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特朗普| 创造性胡诌的天才

2016-07-19 NYT 英文联播

Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative With the Truth


There was the time  told Larry King that he had been paid more than  about his business acumen when in fact he was paid $400,000.

唐纳德·特朗普曾对拉里·金说他发表一次有关他商业才华的演讲赚100万美元,事实上他只拿到40万。


Or the time he sought a  claiming a net worth of $3.5 billion in 2004, four times as much as what the bank found when it checked his math.

他2004年申请贷款时自称身价35亿美元,银行核算后,发现这是实际结果的4倍。 


Or the time he boasted that to Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., cost $300,000 when the actual initiation fee was $200,000. 

他自夸加入纽约州韦斯特切斯特郡特朗普国家高尔夫俱乐部要缴纳30万美元会员费,实际上入会费用是20万。


Or the time he bragged on CNBC about his new Trump International Hotel and Tower in Las Vegas, claiming, “We have 1,282 units, and they sold out in less than a week.” As Mr. Trump knew, more than 300 units had not been sold.

他在CNBC上吹嘘,说拉斯维加斯新建的特朗普国际酒店大厦有“1282个房间,不到一周就售罄。”特朗普先生知道,有300多套还没卖出去。


Confronted in a court case about this last untruth, Mr. Trump was anything but chagrined. “I’m talking to a television station,” he said. “We do want to put the best spin on the property.”

在法庭上谈到最近这一次谎言,特朗普先生只有委屈。“我在和电视台讲话,我们想把项目宣传得漂亮些。”


As Mr. Trump prepares to claim the Republican nomination for president this week, he and his supporters are sure to laud his main calling card — his long, operatic record as a swaggering business tycoon. 

特朗普本周准备宣布获得共和党竞选总统提名,他和他的支持者自然想打响这张王牌——他一直以来作为商业阔佬的精彩记录。


And without question, there will be successes aplenty to highlight, from his gleaming golden high-rises to his well-regarded golf resorts, hit TV shows and best-selling books.

毫无疑问,他有不少值得炫耀的成功,他建造了金光闪闪的高楼大厦,饱受赞誉的高尔夫庄园,爆款电视节目和排行榜上的畅销书。


But a survey of Mr. Trump’s four decades of wheeling and dealing also reveals an equally operatic record of dissembling and deception, some of it unabashedly confirmed by Mr. Trump himself, who nearly 30 years ago first extolled the business advantages of “truthful hyperbole.”

可特朗普先生过去四十年机关算尽,同样给出掩饰和欺骗的精彩记录,有些特朗普自己毫不脸红地承认,近三十年前,他第一次颂扬了生意场的“真实的夸大”。


Indeed, based on the mountain of court records churned out over the span of Mr. Trump’s career, it is hard to find a project he touched that did not produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies or outright fraud.

事实上,特朗普有累牍的法庭记录,这些记录显示,他经手的一个工程无不遭受不守诺言、公然撒谎和纯属欺诈的指控。


Under the intense scrutiny of a presidential election, many of those allegations have already become familiar campaign fodder: the  students and Trump  who say they were fleeced; the public servants from New Jersey to Scotland who now say they rue the zoning approvals, licenses or tax breaks they gave based on Mr. Trump’s promises; the small-time contractors who say Mr. Trump concocted complaints about their work to avoid paying them; the infuriated business partners who say Mr. Trump concealed profits or ignored contractual obligations; the business journalists and stock analysts who say Mr. Trump smeared them for critical coverage.

在总统选举的密集审查中,许多指控已经成为为人熟知的竞选弹药:特朗普大学的学生和特朗普地产的买家说他们遭到欺诈;从新泽西到苏格兰的公务员他们后悔相信特朗普的承诺,给他批地、牌照和减税;小合同商说特朗普捏造投诉从而赖账;怒不可遏的商业伙伴说特朗普隐瞒利润,逃避合同义务;财经记者和股票分析师说特朗普用批评性报道抹黑他们。


Taken as a whole, though, an examination of Mr. Trump’s business career reveals persistent patterns in the way Mr. Trump bends or breaks the truth — patterns that may already feel familiar to those watching his campaign.

总得来说,特朗普做生意一直遵循这样的套路,他扭曲或罔顾事实——关注他竞选的人已然熟悉这些套路。


First and foremost is Mr. Trump’s tendency toward the self-aggrandizing fib — as if it were not impressive enough to be paid $400,000 for a speech. What also emerges is a nearly reflexive habit of telling his target audience precisely what he thinks it wants to hear — such as promising Trump University students they will learn all his real estate secrets from his “handpicked” instructors.

首先,特朗普喜欢撒谎自夸,好像一次演讲40万美元还不够厉害。还有就是几乎反射性地告诉他的听众他认为他们想听的话,比方说承诺特朗普大学的学生他们从他亲自挑选的讲师那里可以学到他的房地产成功秘诀。


And finally, there is the pattern already deeply familiar to his political opponents — making spurious claims against adversaries under Mr. Trump’s oft-stated theory that the best defense is a scorched-earth offense.

最后,他的政治对手了如指掌的套路:无中生有地中伤对手,这就是特朗普挂在嘴边的理论,最好的防守是焦土式的进攻。


Equally striking is his Houdiniesque ability to wiggle away from all but the most skilled and determined efforts to corner him in an apparent lie. In interviews, lawyers who have tangled with Mr. Trump in court cases are sometimes reduced to sputtering, astonished rage, calling him “borderline pathological” and “the Michelangelo of deception” as they attempt to describe the ease with which Mr. Trump weaves his own versions of reality.

同样令人刮目相看的是他魔术大师胡迪尼式的能力,显而易见的谎言要被最有技巧、最执着的努力揭穿时,他一扭屁股就溜开了。在法庭诉讼中与特朗普纠缠在一起的律师有时怒不可遏,大发雷霆,谈到特朗普如何轻而易举地编造自己版本的事实时,说他简直“濒临病态”,是“骗子界的米开朗琪罗”。


“He’s a bully, and bullies aren’t known for their veracity,” said Richard C. Seltzer, a retired senior partner at the law firm Kaye Scholer who confronted Mr. Trump in three real estate lawsuits.

“他是个恶霸,恶霸们通常不说真话。” Kaya Scholer法律事务所退休高级合伙人Richard Seltzer说,他曾在三遭房地产诉讼中遭遇特朗普。


In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Trump defended his integrity as a businessman — “I shoot very straight” — and argued that those who accuse him of acting in bad faith are often the same people he has outmaneuvered in deals.

周五接受电话采访时,特朗普为他的商业道德辩护,“我有话直说”,他辩称那些指责他不老实的人,自己在交易中也玩花样。


“What, you’re going to quote people that I’ve beat? Are you going to quote people that I out-dealt?” he asked, adding, “I’ll give you hundreds of names of people that have dealt with me that say I’m very honest.”

“什么?你要引用那些和我交手中失利的人说的话?你要引用那些我打败的人呢?我可以给你几百个和我打过交道的人说我非常真诚。”


Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is already hard at work making the case that Mr. Trump’s truth-challenged business record is a harbinger of how he would mislead from the Oval Office.

希拉里已经苦做准备,说明特朗普做生意不老实预示了他也会把白宫椭圆办公室带上歧途。


Mr. Trump’s business record may help explain why various fact-checkers have barely been able to keep pace with his false claims on the campaign trail.  has labeled 34 of Mr. Trump’s assertions “Pants on Fire” lies. As of July 1,  had fact-checked 46 statements by Mr. Trump. It gave 70 percent of them its worst rating, four Pinocchios — a record so abysmal that the newspaper recently compiled a video of what it called “Donald Trump’s most outrageous four-Pinocchio claims.”

特朗普的从商纪录有助于解释为何各种较真的人差点跟不上他在竞选中说的假话。PolitiFact挑出34个特朗普令人难以置信的谎话。到7月1日为止,《华盛顿邮报》核查了特朗普的46个论断,70%差评,4个匹诺曹谎话,这一纪录恶劣至极,该报纸最近编辑了一个视频《特朗普最令人发指的四个匹诺曹论断》。


The taxonomy of Mr. Trump’s business deceptions has been the subject of legal and journalistic scrutiny for decades. A Fortune magazine article from 2000 memorably described Mr. Trump’s “astonishing ability to prevaricate” this way: “But when Trump says he owns 10 percent of the Plaza Hotel, understand that what he actually means is that he has the right to 10 percent of the profit if it’s ever sold. 

几十年来,给特朗普商业欺诈分类一直法律调查和新闻调查的主题。《财富》杂志2000年文章明确地描述特朗普先生“闪烁其词的惊人能力”:“当特朗普说他拥有广场酒店的10%时,你可以这样理解他的话,如果酒店被出售,他有权获得10%的利润。


When he says he’s building a ‘90-story building’ next to the U.N., he means a 72-story building that has extra-high ceilings. And when he says his casino company is the ‘largest employer in the state of New Jersey,’ he actually means to say it is the eighth largest.”

当他说他建造了联合国旁边一栋“90层大厦”时,他的意思是有超高天花板的72层大厦。当他说他的赌博公司是“新泽西州最大的雇主”时,他的意思是第八大雇主。


The casino magnate Steve Wynn, a sometimes friend and sometimes foe of Mr. Trump’s, took up the subject of Mr. Trump’s honesty in an interview with New York magazine. “His statements to people like you, whether they concern us and our projects or our motivations or his own reality or his own future or his own present you have seen over the years have no relation to truth or fact,” Mr. Wynn said.

与特朗普亦敌亦友的赌场大亨Steve Wynn在接受《纽约》杂志采访时谈到特朗普的诚信:“他对媒体说的话,不论这些话和我们及我们的项目或意向有关,或者和他自己、和他的未来和这些年来你们看到他的杰作有关,这些都与真实或事实毫无关系。”


‘Truthful Hyperbole’

Some of the earliest documented examples of Mr. Trump’s deceptive business tactics come from none other than Mr. Trump, who in books and in interviews sometimes seems to delight in describing the brazen bluffs and well-timed trickery he used to claw his way to the upper echelons of New York City’s cutthroat real estate world.

一些可以查到的特朗普欺骗性商业策略的最早期证据正来自特朗普自己,他有时在图书和采访中乐于谈及他如何运用厚颜无耻的恐吓和恰到好处的骗局爬进纽约竞争激烈的房地产世界的上层。


“You have to understand where I was coming from,” Mr. Trump wrote in his 1987 best-seller,  “While there are certainly honorable people in the real estate business, I was more accustomed to the sort of people with whom you don’t want to waste the effort of a handshake because you know it’s meaningless.”

“你必须理解我从哪里来。”特朗普1987年畅销书《交易的艺术》一书中写道:“房地产业中当然有令人尊重的人,我则更惯于你无需浪费时间和他握手的那种人,因为你知道这是没有意义的。”


Mr. Trump was particularly proud of a stratagem he employed in 1982, when he was trying to entice Holiday Inn to invest in a casino he was building in Atlantic City. The board of directors decided to visit Atlantic City, which worried Mr. Trump because he had precious little actual construction to show off. So Mr. Trump ordered his construction supervisor to cram every bulldozer and dump truck he could find into the nearly vacant construction site.

特朗普尤其对1982年采用策略引以为傲,当时他想让假日酒店投资他在大西洋城建造的赌场。董事会成员决定去大西洋城踏勘,这让特朗普有点担心,因为他还没有任何建筑可以示人。特朗普让他的建筑监理把能找到的每一台挖土机和倾卸卡车都开到建筑空地上。


“What the bulldozers and dump trucks did wasn’t important, I said, so long as they did a lot of it. If they got some actual work accomplished, all the better, but if necessary, he should have the bulldozers dig up dirt from one side of the site and dump it on the other.”

“挖土机和卡车干什么不重要,我说,只要他们全都忙活着。如果真能干点什么出来,当然更好,如果有必要的话,可以让挖土机从一边挖土,卡车把土卸到另一边去。”


A week later, when Mr. Trump escorted the Holiday Inn executives to the site, one board member wanted to know why a worker was filling a hole he had just dug. “This was difficult for me to answer, but fortunately, this board member was more curious than he was skeptical,” Mr. Trump wrote, boasting that weeks later Holiday Inn agreed to invest in his casino.

一周后,特朗普陪同假日酒店的高管来到现场,一个董事想知道为什么一个工人挖了个坑又填上。“我很难回答这个问题,不过很幸运,董事更多的是好奇而不是怀疑。”特朗普这样写道,几周后假日酒店同意投资赌场,他引以为傲。


“That’s called ‘business,’” Mr. Trump said on Friday of the episode.

周五接受采访时谈到这段往事,特朗普说:“这才叫‘生意’。”


In court cases against Mr. Trump — USA Today counted 3,500 lawsuits involving Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump estimates he has testified more than 100 times — plaintiffs’ lawyers frequently return to the same two paragraphs from “The Art of the Deal.”

“I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”

特朗普成为被告的案件中——《今日美国》盘点特朗普先生牵涉3500起诉讼,特朗普估计他出庭作证超过100次——被告律师每每找出《交易的艺术》中的这两段话:“我将之成为真实性夸大。这是一种无罪的夸张,一种有效的促销方法。”


In depositions, lawyers have repeatedly probed for the limits of Mr. Trump’s “truthful hyperbole,” or, as one lawyer framed it, the distinction Mr. Trump makes between “innocent exaggeration” and “guilty exaggeration.”

在特朗普的证词中,律师反复摸索特朗普“真实性夸大”的边界,或者如一位律师所言,特朗普如何区分“无罪的夸张”和“有罪的夸张”。


For example, in the now-infamous  litigation, Mr. Trump was asked in a deposition about a script that had been prepared for Trump University instructors. According to the script, the instructors were supposed to tell their students the following: “I remember one time Mr. Trump said to us over dinner, he said, ‘Real estate is the only market that, when there’s a sale going on, people run from the store.’ You don’t want to run from the store.”

例如在臭名昭著的特朗普大学诉讼中,特朗普被要求解释他给特朗普大学教员准备的教案。教案上说,教员要对学生说:“我记得一次特朗普在用餐时和我们说:‘只有房地产市场是这样的,当有人买房时,人们从店里跑出来’。你们不想从店里跑出来。”


No such dinners ever took place, Mr. Trump acknowledged. In fact, Mr. Trump struggled to identify a single one of the instructors he claimed to have handpicked, even after he was shown their photographs. 

根本就没有这样的就餐,特朗普承认。事实上,特朗普想表明每一个教员都是他亲手挑选的,尽管他只是看过照片。


Nonetheless, Mr. Trump was not bothered by the script’s false insinuation of real estate secrets shared over chummy dinners. Asked if this example constituted “innocent exaggeration,” Mr. Trump replied, “Yes, I’d say that’s an innocent exaggeration.”

可特朗普并不觉得在美味的晚餐上分享房地产秘诀这段误导有什么大不了的。当被问到这是否构成“无罪的夸张”时,特朗普回答,“是的,我会说这就是无罪的夸张。”


On Friday, Mr. Trump argued that the script might fall under the legal concept of “puffery” — which many legal dictionaries define as an exaggeration or statement that “no reasonable person” would take as factual. And in any event, he continued, the true sinners in the Trump University case are the students who sued him even after giving rave reviews in their written evaluations of the seminars. “I think that’s dishonest,” he said.

周五,特朗普说这一段教案符合法律概念中的“夸大宣传”,许多法律字典将这种夸张或声言定义为“没有一个有理智的人”会认为是事实。不论如何,他继续说,特朗普大学一案中真正有罪的是起诉他的学生,他们在学期书面评语中对课程给予了高度评价。“我认为这是不诚信的。”


Mr. Trump has been repeatedly accused of bringing false legal claims to avoid paying debts and evade contractual obligations. As far back as 1983, a New York City housing court judge ruled that Mr. Trump filed a “spurious” lawsuit to harass a tenant into vacating a Trump building.

特朗普多次被指控提起虚假诉讼以赖掉债务和逃避合同义务。早在1983年,一名纽约住房法院法官裁定特朗普提起了“虚假”诉讼,骚扰一名房客,迫使其腾退特朗普大楼。


Well-Timed Memory Lapses

In Friday’s interview, Mr. Trump denied filing frivolous court cases, insisting, “I’ve won a massive majority of the litigation I’ve been involved in.” He pointed to the USA Today survey of his 3,500 legal cases.

周五的采访中,特朗普否认提起无聊的诉讼,他坚称,“我赢下了大多数和我有关的诉讼。”他也提到了《今日美国》调查的3500起诉讼。


Although the newspaper could not determine who had prevailed in the vast majority of the cases, it did find Mr. Trump the clear winner in 450 suits and the clear loser in 38.

尽管报纸不能判定谁赢下了大多数诉讼,但却发现在450个诉讼中特朗普是明显的赢家,在38个诉讼中他是明显的输家。


And, indeed, for all of the litigation Mr. Trump has attracted or spawned, for all of the times he has been accused of ruinous dishonesty, the legal and regulatory record is surprisingly bare of official findings by judges, juries or regulators that Mr. Trump engaged in perjury or improper deception or actual fraud.

没错,特朗普导致或提起的所有诉讼中,他都被指控毫无诚信,可司法和行政记录中,法官、陪审团或监管者都没有发现特朗普作伪证或不当欺骗或事实性欺诈,这令人吃惊。


A rare exception came after Mr. Trump decided to demolish a department store to make way for his Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. Mr. Trump’s demolition contractor hired about 200 unauthorized Polish laborers, paying them as little as $4 an hour to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The case ended up in federal court after some workers were shortchanged even these wages.

一个例外是特朗普决定拆掉曼哈顿城中的一座百货商场以建造特朗普大厦。特朗普的拆迁合同商雇佣了200个未获许可的波兰劳工,每天工作12个小时,七天不休,每天只给4美元。就这么点钱有些工人还没拿全,因此闹上了联邦法院。


Mr. Trump protested that he knew nothing about the use of unauthorized workers — even though workers testified that they saw him visiting the site and some witnesses said that Mr. Trump and the executive he assigned to oversee the demolition were well aware of what was going on.

特朗普抗议说他压根不知道雇佣未获许可的工人,尽管工人作证说他们看到他视察工地,有证人说特朗普和他指派监理拆迁的经理知道事情真相。


In 1991, a federal judge, Charles E. Stewart Jr., ruled that despite Mr. Trump’s denials, there was “strong evidence” that he and his subordinates and his contractor had conspired to hire the Polish workers and deprive them of employment benefits. He awarded them $325,415 in damages.

1991年,联邦法官Charles Stewart Jr.裁定尽管特朗普否认,有“强证据”说明他和他的下属以及合同商策划雇佣波兰工人,并剥夺了他们的受雇利益。他赔偿了325415美元。


But in case after case, Mr. Trump has displayed a special talent for turning what should be cold hard facts into semantic mush. Perhaps the most famous example of this skill came when Mr. Trump was asked under oath a seemingly straightforward question: Had he ever lied about his net worth? Mr. Trump responded, “My net worth fluctuates and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.”

可在更多的案子中,特朗普显示了一种特殊能力,把板上钉钉的事实说得云里雾里。可能最著名的例子是特朗普被要求起誓回答一个看起来直白的问题:他是否对他的身价撒谎?特朗普回答:“我的身价在波动,随市场而变,随态度而变,随感觉而变,甚至我自己的感觉。”


So, he explained in a deposition, when he said to his Westchester golf club, that included the $200,000 initiation fee plus every cent he guessed that a member might spend on annual dues over the next 20 or 30 years. In other words, “The way I say it is more accurate.” 

他在作证中解释,他说加入韦斯特切斯特高尔夫球俱乐部的会员费是30万美元时,他包括了20万的入会费和他猜测每名会员在接下来20年或30年中将花费的每一分年费。换言之,“我的说法更精确。” 


And when he  for a speech, it was not his fault if viewers failed to realize he was including not just his $400,000 speaking fee but also the hundreds of thousands of dollars he assumed must have been spent promoting his appearance.

当他告诉拉里金一次演讲要100万美元,这不是他的错,因为观众没有意识到他说的不仅是40万的演讲费,还有数十万美元他估计可能用来宣传他亮相的费用。


Part of what makes Mr. Trump such an elusive target is that his paper trail is often minimal. Mr. Trump has repeatedly testified that he does not use computers. He says he also throws away his day planner each month, and just last year he testified that he did not own a smartphone.

特朗普能耍滑头的部分原因在于他落在纸面上的东西不多。他反复作证说他不用电脑。他说他每个月都丢掉日程表,去年还说他不用手机。


Mr. Trump is also adept at deflecting blame to his staff. In two of his books, Mr. Trump made the startling and, as it turned out, bogus claim that he had once performed the remarkable feat of climbing out from under more than $9 billion in debt. Mr. Trump blamed his ghostwriter for the mistake. Asked if he reads his books before publication, Mr. Trump said, “I read it as quickly as I can because of time constraints.”

特朗普还擅长把责任推卸给员工。在两本书中,特朗普正想如你可以想象得那样,令人大跌眼镜地谎称,他从90亿美元债务中一路走来,取得现在的成就。特朗普说这全怪他的雇佣写手。被问及在书出版前是否读过,特朗普说:“我快速翻了翻,因为时间紧张。”


Mr. Trump is also the beneficiary of miraculously well-timed memory lapses. In suit after suit, the man who claims to possess one of world’s best memories suddenly seems to have chronic memory loss when asked about critical facts or events.

特朗普奇迹般地、恰到好处地忘事,这也让他受益匪浅,这个男人宣称自己拥有世界上最好的记忆力,可当被问到批评性事实或事件时就突然患了慢性失忆症。


Such was the case when Mr. Trump filed a libel lawsuit against Timothy L. O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” Among other things, Mr. Trump asserted that “TrumpNation” cost him a “deal made in heaven” with a group of Italian investors, men he had met and who were on the brink of signing a business partnership that would have made him hundreds of millions of dollars. Their names? He could not recall. 

在特朗普先生指控《特朗普国:做个唐纳德的艺术》一书作者Timothy O'Brien诽谤正是如此。特朗普称《特朗普国》一书搞砸了他一桩“天堂般的交易”,他已经和一波意大利投资者会晤,马上就要签合同了,这让他丢了数亿美元。他们的名字?他想不起来了。


“Trump Nation” also cost him a hotel deal with Russian investors, he said. He could not remember their names, either. He was certain the book also ruined a deal with Turkish investors. Again, he could not recall any names. Polish investors also got cold feet after they read Mr. O’Brien’s book. Their names escaped him, too. The book also scared off investors from Ukraine. Alas, he could not think of their names either.

他说《特朗普国》还搞砸了他一桩和俄罗斯投资者的酒店生意,他也记不住投资者的名字了。他很确信该书搞砸了他和土耳其投资者的一桩生意,他也想不起名字。读了O'Brien的书,波兰投资者也望而却步了,投资者名字同样也想不起来了。该书还吓跑了乌克兰的投资者,天啊,他也想不起人家的名字了。


Mr. Trump’s lawsuit was dismissed.

特朗普的起诉被驳回。



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