I abuse power better than anyone

When the story came out a few days ago that Donald Trump may or may not have mentioned a little set of issues he had with his building interests in Buenos Aires while on the phone with Argentine President Mauricio Macri, everyone was quick to push back on the weak sources and deny anything untoward had taken place. The strange term used by the TV Journalist who originally reported the claim was that he was “half joking, half serious.” Well, in what is probably only an amazing coincidence, possibly a hilarious one, it’s now being reported that some of these Trump-connected building projects are moving right along after being stalled for years.

Three days after the phone call between Trump and Macri on Nov.14, Trump’s associates at Buenos Aires firm YY Development Group announced that the construction project would go ahead, in an interview with La Nación (link in Spanish). The tower’s construction had reportedly been held up for years, for various reasons, with YY Development actively restarting construction permit requests when pro-business Macri took over from statist former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Jan. 2016. There’s nothing substantive to confirm that the phone call and construction announcement are linked, but local news media have reported that the call itself was arranged in very unusual fashion. Macri, who is son of one of Latin America’s richest men and has reportedly known Trump since beating him at golf in the 1980s, had backed the wrong horse at the election, openly supporting Hillary Clinton. Accordingly, a crisis meeting was called to work out how to put relations on the right track (Spanish language) with Trump’s administration.

It must be a Thanksgiving miracle.