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.

The Nasty Public Secret of trump's Failures

It's been something I've harped on a long time: how trump's reputation as a savvy businessman was all a lie when you look at his long history of bankruptcies, failed projects, and the honest-to-god killing of an entire sports league.

And now his tax returns from the 1980s and 1990s re-affirmed all of that, pointing out how trump lost more money than any other American taxpayer - even actual billionaires  - on a scale that suggests either sheer incompetence on trump's part... or blatant acts of fraud.

Consider this little tidbit about what trump did to play the Stock Markets (from Matthew Yglesias at Vox.com):

...He would secretly buy shares of stock in a company, publicly suggest he was planning to make a bid to buy the whole company, watch the share price rise in response to the Trump takeover rumors, and then sell his shares at a profit without actually doing anything.

He did this successfully with United Airlines in 1987, which led him to try it again with Hilton Hotels, Gillette, and Federated Department Stores in 1988. This was apparently a “fool me five times, shame on you” situation, however; investors caught on to the fact that Trump was running a scam, and it didn’t work anymore...

And yet from the reports we're getting, people on Wall Street figured out trump was pulling these Pump And Dumps. WHICH ARE AGAINST THE LAW. And yet... nobody charged him with sh-t while the statue of limitations were in effect. Unless the SOB has been doing it recently based on the latest tax returns trump still refuses to release, he can't be touched on the matter. Which sucks.

This is from a specific blog rant I wrote back during the 2016 campaign, about how trump developed this not-so-secret track record of screwing over his own employees and contractors to where someone, ANYONE, should have gone public with his deal-breaking and get his ass thrown in jail for it or something:

It's good that the stories are getting out there now, during a period that our voters can realize that Trump isn't a successful businessman, he's a successful thief. But it bothers me that someone like Trump was allowed to operate like this for over 40 years and got away with it. Shouldn't some requirement of business ethics DEMAND that a crook of Trump's venality be hauled into the spotlight for his sins long ago? Before it got worse?

Which all leads to this sad open secret about the law in the United States:

The law is entirely geared to favor the wealthy.

I mean, that's the whole point of the law when you think about it. Read up on the Code of Hammurabi. One of the earliest forms of codified law in Western civilization, it may have set down punishments for criminal acts but it also spelled out who owned what, the fair rate of exchange for goods and services, and other things people tended to argue over.

Every legal system is a reflection of that, and ultimately focused on one thing: How to do business. Look at your city and county ordinances. A lot of local laws focus on zoning and property rights (who owns what). Your state laws and statutes, there's a lot in there about property rights, theft protections, wages, money, regulations for business (who owns what). The US Code covers that stuff at the federal level.

When the Founders created the federal system under the Constitution, they did so because their original model of government under the Articles of Confederation did a lousy job of spelling out who owned what... and they feared the rise of mobs who would take from the rich - the Revolutionary Founders themselves - if they didn't set up a stronger system to enforce who owns what.

As a result, you ever take a good long look our legal system, you'll see there are two different rules for the poor and the rich. A lot of laws are set up to punish the poor - high bails, prison time for most low-income crimes, legal fees that a public defense can never cover - and protect the rich - lawyers on retainer to argue probation, harder standards of proof for financial fraud, etc.

Click on the link to the US Code covering Securities Fraud: it spells out penalties covering "fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than 25 years, or both." Yet in practice the fines tend to be maybe ten thousands or hundred thousands of dollars, but never the amount that the fraudsters committed, meaning a lot of them can pay off fines with their equivalent of pocket change. And jail time? Usually measured by months instead of years. If you compared a guy who stole $10 million from an investment firm who pays a $50,000 fine and spends three months in jail to a guy who stole a flatscreen TV from WalMart who has no money to pay and spends three years in jail, you see all the rewards go to the white-collar crook while the low-income crook suffers more.

You might retort "Well we're arrested fraudsters before," and yes we've seen the likes of Boesky and Madoff and Milken head to court and even some jail time, but those are the painful exceptions to the hundreds pulling lower-scale scams. They were so brazen and reckless that they were easy to catch... and in most of their cases they ripped off fellow rich folk, which is the big no-no within their circles. And even then, it took years before anyone listened to the one investigator warning the financial world about Madoff. Even then, it takes years for white collar crooks to see the inside of a courtroom.

trump should have been one of those fraudsters who crossed those lines. he lied and cheated to a lot of fellow millionaires to pretend to be one of them... and yet he was routinely let off the hook. All because we as a nation do not take financial fraud crimes serious enough.

Let's admit it. Compared to all the sins we already know trump committed. We jailed Martha Stewart for less.

No one had the balls or decency to go after trump. Until it was too late.

A Con Artist In the Red

I wrote this what feels like a lifetime ago:

Okay, I'm asking here: if you were truly worth $10 billion, wouldn't you use some of that money cashed out - in hand - to pay off said debts? I mean, $100 million is less than a percent of $10 billion: you could pay off that debt and still have $9.99 billion to your name. Done and done. One less thing to worry about.

One of Trump's selling points during the Primary campaign was that nobody could "own" him because he was so independently wealthy. But if he's in this much debt to banks - debt he hasn't paid off with a portion of billionaire wealth he's supposed to have - how can he claim that? Those banks surely own him: what would happen if they started calling in that credit he owes...?

...This needs to be an ongoing question at every press gathering, at every time Trump is at the podium: Is Donald Trump even really a billionaire?

And the answer to that, according to a New York Times report by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig coming out tonight, is NOPE.

Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition...

The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years...

trump lost so much money he actually qualified to not pay any federal taxes most of those years.

While this report doesn't cover trump's most current history - anything from 2006 onward, within the last ten years before the 2016 elections - the report demonstrates a clear and consistent pattern: donald trump was and likely still is a terrible businessman when it comes to actual management of property, casinos, sales, and other operations.

The ONLY thing trump ever seemed to be good at was selling himself - putting his name in BIG UNAVOIDABLE GOLD LETTERS everywhere - with the lie of being successful.

It was that lie - "I know what I am doing. I know how to run things." - that trump kept harping on during his presidential campaigns. For all the media disdain - and for all the warnings that kept coming from people like me, Christ I wrote this three years ago - a lot of the public had the wrongful image of trump as successful CEO. What a goddamn lie that proved to be.

The nation is still going to struggle with the horrors of this trump administration until enough Americans wake up to the reality that trump is a con artist, and that his protestations of being a success is false and grotesque.

It's just another lie from trump, America. For the LOVE OF GOD, stop believing his bullshit.

The Two Certain Things In Life: Trump Being a Con Artist and Taxes.

So the New York Times received an envelope mailed from Barad-dur Trump Tower itself, and they apparently took the time to get the papers inside that envelope vetted, and last night they released what their Sunday paper was going with on the front page:

Trump Tax Records Obtained by The Times Reveal He Could Have Avoided Paying Taxes for Nearly Two Decades

Remember the constant drum beats from Democrats, critics, certain media pundits, and pretty much most Americans that Trump should publicly release his tax records the way most candidates have done since 1968?

Remember how Trump kept throwing up excuse after excuse after lie?

"Oh, I'm being audited, rules say I can't release while I'm audited." IRS says nuh-uh, nothing stopped him from that obligation.

"It's meaningless, I'm rich, believe me." Reagan taught us to Trust But Verify, Ferret-hair.

"Oh, you won't like what you see so I just won't release them." ...Well, that turned out to be right.

Just the brief taste of revelation we're getting here - a set of state-level returns documenting the fallout of Trump's disasters in the early 1990s - is enough to raise more red flags than a mailbox vendor convention:

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period...

I don't who this is worse for: Trump, or the state and federal governments whose tax laws allow a massive black hole like $916 MILLION IN LOSSES turn into a decades-long benefit for uber-rich people. I doubt that kind of loss for a middle-income small-business owner would turn into 18 years of write-offs.

Just remember: The NYTimes reportedly has more tax returns in their possession. They just needed to release this one first because all the following tax papers require this context.

Aside from the schadenfreude of guessing just who within Trump Tower itself has betrayed their master,* this brings up a set of troubling facts:

1) This revelation demonstrates once again that the current tax code benefits the wealthy over the rest of us. The tax breaks Trump is qualifying for - even with his massive financial disasters - are simply unavailable to lesser incomes,

2) This one tax return is showing massive losses close to A BILLION DOLLARS. Given Trump's obvious habits of bankruptcies, failures, sinkholes, money pits, shell games, and additional screw-ups, how bad are the other years' returns?

3) We've had Trump running around this Presidential campaign cycle claiming he's worth $10 Billion. Yet this one tax return suggests he's lost hundreds of millions before with little evidence he's been able to reclaim any of that back (the reports of him living entirely off credit and Other's People Money become more obvious by the minute). Either he's really not worth billions of dollars - in which case he's clearly lying to EVERYBODY from the Beltway pundits to the American voters - or he's falsely reporting lost earnings to the tax collection agencies in order to scam them on the benefits of reporting these "losses". Either way, he's committing FRAUD.

This is Trump, aiming for the hat trick of stupidity, scamming, and self-aggrandizement.

Never one to apologize or admit a mistake of this scale, Trump's response to this has been to accuse the leak of being illegal and then argue via Tweet that "I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them."

Of course he knows those complex tax laws, he's been playing them like the con artist he is turning billion-dollar losses into fool's gold. But there's no way this con artist is going to fix a rigged game that benefits himself. His own tax cut proposals - killing the estate tax entirely, dropping the upper income rates to their lowest at 33 percent, and reducing corporation tax rates to an insane 15 percent - are proof of that.

I wouldn't trust Trump on taxes simply because he doesn't value them at all. He's clearly gaming the system to avoid paying as much of it as possible, and when confronted on his avoidance he smugly claims "that makes me smart."

No, Donald, that makes you a tax-dodging tiny-fingered Cheeto-faced ferret-wearing shitgibbon. And Americans DO NOT TAKE KINDLY TO TAX DODGERS.

* Personally, I got money on an elite team of high-tech accountants who performed the Heist of the Century (well, until the Wu Tang Clan and Bill Murray team up to steal their album back from PharmaBro).