The story erupted Thursday when The Washington Post put online a recording of Trump posing as “John Miller,” in a 1991 interview with People magazine reporter Sue Carswell. The fictitious “Miller” described himself as a newly hired Trump Organization publicist for the company boss….

Trump also used the name John Barron or Baron (he later named his son Baron).

“John Barron” didn’t just puff Trump’s sexual boasting in the press. “Barron” was also menacing, as revealed in the [a] film clip [from the documentary] about his abuse of Polish immigrant construction workers – and the attorney who tried to help them.

Trump: What’s The Deal recounts a wide variety of Trump lies, exaggerations, and manipulations, but the misconduct of greatest interest to voters may be his threatening litigation in a scheme to deny payment to about 200 illegal Polish immigrants tearing down the old Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue (an act of architectural vandalism). Many of the men lacked hardhats or face masks, used sledge hammers rather than power tools, had to pull out live electric wires with their bare hands, in a building laced with asbestos — all in blatant violation of worker safety laws.

A lawyer trying to get the workers paid the meager $4 to $6 per hour that Trump owed them received a bullying telephone call from one “John Barron,” as recounted in the film:

Narrator: Chapter Six. [Voiceover various images of Trump Tower and Trump]

 Threaten the lawyer that the Polish illegals hired after your cheap contractor defaults on paying them. Make sure that the threats are untraceable, in case the guy isn’t scared off.

 Interview On Camera: John Szabo (lawyer for Polish workers):

 “Mr. Barron had told me in the one telephone conversation that I had with him, ‎that Donald Trump was upset because I was ruining his credit, reputation by filing the mechanics liens [legal action intended to enforce payment]. And Mr. Trump was thinking of filing a personal lawsuit against me for $100 million for defaming his, uh…reputation.”

 Narrator: It turned out that Mr. Barron was Donald Trump’s favorite alias.

 When this was revealed Trump said, “What of it? Ernest Hemingway used a pen name, didn’t he?”

You can now view the entire 80-minute documentary, which is a superb examination of Trump’s mendacity and manipulation of journalists and politicians. It’s available for $9.99 on iTunes.

Here’s a sobering piece from Simon Johnson at Reuters: Commentary: Win or lose, Trump could cause a recession.

Trump contends he can run Washington far better by treating the federal government like one of his companies. He has a very particular style as a real-estate developer, and his general approach to business could indeed be applied to fiscal and monetary policy. Any way that you look at what Trump is inclined to do, however, the result could lead to unprecedented disaster on a global scale.

Trump has already demonstrated a great ability to make the kinds of inconsistent comments that,  — if coming from the mouth of a president — would scare investors, create a great deal of uncertainty, push up interest rates, lower employment, drive down stock market prices and cause the bottom to fall out of the value of other assets.

This kind of destabilization wouldn’t just have negative effects on investor and consumer confidence in the United States. It would spread rapidly around the world and drive up interest rates, bankrupt private-sector companies and plunge countries into a downward default-recession spiral. U.S. exports would naturally crater in this scenario because U.S. allies and trading partners would be in deep crisis and could not afford to buy American products.

The Trump ripple effect would really be a devastating global tidal wave of rising interest rates….

On debt, Trump believes the more the better. His companies issue a great deal of debt because, in the downside scenario, developers like Trump can find ways to pay less than the face value of what is owed. He recently said this approach is an opportunity the U.S. Treasury is losing out on.

The U.S. government, however, is not a speculative real-estate company. Alexander Hamilton realized, at the very start of the nation that having the federal government pay its debts in full, as well as assuming the states’ debts, was of fundamental importance. This was crucial not just for public finance but also for the ability of the private credit markets to operate in a reasonable fashion. And this is what Washington has done for more than 200 years.

“Risk-free debt” is how U.S. debt is described in the world of finance. Once you introduce default risk into those calculations, interest rates would spike for both the government and the private sector.

The paintings in this post are by Henri Matisse, of course.

I won’t be around tonight until late, but if we need another post, Dakinikat will post a live blog to discuss the primary results. What stories are you following today?