal tax rate of 30 percent. Buffett paid about $7 million in taxes


last year. Yet he says he pays taxes at a lower percentage rate than his secretary. What Buffett really means is he takes


so little income out of his Berkshire Hathaway money machine, he doesn’t have much income tax to pay. (It is an established fact that the top 1 percent of income earners pay 40 percent of all


federal taxes, and the bottom half of wage earners pay little or nothing at all.) Still, President Obama has used Buffett’s name to coin a tax-


and-spend agenda targeting wealthier Americans. “The plan had no chance of passing,” columnist Thomas J.


Friedman of The New York Times recently wrote, “would have made only a small dent in the deficit, and was rightly decried by experts as a gimmick that only diverted attention from what we


HANNITY/©RIC KALLAHER / BUFFETT/AP IMAGES


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