The Last Con of donald trump

This ending may yet include bangs - especially if trump's mobs decide to try their rioting on state capitols this weekend - but by most measures donald trump's empire is about to end with a whimper. Let us refer to Jonathan Chait's overview of trump's troubles over at the New York Intelligencer: 

...But now, finally, the end is at hand. Trump is suffering a series of wounds that, in combination, are likely to be fatal after Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20. Trump is obviously going to surrender his office. Beyond that looming defeat, he is undergoing a cascading sequence of political, financial, and legal setbacks that cumulatively spell utter ruin. Trump is not only losing his job but quite possibly everything else.

One crisis, though the most opaque, concerns Trump’s business. Many of his sources of income are drying up, either owing to the coronavirus pandemic or, more often, his toxic public image. The Washington Post has toted up the setbacks facing the Trump Organization, which include cancellations of partnerships with New York City government, three banks, the PGA Championship, and a real-estate firm that handled many of his leasing agreements. Meanwhile, he faces the closure of many of his hotels. And he is staring down two defamation lawsuits. Oh, and Trump has to repay, over the next four years, more than $300 million in outstanding loans he personally guaranteed...

If this were still 2015, Trump could fall back on his tried-and-true income generators: money laundering and tax fraud. The problem is that his business model relied on chronically lax enforcement of those financial crimes. And now he is under investigation by two different prosecutors in New York State for what appear to be black-letter violations of tax law. At minimum, these probes will make it impossible for him to stay afloat by stealing more money. At maximum, he faces the serious risk of millions of dollars in fines or a criminal prosecution that could send him to prison.

Trump reportedly plans to pardon himself along with a very broad swath of his hangers-on. But a pardon hardly solves his problems. For one thing, a federal pardon is useless against state-level crimes. For another, the self-pardon is a theoretical maneuver that’s never been tested, and it’s not clear whether the courts will agree it is even possible to do so.

And what’s more, a pardon might constitute an admission of guilt, which could open up Trump to more private lawsuits. Remember how O. J. Simpson was ordered to pay $34 million to the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, even after he beat the murder rap? The families of victims of the January 6 riot might well sue Trump for his role in inciting the violence. Trump might try pardoning himself to make sure he can’t be charged with criminal incitement, but admitting the crime makes it even easier to bring a civil suit against him.

The easiest way out of the self-pardon dilemma would be for Trump to make a deal with Mike Pence, under which he would resign before leaving office and Pence would grant him a pardon. Unfortunately for Trump, Pence is still sore about the whole “whipping up a paramilitary mob to lynch him” episode. ABC reported recently that Trump does not want to resign, in part because he doesn’t trust his vice-president to pardon him.

The assumption until now has always been that Trump wouldn’t really be convicted of crimes or sentenced to prison, despite the fairly clear evidence of his criminality. American ex-presidents don’t go to jail; they go on book tours.

That supposition wasn’t wrong, exactly. It rested on the understanding of a broad norm of legal deference to powerful public officials and an understanding of the dangers of criminalizing political disagreement. But what has happened to Trump in the weeks since the election, and especially since the insurrection, is that he has been stripped of his elite impunity. The displays of renunciation by corporate donors and Republican officials, even if they lack concrete authority, have sent a clear message about Donald Trump’s place in American society...

I have written before on this blog during his campaign and then in the aftermath of 2016 that this - his run for high office, his tenure as President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) - was it for him, the last con job in a string of con jobs he'd been running since his days as a racist landlord.

Everything about trump - the pandering and yelling toward the media to PAY ATTENTION TO ME, branding his name atop every property he could get his hands on, the grifting, the cheap products, the fake online university, the broken casinos, the busted sports league, the overall drive to promote himself as a success with every failure trailing in his wake - was about feeding his ego and satiating his greed. Neither of which could be served with each endeavor he undertook, even the only successful thing he truly had, a barely entertaining reality TV show that was as fake as he still is.

Getting into the White House was the next big con in his game. Oh sure, the talk is that he hoped to lose to Hillary in 2016 and then use the outrage from that to market his own cable "news" network to rival Fox's. But he had to know there was a risk he'd win, which the Electoral College did for him, and which led to his gleeful abuse of high office to line his own pockets some more.

And like every other con game trump played out, he had no idea what he was getting himself into and how poorly he was going to mismanage the whole thing. Four years of it, surrounding himself with a rotating parade of Yes men (and women) alongside other con artists using his administration to pull their own fleecing. Anyone halfway competent at their job didn't last more than a year. Anyone who conflicted with trump's graft and schemes found themselves isolated, banished, and fired.

There are so many points of corruption in trump's tenure it reaches further past what I can comprehend from where I sit watching it all: The violations of Emoluments Clauses using his hotel properties to entice foreign lobbyists to stay at his places and pay him the honor of doing so; Forcing Secret Service and other government agents to stay at his resorts at overbilled rates; Handing out no-bid contracts to business allies with hints of kickbacks; basically trump and his family ripping off taxpayers at every opportunity to indulge in God-knows-what... 

And then failing to realize that sooner rather than later trump will be out of the Oval Office and unable to hide all of the con jobs he pulled during his tenure. Even if trump HAD stolen his second term away from trump, there was no sign that trump would actually start managing his lifestyle habits any better in terms of what he needed to do.

Every trump con, where he jumped from one deal to another, seemed like he was trying to keep two or three steps ahead of creditors that he kept borrowing money from in order to keep his failing empire of half-abandoned resorts and buildings open. Even before the pandemic hit the tourist (and resort) industry, trump properties were deep in the red. trump had been living on credit even as President Loser of the Popular Vote, yet it never seemed like trump was using his corrupt practices to pay off those bills. You'd think that someone with 300 million dollars in guaranteed loans - as Chait pointed out earlier - would make an effort to pay those loans back.

It's as though trump thought - still thinks - he can keep using this big con job of being President Loser of the Popular Vote to extend his deadline, spin out his dues to another day, another year.

trump rarely had to pay for the bills that piled up on him. Sure, he filed for bankruptcy often enough - at least four or six you can find on Google searches - but those were his businesses, never his own ass. trump could walk away from them and still imagine himself - lie to himself - as a success story. "Aha, I tricked the courts into buying my sob story," trump probably mused, "now I can use that as a means to start a new business and find more suckers to finance me."

But he's now at a point where bankruptcy court can't save him. While his properties and business holdings are likely facing financial ruin as before, this time trump is now a direct target to fail. trump's flaunted too many rules, crossed too many lines, failed to pay his dues in ways that demand legal retribution... and he's running out of lawyers and legal loopholes to save him.

trump is facing legal matters that can hit his own person. The sexual assault and defamation lawsuits. Criminal investigations into his Emoluments violations launched by either a fully-led Democratic Congress or by Biden's Justice Department (maybe a special prosecutor backed by both branches), still needed after years of courts arguing over who had standing to sue on the Emoluments (with majority control of Congress, Dems now have a chance). State criminal investigations as mentioned by Chait and so many others, not just the tax evasion in New York but now elections interference in Georgia and elsewhere.

These are things that are going to stop trump from moving on, finding another con job or tricking potential business partners into another half-baked venture to promote his name in big gold letters.

I kept saying this was it for trump, because this was too big a con job to pull off. trump in the Executive Branch was too high-profile and too disastrous with his inept bankrupt leadership to lead to anything else.

It was too big for trump to resign early on when he had a chance to escape. It was too big for trump to risk self-pardons on (because the exposure of accepting his own pardon would be an admission of crimes, and likely doomed to fail even in Republican-led courts). It was too big for trump to moderate himself and avoid any stupid efforts at overreach, to avoid committing any further crimes that would trap him once he left the legal protections of the Oval Office.

And now it's too late for him. trump is stuck in a trap of his own making, and he can't charm or bully or bluff his way out now. trump's made too many enemies in too many places, and he's running out of resources - money obviously, but allies and cronies especially - he can rely on to survive.

This is it for trump. No more con jobs. No more social media assaults. he's done.

And good riddance.