Donald Trump Saved A Woman's Farm From Foreclosure

It was September 1986, and Annabel Hill, 66, was facing an auction where she would lose the farm that had been in her family for five generations.

Hill’s husband, Lenard, had committed suicide eight months earlier, 20 minutes before a scheduled auction, in a last-ditch attempt to save his property with life insurance money. The life insurance money wasn’t enough, covering only $175,000 of debts than ran in excess of $300,000, from two years of a drought that Hill said had ruined their livelihood. Even when several hundred acres of the 1,300-acre Waynesboro, Georgia, farm were sold, the now-widowed Annabel still found herself deep in debt and facing an auction.

That’s when real estate tycoon Donald Trump and a series of other personalities stepped in to help save Hill’s farm.

The push to save Hill’s farm began with Frank Argenbright, a well-regarded Atlanta businessman. Argenbright had helped another farmer keep his land, according to reports. Argenbright asked Hill to appear at a news conference with him in the city. That news conference made its way onto NBC’s Nightly News and was watched Trump.

“I saw a story on the news about Annabel Hill, who’d hit bottom,” The Donald writes in his book The America We Deserve.

“It was a very sad situation, and I was moved,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “Here were people who’d worked very hard and honestly all their lives, only to see it all crumble before them. To me, it just seemed wrong.”

Trump reached out to Argenbright, who was able to put Trump in touch with bank that held Hill’s mortgage.

“The next morning, I called and got some vice president on the line,” writes Trump. “I explained that I was a businessman from New York, and that I was interested in helping Mrs. Hill. He told me he was sorry, but that it was too late. They were going to auction off the farm, he said, and ‘nothing or no one is going to stop it.’”

“That really got me going,” he writes. “I said to the guy: ‘You listen to me. If you do foreclose, I’ll personally bring a lawsuit for murder against you and your bank, on the grounds that you harassed Mrs. Hill’s husband to his death.’ All of a sudden the bank officer sounded very nervous and said he’d get right back to me. Sometimes it pays to be a little wild.”

“An hour later I got a call back from the banker, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to work it out, Mr. Trump.’”

At a press conference at the entrance to the Burke County Courthouse where the foreclosure sale was set to begin, Argenbright and members of the Hill family discussed their plan to save the farm. Neighbors and friends of the Hills, who had planned to console the family after their sale, were instead “stunned” with the news of a rescue plan, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Argenbright and Trump had put up the money with Federal Land Bank that morning for a 30-day option to purchase the farmland. The auction was called off less than two hours before it was to begin.

“It was a business decision that waiting a month doesn’t put the bank in any worse position, and [the earnest money shows] that this is no sham,” the bank’s manager said. “In this case, there was a lot of cooperation and effort on their part. We don’t always get that in foreclosure cases.”

Annabel Hill told the media her husband “would be overjoyed with the idea that the land will be saved. Truly, I don’t believe he will have died in vain, because one of these days this land will be coming back to the Hill family, and crops will be raised on it again.”

During the 30-day option period, a donation drive to collect the $187,000 necessary to pay the debt was launched. It instantly took off, thanks in no small part to Trump’s celebrity and his connections.

“By the end of the week, we’d raised $40,000. [Don] Imus alone raised almost $20,000 by appealing to his listeners,” writes Trump in The Art of the Deal. After a successful swarm of donations the debt still stood at $78,000.

That was when Trump offered to help pay half and Dallas farmer and landowner Tom McKamy matched Trump’s offer.

“Financially this was obviously no big deal,” writes Trump in The America We Deserve. “But in human terms, there aren’t words to express what Annabel Hill gave to me. Most of us have a few things in life we would never give back, no matter what. Helping Annabel is that way for me.”

That Christmas, at the atrium of the Trump Tower, The Donald and Annabel Hill, flanked by the media and others who had donated, burned Hill’s mortgage.

“It feels wonderful, it really does — especially at this time of the year,” Hill said. ‘I’m just so grateful to these men. It’s really hard with the main person in your family gone. This kind of eases the ache a little bit.”

“It was unreal, almost like my mom was Cinderella,” Hill’s daughter Betsy told BuzzFeed News. “We couldn’t believe that we were going up to New York to actually meet Donald Trump in person and sit down and have a meal with him. He was just precious to help save our farm. It was just like we couldn’t believe it.”

“It’s nice to see that other side of a big real estate, investor and businessman to want to help such small, little unknown people,” she added.

“We give a lot of money to foreign countries that don’t give a damn about us, but we don’t help the American farmers,” Trump said.

Annabel Hill passed away at the age of 91 in 2011. She said about the motives of Trump’s charity, “the only way I can explain it was God touched his heart.”

“I would see Annabel, whether it was in church or whether, you know, out in the community and she was always saying, ‘Well, you know I’m praying for Mr. Trump, I am praying for Mr. Trump,’” Marty Baker, a pastor at the local church, told BuzzFeed News. “And she just, you know, really stayed in contact with him some and continually just prayed for him.”

“I saw a side of him that was very caring, very sincere,” Argenbright told Lost Tycoon author Henry Hurt in his book.

“He would call her up and check on her [even after the publicity died out]. There was no feeling of, ‘well, Frank, okay, you’ve done the deal. Annabel’s gone. The publicity is over with. There’s no benefit to Donald Trump now.’ Not any of that ever.”

The Hills, according to Annabel’s son, Jim, who spoke with BuzzFeed News by phone, had never heard of Trump before he called up their family.

Jim Hill said that after their farm was saved, the family became the unofficial spokespeople for farmers losing their lands to banks in foreclosure.

“She sort of kind of became the spokesperson of the entire group of farmers that committed suicide or were losing their properties or losing the remainder of their properties,” he said.

Leonard Hill, Annabel’s son, who currently lives on the farm, says the family is deeply indebted to Trump.

“I’ve got three daughters and it allowed them to grow up on the farm,” Leonard Hill told BuzzFeed News. “We have been very blessed, very blessed.”

“My wife was pregnant with our youngest daughter when Mr. Trump came into the picture, and she grew up and decided to be a lawyer and went to the Catholic law school in Washington, D.C., and probably would not have been able to do that without Mr. Trump,” he stated.

“We about lost our names, I wouldn’t even know who I was. It was a tremendous blessing.”

Donald Trump and Eminent Domain http://www.nationalreview.com/article/265171/donald-trump-and-eminent-domain-robert-verbruggen ROBERT VERBRUGGEN April 19, 2011 3:30 PM A brief history In a free market, there’s a pretty simple process for dealing with the situation that arises when one person covets another’s belongings: The coveter makes an offer to purchase them. If the offer is rebuffed, the coveter can make a new proposal, but he cannot simply take what he wants. It’s an effective way of recognizing the impracticality of the Tenth Commandment while enforcing the Eighth.
Donald Trump’s covetous nature is not in dispute, but what many may forget is that he’s no great respecter of the admonition not to steal, either: The man has a track record of using the government as a hired thug to take other people’s property.
This is called, of course, “eminent domain.” The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment allows the government to take private property for “public use,” so long as “just compensation” is paid. In the infamous 2005 Kelo decision, the Supreme Court held that “public use” could include, well, private use, so long as the new property owner paid more in taxes than the previous one. In other words, it allowed developers and the government to gang up on homeowners. The developer gets more land, the government gets more tax money. The only losers are the original owner and his property rights.
A decade and a half ago, it was fresh on everyone’s mind that Donald Trump is one of the leading users of this form of state-sanctioned thievery. It was all over the news. In perhaps the most-remembered example, John Stossel got the toupéed one to sputter about how, if he wasn’t allowed to steal an elderly widow’s house to expand an Atlantic City casino, the government would get less tax money, and seniors like her would get less “this and that.” Today, however, it takes a push from the Club for Growth to remind us of Trump’s lack of respect for property rights.
The problem dates back to at least 1994. That year, Trump promised to turn Bridgeport, Conn., into“a national tourist destination by building a $350 million combined amusement park, shipping terminal and seaport village and office complex on the east side of the harbor,” reported the Hartford Courant. “At a press conference during which almost every statement contained the term ‘world class,’ Trump and Mayor Joseph Ganim lavished praise on one another and the development project and spoke of restoring Bridgeport to its glory days.”
The wrinkle? “Five businesses and the city-owned Pleasure Beach now occupy the land,” as the Courant put it. The solution? “The city would become a partner with Trump Connecticut Inc. and obtain the land through its powers of condemnation. Trump would in turn buy the land from the city.”
Here’s how the story concluded: “The entire development would cost the city nothing, Trump said, and no private homeowners would be affected because there are no dwellings on the land. Trump would own everything.”
That brings us to the story of the aforementioned elderly widow in Atlantic City, which starts at about the same time. The woman, Vera Coking, had owned property near the Trump Plaza Hotel for three decades, and didn’t want to move. Trump thought the land was better suited for use as a park, a parking lot, and a waiting area for limousines.
He tried to negotiate, at one point offering Coking $1 million for the land. But she wasn’t budging. So New Jersey’s Casino Reinvestment Development Authority filed a lawsuit, instructing Coking to leave within 90 days and offering compensation of only $251,000.
Perhaps the only upside to this story is that in neither case did Trump succeed. The Bridgeport plan fizzled. Coking fought in court, and — in part because these were the days before Kelo was decided, no doubt — she was lucky enough to win. In 1998, a judge threw out the case.
In 2005, however, Trump was delighted to find that the Supreme Court had okayed the brand of government-abetted theft that he’d twice attempted. “I happen to agree with it 100 percent,” he told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto of the Kelo decision.
Can Republicans support someone with so little regard for the property of others? Let’s hope not. ____ I can't for a number of reasons.

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