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Trump, Inc.

Trump, Inc.

WNYC Studios

He’s the President, yet we’re still trying to answer basic questions about how his business works: What deals are happening, who they’re happening with, and if the President and his family are keeping their promise to separate the Trump Organization from the Trump White House. “Trump, Inc.” is a joint reporting project from WNYC Studios and ProPublica that digs deep into these questions. We’ll be layout out what we know, what we don’t and how you can help us fill in the gaps. WNYC Studios is a listener-supported producer of other leading podcasts, including On the Media, Radiolab, Death, Sex & Money, Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin, Nancy and many others. ProPublica is a non-profit investigative newsroom. © WNYC Studios
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Top 10 Trump, Inc. Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Trump, Inc. episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Trump, Inc. for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Trump, Inc. episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

Trump, Inc. - Nobody Wants To Work With The Trumps Anymore
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01/15/21 • 36 min

In the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and an unprecedented second impeachment, a growing number of businesses, governments, and financial institutions are severing ties with President Trump.

David Fahrenthold is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who covers the Trump family and its business interests for The Washington Post. Zach Everson reports on who patronizes the Trump family businesses for the newsletter 1100 Pennsylvania.

Next week's Trump, Inc. will be the final episode of the series. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on what we're doing next. Show your support with a donation to New York Public Radio.

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Trump, Inc. - The Russia Report
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08/26/20 • 31 min

In this bonus episode of Trump, Inc., co-hosts Ilya Marritz and Andrea Bernstein talk to Politico’s Natasha Bertrand and The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer about the new report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence detailing Russia's role in the 2016 election.

Additional reading:• “Russiagate Was Not A Hoax” by Franklin Foer• “The Trump-Putin Relationship, as Dictated by the Kremlin” and “How a Russian disinfo op got Trump impeached” by Natasha Bertrand• Read the full Senate report.This conversation originally aired part of WNYC’s Special Convention Coverage 2020.

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Trump, Inc. - Who Matters In America
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10/22/20 • 29 min

Trump, Inc. co-host Andrea Bernstein sits down with Kai Wright, host of The United States of Anxiety, to discuss how American history informs the 2020 election. The conversation, called "Who Matters in America 2020?," was part of Reporter's Notebook series at The Greene Space.

Sign up for email updates from Trump, Inc. to get the latest on our investigations.

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Trump, Inc. - Midnight Regulations
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11/25/20 • 17 min

This story was co-published with ProPublica. Sign up for email updates from Trump, Inc. to get the latest on our investigations.

Six days after President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, the U.S. Department of Agriculture notified food safety groups that it was proposing a regulatory change to speed up chicken factory processing lines, a change that would allow companies to sell more birds. An earlier USDA effort had broken down on concerns that it could lead to more worker injuries and make it harder to stop germs like salmonella.

Ordinarily, a change like this would take about two years to go through the cumbersome legal process of making new federal regulations. But the timing has alarmed food and worker safety advocates, who suspect the Trump administration wants to rush through this rule in its waning days.

Even as Trump and his allies officially refuse to concede the Nov. 3 election, the White House and federal agencies are hurrying to finish dozens of regulatory changes before Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20. The rules range from long-simmering administration priorities to last-minute scrambles and affect everything from creature comforts like showerheads and clothes washers to life-or-death issues like federal executions and international refugees. They impact everyone from the most powerful, such as oil drillers, drugmakers and tech startups, to the most vulnerable, such as families on food stamps, transgender people in homeless shelters, migrant workers and endangered species. ProPublica is tracking those regulations as they move through the rule-making process.

Every administration does some version of last-minute rule-making, known as midnight regulations, especially with a change in parties. It’s too soon to say how the Trump administration’s tally will stack up against predecessors. But these final weeks are solidifying conservative policy objectives that will make it harder for the Biden administration to advance its own agenda, according to people who track rules developed by federal agencies.

“The bottom line is the Trump administration is trying to get things published in the Federal Register, leaving the next administration to sort out the mess,” said Matthew Kent, who tracks regulatory policy for left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen. “There are some real roadblocks to Biden being able to wave a magic wand on these.”

In some instances the Trump administration is using shortcuts to get more rules across the finish line, such as taking less time to accept and review public feedback. It’s a risky move. On the one hand, officials want to finalize rules so that the next administration won’t be able to change them without going through the process all over again. On the other, slapdash rules may contain errors, making them more vulnerable to getting struck down in court.

The Trump administration is on pace to finalize 36 major rules in its final three months, similar to the 35 to 40 notched by the previous four presidents, according to Daniel Perez, a policy analyst at the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center. In 2017, Republican lawmakers struck down more than a dozen Obama-era rules using a fast-track mechanism called the Congressional Review Act. That weapon may be less available for Democrats to overturn Trump’s midnight regulations if Republicans keep control of the Senate, which will be determined by two Georgia runoffs. Still, a few GOP defections could be enough to kill a rule with a simple majority.

“This White House is not likely to be stopping things and saying on principle elections have consequences, let’s respect the voters’ decision and not rush things through to tie the next guys’ hands,” said Susan Dudley, who led the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget at the end of the George W. Bush administration. “One concern is the rules are rushed so they didn’t have adequate analysis or public comment, and that’s what we’re seeing.”

The Trump White House didn’t respond to requests for comment on which regulations it’s aiming to finish before Biden’s inauguration. The Biden transition team also didn’t respond to questions about which of Trump’s parting salvos the new president would prioritize undoing.

Many of the last-minute changes would add to the heap of changes throughout the Trump administration to pare back Obama-era rules and ...

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Trump, Inc. - You're Fired

You're Fired

Trump, Inc.

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11/12/20 • 32 min

As the Trump campaign wages a haphazard legal campaign against the rightful outcome of the 2020 election, the Trump administration is working to remake the federal bureaucracy.

Adam Klasfeld is a senior investigative reporter and editor for Law & Crime.• Denise Turner Roth, an Obama appointee, served as administrator of the Government Services Administration from 2015 to 2017.• Robert Shea was associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush.• Ronald Sanders, who until last month was chairman of the Federal Salary Council, resigned over an executive order he warned would politicize much of the federal workforce. (Read his letter of resignation here.)

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Trump, Inc. - And Now, The End Is Near
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01/19/21 • 51 min

This story was co-published with ProPublica.

A birth certificate, a bar receipt, a newspaper ad, a board game, a Ziploc bag of shredded paper, a pair of museum tickets, some checks, and a USB drive. The series finale of Trump, Inc.

This episode was reported by Andrea Bernstein, Meg Cramer, Anjali Kamat, Ilya Marritz, Katherine Sullivan, Eric Umansky, and Heather Vogell. We assembled our time capsule at Donald J. Trump State Park; it will be stored until 2031 with WNYC's archives department.

Trump, Inc. is produced by WNYC Studios and ProPublica.

This is the last episode of Trump, Inc. But it's not the end of our reporting: subscribe to our newsletter for updates on what we're doing next. Show your support with a donation to New York Public Radio.

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Trump, Inc. - The "King of Debt"? He Pays Cash.
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05/11/18 • 18 min

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Trump, Inc. - 'Repeat Offender'
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08/12/20 • 32 min

This story was co-published with ProPublica. Stay up to date with email updates about WNYC and ProPublica’s investigations into the president’s business practices.

President Donald Trump’s recent musings about staging his Republican National Convention speech at the White House drew criticism from government ethics watchdogs and even one Republican senator, John Thune of South Dakota.

The suggestion wasn’t an isolated blending of official presidential duties and the campaign. It was part of a yearslong pattern of disregarding such boundaries in the Trump White House. There is a law, called the Hatch Act, that prohibits most government officials from engaging in politicking in the course of their official work.

The law does not apply to the president or vice president. While other presidents took campaign advantage of the trappings of the office, something that came to be known as the “Rose Garden strategy,” they typically refrained from explicit electoral appeals or attacks on their opponents at official presidential events. Federal election law and measures governing appropriations prohibit using taxpayer dollars for electioneering.

Since resuming official travel at the beginning of May after a coronavirus-imposed pause, Trump has held 25 presidential out-of-town events. Of these events, transcribed on the official White House website, the president spoke about the election or attacked his opponent, Joe Biden, at 12 of them, nearly half. His presidential stage provided a venue for supporters to urge others to vote for Trump in November at three additional events.

Administration officials have been cited for breaking the Hatch Act 13 times by federal investigators at the Office of Special Counsel (not to be confused with special counsel Robert Mueller). Twelve more investigations are underway. The law dates from the New Deal era, enacted after a scandal where employees of the Works Progress Administration were pressured to work on the campaigns of candidates friendly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Neither the White House, the campaign or Trump’s campaign treasurer, Bradley Crate, responded to requests for comment.

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, violated the Hatch Act so many times that the OSC took the drastic measure of recommending she be fired, calling her actions “egregious, notorious and ongoing.” (Trump refused to do so.)

The special counsel, Henry Kerner, is a Trump appointee and member of the conservative Federalist Society. He previously worked for Republicans Darrell Issa and Jason Chaffetz on Capitol Hill.

When asked about the OSC’s recommendation, Conway said, “blah blah blah,” adding, “Let me know when the jail sentence starts.” Hatch Act violations are not criminal. The most significant result of a violation is dismissal.

Hatch Act violations were relatively rare in the previous two presidential administrations. Two cabinet officials were cited for Hatch Act violations during the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Some half-dozen senior officials in the Obama and Bush administrations said that they were frequently advised to avoid even the appearance of electioneering at official events.

“There was a very bright line between what was a campaign event and what was an official event,” said Greg Jenkins, the director of advance for President George W. Bush during the period that included the 2004 reelection campaign. “If you could stretch things and say, yes, it’s perfectly legal to do this, but it has the appearance of impropriety — you don't do it.”

Kathleen Sebelius, the former secretary of health and human services under Obama, was cited for making a statement urging his reelection during a gala for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ rights group. Sebelius apologized, and the Treasury was reimbursed for the cost of the trip.

“I’d prefer that it not be on my record,” Sebelius said in an interview from her home in Lawrence, Kansas. Given that she was on the Kansas ethics commission and was a national board member of Common Cause, “it’s kind of a black mark.” She added: “But I did what they say I did,” and said that “it puts into perspective what goes on every day in this current administration that just makes the top of my head come off.”

Previous campaigns have reimbursed taxpayers for costs associated with politicking while on official travel. And while disclosures do show that campaign committees associated with Trump have paid $896,000 to the Treasury and the White House Military Office in May and Jun...

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Trump, Inc. - Temporary Presidential Immunity
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05/13/20 • 30 min

This story was co-published with ProPublica. Sign up for email updates from Trump, Inc. to get the latest on our investigations.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday, via teleconference, about the power to investigate the president.

President Donald Trump has objected to subpoenas for his tax returns and other financial records. New York City prosecutors have demanded the documents as part of a criminal investigation into the president’s hush money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels, while the House of Representatives has been seeking to investigate the conflicts of interests of a president who still owns a sprawling business.

Trump’s lawyers have argued that a president shouldn’t be subject to investigation while in office. “We're asking for temporary presidential immunity,” attorney Jay Sekulow said.

Andrea Bernstein of Trump, Inc. and NYU law professor Melissa Murray listened to the oral arguments and chatted with co-host Ilya Marritz about what struck them. A few takeaways:

• Fights between the legislative and executive branch are not normally heard in front of the Supreme Court. Congress and the White House have typically negotiated solutions to such disputes. “And the fact that we're in court is because this president hasn’t acceded to those norms,” Murray said.

• A phrase that came up repeatedly: “presidential harassment.” It’s language that Trump frequently uses on Twitter and his lawyers raised in court. The assertion, Murray said, “has transformed what would be considered, I think in other times, ordinary and essential legislative oversight into what accounts to bullying, harassment and mere partisan politics.”

• A number of the justices — including the liberal Stephen Breyer — expressed sympathy for the White House’s arguments against the House’s demands for documents, but they were far more skeptical about the claim that the president is immune from even criminal investigation. “The court seemed not to be amenable to that kind of argument at all,” Murray said.

The justices are expected to deliver a decision in the cases — Trump v. Mazars, Trump v. Deutsche Bank and Trump v. Vance — this summer.

Related reporting:• The AccountantsTrump and Deutsche Bank: It's ComplicatedHow Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., Avoided A Criminal Indictment

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FAQ

How many episodes does Trump, Inc. have?

Trump, Inc. currently has 104 episodes available.

What topics does Trump, Inc. cover?

The podcast is about News, Business News, Eric, Trump, Podcasts, Business and Politics.

What is the most popular episode on Trump, Inc.?

The episode title 'Nobody Wants To Work With The Trumps Anymore' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Trump, Inc.?

The average episode length on Trump, Inc. is 30 minutes.

How often are episodes of Trump, Inc. released?

Episodes of Trump, Inc. are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of Trump, Inc.?

The first episode of Trump, Inc. was released on Feb 7, 2018.

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