Skip to content
Politics
Link copied to clipboard

Philly Clout: Trump's night at Rotwitt's Sun Center Studios

IT WAS ONLY a matter of time before walking tragicomedy Donald Trump strolled into Jeffrey Rotwitt's Sun Center Studios, the site of Thursday night's campaign rally for the Republican presidential nominee.

Jeffrey Rotwitt (left)  is president and CEO of Sun Center Studios in Delaware County. Donald Trump spoke there Thursday night, pledging to make the ultimate deal with the American people. Yes, Trump had a best-seller in 1987, but these days, according to PolitiFact, only 15 percent of his statements are true or mostly true.
Jeffrey Rotwitt (left) is president and CEO of Sun Center Studios in Delaware County. Donald Trump spoke there Thursday night, pledging to make the ultimate deal with the American people. Yes, Trump had a best-seller in 1987, but these days, according to PolitiFact, only 15 percent of his statements are true or mostly true.Read more

IT WAS ONLY a matter of time before walking tragicomedy Donald Trump strolled into Jeffrey Rotwitt's Sun Center Studios, the site of Thursday night's campaign rally for the Republican presidential nominee.

Trump and Rotwitt, together at last, we thought. It feels so right.

Let Clout explain.

Trump, coauthor of the 1987 best-seller The Art of the Deal, has promised to Make America Great Again through a series of unrealistic deals:

You're a factory worker who lost your job? No problem. Trump will make a deal with China to fix that. Are your health-care costs too high? Trump will make a deal with Big Pharma to get the prices down. Do you really hate all those dang Mexican immigrants? Trump will make a deal to keep them out - with a wall that Mexico will build!

So it's fitting that Trump's latest rally was in Chester Township, Delaware County, at Sun Center Studios, where Rotwitt is president and CEO.

An Inquirer investigation in 2010 found that Rotwitt, a well-connected Republican lawyer, was paid $1.1 million by the state Supreme Court to find a location for a new Family Court building, yet he also collected $825,000 as the business partner of the developer with rights to the site.

"That's like a home buyer hiring the seller to serve as his real estate agent," Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron wrote in 2014.

Sounds like a deal Trump could love.

The law firm Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel fired Rotwitt for playing both sides of the deal, and later paid $4 million to settle a lawsuit contending that Rotwitt had hoodwinked a former state Supreme Court justice.

Rotwitt was involved in another shady real estate deal in Haverford Township back in 2003, when township officials made a secret $600,000 payment to him and his law firm for help finding a developer for the site of the old Haverford State Hospital. A grand jury report later alleged that Rotwitt participated in a "ruse" to secure the money, which the law firm returned when it became public.

Jason Fagone, a writer for Philadelphia Magazine, has described Rotwitt - who was not charged with a crime and contended that he did nothing wrong in either case - as "a man comfortable operating in gray areas where others fear to tread."

Trump has spent his entire career in gray areas, and that story is now being told in greater detail as the November election looms.

He spent $258,000 from the Donald J. Trump Foundation - which is funded by other people's money - to settle lawsuits involving his for-profit businesses and to buy a six-foot portrait of himself for $20,000, the Washington Post reported this week.

Trump's foundation - to which he hasn't contributed since 2008 - also made a $25,000 political contribution to a group supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who later decided not to investigate Trump University. The IRS fined the foundation this month, and the New York attorney general is investigating.

Trump also built his New York real estate empire on "$885 million in tax breaks, grants and other subsidies" that "helped him lower his own costs and sell apartments at higher prices because of their reduced taxes," the New York Times reported last weekend. He loves when taxpayers chip in to sweeten his end of the deal.

Then you have Trump's lying about everything from his net worth to his speaking fees. And don't forget the made-up scripts handed out to Trump University instructors about real estate tips Trump shared with them over nonexistent dinners.

PolitiFact has found only 15 percent of Trump's statements to be true or mostly true. Yet, at the lectern Thursday night inside's Rotwitt's studio, Trump called the media "among the most dishonest people in the world," according to reporter Caitlin McCabe.

Earlier in the speech, Trump pledged to be a new voice for inner-city Americans plagued by violence and said that if he's elected, "everything is going to get better because it certainly couldn't get much worse."

"What do you have to lose?" Trump asked. "I will fix it."

Sounds like a helluva deal.

What could possibly go wrong?

- Staff writer William Bender contributed to this column.

Tips: clout@philly.com