WASHINGTON — Donald Trump calls himself “100 percent clean” in his new book — saying it’s “something you can’t say with certainty about our current group of presidential candidates.”
The billionaire developer says he would name himself U.S. trade representative if he becomes president, and he’d do all the negotiating with foreign traders to keep the United States from being “ripped off by every country we do business with.”
“Our trading partners would have to sit across the table from Donald J. Trump, and I guarantee you the rip-off of the United States would end,” Trump writes in the upcoming “The America We Deserve.”
Trump already has proposed a 14.25 percent surtax on those worth more than $10 million. Trump — a possible Reform Party candidate — claims he’d hurt himself, but he refuses to release his tax returns to show his actual wealth.
In his book, Trump blasts Democratic candidate Bill Bradley for helping write the 1986 tax laws Trump blames for the late 1980s real-estate crash and his own plummet to near-bankruptcy. Bradley is challenging Veep Al Gore for his party’s nomination.
“Anyone who prefers Bradley to Gore is either completely ignorant or a member of the family,” Trump writes, adding that Bradley is one of his “least favorite subjects.”
Trump concedes he has an inflated sense of self.
“I’ve never met a person who’s successful who didn’t have an ego. There’s nothing wrong with it,” he writes.
Meanwhile, Bradley accused Gore yesterday of being “wedded to the ways of Washington” and paying only “lip service to [campaign] reform” — a sign that Bradley might make an issue of Gore’s questionable activities in the 1996 campaign, such as dialing for dollars from the White House and raising money at a Buddhist temple.
Leading Republican George W. Bush was endorsed by Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee governor and education secretary who dropped out of the GOP presidential race earlier this year.
John McCain, who is Bush’s closest Republican challenger, offered a health-care plan that lets patients sue their HMOs in federal courts, but caps the amount of money they can win.
McCain also promised to spend 70 percent of government surpluses on Social Security and Medicare — while Bush offers much of the surplus for a tax cut.
McCain claimed “special interests” have prevented the Democrats and Republicans in Congress from agreeing on a health-care bill.