The Tax Returns Cometh: ‘Trump Literally Can't Afford to Lose the Election’ -The iPINIONS Journal

[Note: This commentary was originally scheduled for publication early on Friday, October 2. But then interposed the “breaking news” that President Trump and first lady Melania had tested positive for Covid-19, and all hell broke loose. Still, talk about picking your poison. Ha!]

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Donald J. Trump set the whole world atwitter in 2015, when he descended the escalator at his Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the US presidency. But, ever since, his tax returns have loomed in American politics like the proverbial Holy Grail.

This is why The New York Times set the whole world atwitter on Sunday (September 27), when it published a “bombshell” report on 20 years of those returns. Except that reading the findings in that report was about as revealing and exciting as watching the findings in Al Capone’s vault. Remember that dud…?

No doubt the reporters who did the digging deserve kudos for finding the systemic fraud laced throughout Trump’s filings. And there’s no overstating their bottom line, namely that he is not only a serial tax cheat but easily the biggest loser in US history when it comes to business losses.

It’s just stupefying that so many news anchors and political commentators reacted to their report as if it revealed incriminating things nobody knew about Trump. Because nothing could be further from the truth.

For starters, his niece Mary and former fixer Michael Cohen headlined a cottage industry of recently released tell-alls, which – taken together – provided a pretty accurate and compelling overview of everything in this report. Not to mention that everyone in New York has known for decades that Trump was a lazy, dumb, rich kid who squandered the hundreds of millions he inherited, and then proved so inept as a businessman that he managed the arguably impossible feat of bankrupting a casino … five times.

“The house always wins” was the motto that had governed casino operations for a quarter century. Then along came Trump and made a mockery of that motto.

But one did not have to be a relative, his fixer, or even a New Yorker to know that he is

a phony and a fraud [whose] promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University; and who plays the American people for suckers.

(NPR, March 6, 2016)

That, after all, is how Republican Senator Mitt Romney, a strait-laced Mormon from Utah, publicly denounced Trump in a speech during the 2016 presidential primaries. Then, Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a one-time personification of Hispanic and immigrant pride from Florida, one-upped Romney by ridiculing Trump’s notorious insecurity about his performances – in business and in bed – during one of their primary debates.

But it was Hillary who exposed him as a high-rise grifter. And she did so during their 2016 presidential debates … when the whole world was watching. She called him out not just for paying $0 in taxes, but for routinely bilking the poor, hapless workers who labored on his luxury resorts.

She also accused Trump of being Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet. In doing so, she presaged what the Times offers as one plausible explanation for him letting this Russian dictator play him like a puppet on a string. I’m referring to findings that

Trump has to repay over $400 million in loans to undisclosed creditors over the next few years; and
his investments are hemorrhaging so many millions that he has no conceivable way of making those repayments … without further compromising his personal finances and our national security.

(More on his compromising situation later.)

As is so often the case, however, nobody betrayed his personal and professional liabilities more than Trump himself. Exhibit A: He misused donations to his charitable foundation for personal use so egregiously, it led inexorably to this humiliation:

‘The Trump Foundation has shut down, funds that were illegally misused are being restored, the president will be subject to ongoing supervision by my office, and the Trump children had to undergo compulsory training to ensure this type of illegal activity never takes place again,’ New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office filed the case, said in a statement.

(NPR, November 7, 2019)

I actually called on New York authorities to do just this in ““Forget the Clinton Foundation. Shut Down the Trump Organization,” August 26, 2016. But, if Trump were a bona-fide billionaire whose investments generate over $500 million in profits annually – as he claims, he clearly would not have been embezzling charitable donations in this grubby fashion.

Incidentally, this puts into perspective the much ado Trump makes each quarter of donating his presidential salary to charity. Because his tax returns reveal the bait-and-switch behind him doing so. But I denounced this fraud in “Trump, Jared, and Ivanka Foregoing Salaries Is Just Another Bait and Switch,” on April 3, 2017, and again just months ago in “Trump Forgoes Salary Only to Enrich Himself in Other Ways a Thousandfold,” on February 26, 2020.

The point is that, given the way anchors and commentators reacted to this Times report, you’d never know that any of the above was already a matter of public record. But, truth be told, the reason I’m so frustrated is that, as I have already shown to some degree, this report merely confirms what I’ve been writing and warning about for years. So please bear with me.

Much is being made these days about how Trump ridicules people who serve in the military as suckers. But I telegraphed this ridicule – with respect to his business practices – in prescient and ironic fashion nearly a decade ago. The following excerpt from “Trump for President, Don’t Be a Sucker” on April 8, 2011, attests to this:

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Donald Trump is nothing more than the P.T. Barnum of business: a huckster who thrives on the maxim that ‘there’s a sucker born every minute.’ Now he seems to believe that being rich is the only qualification he needs to be president of the United States:

Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich.

(New York Post, March 17, 2011)

You’ve probably seen him on TV waxing heroic about turning the millions he inherited from his daddy into a garish real-estate empire that would make an Egyptian Pharaoh blush. Never mind that he had to rely repeatedly on bankruptcy protection (three times in six years in the case of Trump Hotels alone) to save his corporate hide.

Sadly, far too many people think Trump would make a good president. They are the suckers to whom he could sell swampland as beachfront property, or a discredited degree from Trump University as even better than an accredited one from Harvard.

Mind you, it’s not as if he’s pulling the wool over their eyes. After all, he makes clear that his foray into presidential politics is just for personal ego and financial enrichment. He does this by continually talking about his campaign platform as if he were a cross between a right-wing shock jock and a snake-oil salesman.

This is nothing more than an opportunistic way for Trump to generate interest in his reality-TV show and increase value for the Trump brand. And no gimmick – even running for president of the United States – is beyond him in this respect. However, that he is fashioning himself as a born-again conservative – after supporting mostly liberal causes for much of his life – indicates that he’s only doing what is good for him, not what is good for his country.

_________

Again, that was nearly 10 years ago, folks. And no less a person than Cohen, Trump’s former fixer referenced above, affirmed every word of it in his confessional tell-all, Disloyal. Specifically, Cohen writes that Trump finally launched a presidential campaign in 2015 as nothing more than “the biggest branding infomercial” in the history of marketing. Further, that this is why nobody was more surprised when he won than Trump himself.

Unfortunately, we’ve all been paying the price for his reality-TV stunt ever since.

But, to bookend what I wrote in 2011, here is how I characterized Trump’s criminal enterprise masquerading as a family business just last year in “Becoming President Proving Worst Business Deal Trump Ever Made,” May 19, 2019:

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No doubt you saw promos for The Trump Family Business that ran last week. CNN finally aired it on Friday night.

But I hope you had better things to do. Because another report on shady dealings in the Trump Organization could be no more informative than another one on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Reviews indicate that CNN featured case after case where Trump got millions to license his name for condo developments he never developed – despite his now-trademark hype. His scams left countless investors high and dry while he made off with their down payments.

But scamming investors, whether condo purchasers or money lenders, has been standard practice in the Trump family business for decades. Indeed, there’s no denying Trump’s genius for using other people’s money to enrich himself (as he is now doing with taxpayers’ money).

News flash! The Trump family business is little more than a Ponzi scheme built inside a house of cards. The Madoffs had nothing on the Trumps.

The wonder is that Trump could always get far too many people to buy his shtick hook, line, and sinker. Exhibit A: He got enough of them to elect him president of the United States, which will live in infamy as the biggest scam in history.

_________

Admittedly, I was losing faith that this day would come. But only because I was continually assuring friends that someone is bound to leak Trump’s tax returns before Election Day. That’s why this Times report made me feel more vindicated than gratified.

For the record, it makes patently clear that Trump has been hiding his returns all these years because he knew his freedom depended on doing so. Nonetheless, I cannot overstate that the details in this report are not important.

Indeed, reading the main and subheadlines from Sunday’s edition of the Times should have merely punctuated all you should have known about this shyster:

TRUMP’S TAXES SHOW CHRONIC LOSSES AND YEARS OF TAX AVOIDANCE
President Trump paid no U.S. income tax for much of the past two decades
Financial pressure on the president is only growing
He received more money from foreign sources than was known
Vast write-offs help fuel a gilded life

And reading similar headlines from Drudge Report, the most widely read blog on the Internet, should have provided nothing more than comic relief, even if redolent with schadenfreude:

CAN’T AFFORD TO LOSE: TRUMP OWES $421M
Fake Billionaire
Watchdog Claims campaign ‘Laundering’ money
[Campaign manager] Parscale threatens suicide: 10 guns taken

Except that, even though tragic, that Parscale headline reflects consciousness of guilt (or chickens coming home to roost):

Brad Parscale, senior digital adviser for the Trump campaign and former campaign manager, was involuntarily hospitalized after his wife told police in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Sunday afternoon that Parscale had access to weapons and was threatening to harm himself.

(NPR, September 28, 2020)

Reportedly, the Federal Election Commission is investigating him for laundering $170 million while serving as Trump’s campaign manager. More to the point, though, Parscale’s breakdown comes less than two weeks after another of his consiglieri suffered the same:

Michael Caputo, a top Trump administration communications official who in a private online social media video accused government scientists of ‘sedition’ and called on the president’s supporters to arm themselves ahead of the election, announced in a statement Tuesday that he’s taking temporary medical leave from the Department of Health and Human Services.

(ABC News, September 16, 2020)

And I suspect other aides will have similar breakdowns when their responsibility for enabling Trump’s mercenary presidential campaign and dystopian presidency finally dawns on them. Think, for example, of the way the whole world watched counselor Kellyanne Conway’s family fall apart on social media. The highlight (or lowlight) featured her 15-year-old daughter TikToking stories about Conway being more interested in her proximity to power than in caring for her own children … before sharing that she wants to be “emancipated.”

Conway resigned her White House position last month to give her children “less drama, more mama.”

Except that these notorious breakdowns only hint at the number of swamp creatures who have left the Trump administration with their reputations in tatters. And they’re the lucky ones. Because there’s a rogues’ gallery of others who have left his side to go straight to jail.

This is why, with all due respect to every political tell-all and journalistic report, the most relevant publication on the Trump presidency is contained in just the title of Rick Wilson’s book, Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever.

But, trust me, if Trump had any conscience, he would’ve suffered a breakdown long ago. He might have even threatened suicide. But we all know he’s too cowardly and narcissistic to kill himself.

Still, I’d be remiss not to comment on how the Times documented the hypocrisy inherent in Trump cheating so brazenly on his taxes. I have repeatedly observed, and Trump has repeatedly proved, that he suffers a congenital inclination to project onto others things he knows he himself is guilty of. This, coupled with his buffoonish use of the “Big Lie,” compose the strategy for every success (and failure) he has had in life.

For example, he has repeatedly accused others of being tax cheats. Yet the Times reports that Trump has avoided paying a single penny in taxes for at least 10 of the past 15 years. Further, that, when becoming president compelled him to pay in 2016 and 2017, it amounted to only $750 each year, which is 10 times less than the average fireman, school teacher, or construction worker paid.

Given that, how’s this for two truly taxing cases of projection (aka hypocrisy):

Half of Americans don’t pay income tax despite crippling govt debt.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 23, 2012

@Barack Obama who wants to raise all of our taxes, only pays 20.5% on $790k salary. Do as I say not as I do.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2012

Not to mention how he is repeatedly accusing

BLM protesters of wanting to defund the police to make it easier for them to commit crimes; after all, this diabolical SOB has been defunding the IRS to make it easier for him and other one-percenters to evade paying taxes; or
Democrats of rigging the election to steal certain victory from him; after all, he is openly championing a campaign of voter suppression and intimidation in minority communities from coast to coast.

A search of this blog, using the word “projection,” will result in pages of commentaries on point dating back to when I first diagnosed this psychopathology in 2016 – as my commentary cited above on the Clinton Foundation and Trump Organization attests.

In any event, the most significant thing about this and the forthcoming reports the Times previewed is that they presage the legal jeopardy that awaits Trump. Here is how The Week framed this prospect on Sunday:

It isn’t a new idea that President Trump is better at playing a billionaire on TV than earning enough money to be one in real life.

But ‘the picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise, deep in debt with the bill coming due, the Times reports. That raises the troubling question of whether Trump can literally afford to lose power on Nov. 3 — and what he might do to prevent an electoral defeat and financial ruin.

But I scooped this reporting too. Because I framed this prospect in my September 18 commentary on the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I did so in the context of suggesting how Republicans can get their conservative replacement on the Supreme Court and, at long last, disavow Trump to save their souls:

This they can do by taking his conservative justice and still sending him back where he came from — namely back to what has become a gilded cage in the sky above New York City. There he would anxiously await state prosecutors who he knows are chomping at the bit to indict him on a battery of charges related to fraud and tax evasion.

Incidentally, you’d be forgiven for thinking the fate that befell Leona Hemsley is the most relevant precedent. After all, like Trump, she was a New York property developer and hotel magnate. And, like him, she thought only suckers paid taxes. But she ended up spending some of the last years of her life in prison, serving time for tax evasion.

Here, in part, is how I referenced her precedent-setting trial in “’Leaked ‘Panama Papers’ Affirm more than Reveal Offshore Banking Secrets,” April 6, 2016:

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During Leona Helmsley’s notorious trial for tax evasion in 1989, one of her employees testified to her abiding belief that, ‘Rich people don’t pay taxes. Only poor people pay taxes.’ Trust me, folks, this revealed the perversely entitled motto that far too many rich people still live by.

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But Trump is too myopic to look that far back, and too egocentric to look that far outside his own sycophantic retinue. This is why the fate that befell his aforementioned fixer Cohen is more instructive. And, sure enough, Cohen has been all over TV providing that instruction.

Specifically, he notes that New York authorities convicted him of tax evasion despite the fact that he paid an average of $1.5 million in taxes each year, not $750 like Trump. He was sentenced to 3 years in prison and required to pay nearly $2 million in restitution and fines. And Cohen bemoans the irony that he got all that for perpetrating what the sentencing judge called a “veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct”… all in furtherance of Trump’s shady dealings.

This is why Cohen warns that Trump can expect New York authorities to find enough in his tax returns to convict him, sentence him to 300 years in prison, and require him to pay $200 million in restitution and fines.

Apropos of which, Trump has made no secret of his affinity for dictators. Therefore, it might seem fitting that he’s now facing the dictator’s dilemma, namely

Whether tis better to execute increasingly repressive measures (e.g., poisoning opposition leaders) to stay in power, or to relinquish power and risk ending up in jail.

His die-hard apologists would have you believe he’s only joking when he talks about emulating Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi by serving as president for life. But he’s deadly serious. Like Cohen, David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s former campaign advisor, was all over TV this week. And he made no attempt to hide his schadenfreude while pointing out that the White House has become Trump’s safe house.

In any event, now you know why Trump is cheating in plain sight to win this election. But, ominously, now you also know why he’s behaving like a cornered feral dog. The problem, of course, is that he has his paws on power that could destroy the world.

Indeed, one can hardly blame the world for watching with existential angst as the tragic farce that is the Trump presidency plays out. Because everyone knows that Trump’s egocentrism is such that he’d sooner destroy the world than pay for his crimes.

Naturally, he would use his presidential power to pardon himself if he could. But here is how I pooh-pooed that prospect in my September 8 commentary on former FBI agent Peter Strzok’s tell all:

Cohen suggests that Trump should resign and have Pence pardon him. The problem with that is that the presidential pardon power does not cover state criminal charges. And those are the ones now hanging over Trump’s head like a Damoclean sword.

Accordingly, we are going to witness a dangerous spectacle over the next few weeks – his testing positive yesterday for Covid-19 notwithstanding. Because Trump seems hell-bent on doing things to hold onto power that would make his puppet master Putin not only proud but green with envy.

As indicated above, this Times report did not reveal who owns the hundreds of millions in debt Trump owes. But I’m on record offering informed speculation that Putin must be holding either much of that debt or salacious information over his head. I refer you in this regard to “Trump Framing FBI, Appeasing Russia. Treasonous?” February 1, 2018, “Helsinki Summit: Trump Hails Russian Propaganda, Rejects American Intelligence,” July 17, 2018, and “‘Putin Told Me,’ Said Trump, His ‘Useful Idiot,’” December 21, 2019.

In other words, this president of the United States appears fatally compromised. This is the all too predictable result of his foreign entanglements. Which, of course, is precisely what the Framers feared when they included the Emoluments Clause in the US Constitution.

Mind you, Republicans used to preach the catechism of national security as an article of political faith. Therefore, you’d think this report would have compelled them to stop their rush to confirm Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court and call for his immediate impeachment.

Unfortunately, Trump has cowered them into sacrificing every ounce of their political integrity at the altar of his ambition. Therefore, none of them could care any less that he is a clear and present danger to national security.

What’s more, he’s still enjoying the undying support of every member of the base that elected him in 2016. This, despite championing policies throughout his presidency that have been inimical to their basic interest. Exhibit A: He’s in federal court seeking authority to strip them of their healthcare in the midst of this Covid-19 pandemic.

Not to mention revelations showing that he holds them in utter contempt. Exhibit A: A disillusioned White House staffer reporting that she witnessed him express relief that the pandemic means he no longer has to shake hands with the “disgusting” people who risk their lives to attend his campaign rallies.

But it is clearly dawning on Trump that his die-hard base is not sufficient to re-elect him. This is why he’s resorting to desperate measures (like scaremongering and voter suppression) to save his hide. Gleefully, this Times report makes saving his face now a lost cause. Which means that this irrepressible narcissist might already be suffering a fate worse than death. (Hee, hee, hee …)

Still, coming full circle, perhaps now you can see why I warned nearly two years ago that becoming president might prove the worst business deal this chronically bad businessman has ever made. Not least because this report confirms what his presidency has made plain for the world to see, namely that Trump’s career-defining boast about being the master of The Art of the Deal, is the biggest Big Lie of them all.

Epilogue

It is hardly bombshell news that Trump spent much of his adult life playing a fake, rude billionaire. The only wonder is that Trump always got far too many people to buy his shtick hook, line, and sinker. Exhibit A: He got enough of them to elect him president of the United States – a feat that will live in infamy as the biggest scam in history.

Nor is it bombshell news that Trump is using his presidency to enrich himself like no other president ever contemplated, let alone dared. This ranges from getting foreign potentates and their retinues to stay at his hotel in Washington, DC to charging taxpayers to house his own secret service detail every time he spends weekends golfing … at one of his own golf resorts.

But this is why the irony afoot is so rich. Because, despite these money-grubbing efforts, Trump seems bound to lose more money during his presidency than any other president in history. Even worse, he seems bound for prison – as his fraudulent business practices come home to roost.

Like I said, becoming president might be the worst deal he ever made. And Trump seems bound to be the first man in history to rue the day he was ever elected president of the United States.