Figuring Out Trump (But Not Really) Plus-- All The President's Taxes

 

While I was working on this post, the NY Times dropped the bombshell opus on Trump's taxes. Who better than Dorothy Reik, President of the Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica Mountains, to deal with the fact that Donald pays less in taxes than the millions of people who are unemployed due to his criminal mishandling of the pandemic? So... ladies first:

All The President's Taxes
-by Dorothy Reik

Just as I was trying to wrap my head around the two latest books exposing the criminal in the White House, White House, Inc. by Dan Alexander and Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis, an alert popped up on my phone from the NY Times. They had the goods-- the tax records Donald Trump has been hiding for the last two decades.

He is right about one thing-- he is under audit and has been for years-- over a tax deduction he took-- $72.9 million-- for abandoning his losing casinos but the deduction is illegal of he received anything in return and he did. The payback to the American taxpayers is over $100M. But the big headline is that Trump paid only $750 in taxes in the year he was elected and the year after. Everyone understands that! And for ten years he paid NO taxes due to a $900 million loss which he was able to "carry forward" for ten years.

Digging further we learn-- as I posited years ago-- that he is cozying up to tyrannical murderers because he has investments in their countries to protect-- the Philippines, Turkey and India are cited in this first installment. I wrote then that he also covets beach front properties in North Korea-- which he admitted. This is the most chilling yet least surprising revelation. The NY Times promises to dribble out more during the weeks to come a la the Hillary emails project.

Another fun fact is that he deducted "consulting fees" for projects that required no such services. The exact amounts of the deductions showed up in Ivanka's financial statements even though she was employed by the entity taking the deduction. My friend just called to suggest Ivanka and Jared head to temple early to start atoning but I think their sins call for a walk to the sea.

They should start now. It's a long walk from their mansion. Whether the Atlantic is big enough to wash away their sins is a question for Jewish scholars. How they allowed Ivanka to convert is another one.

More fun-- entities looking to do business with the government are renting space in Donald's office buildings in Manhattan and San Francisco. They are getting contracts worth many multiples of the rent they are paying.

Donald also has about $400 million in personally guaranteed loans coming due in the next four years and the gravy train of payouts from The Apprentice has stopped.  When asked about the report at his press conference the Donald labeled it "fake news" and walked off.

Maybe Chris Wallace needs to reconsider his questions for Tuesday.

Cousins? Distant

Louisiana is number 1. Louisiana has the most cases per million residents (35,262) in the U.S.-- which is also more than any country in the world, other than make-believe countries like Qatar and Arbua. In 2016 Trump won big in Louisiana-- 1,178,638 (58.1%) to 780,154 (38.4%). Of Louisiana's 64 parishes, Trump won 54. And in those 54 parishes, the folks heard Trump call the pandemic a hoax and they heard him belting people who wear masks or who practice social distancing. The worst hit county in the parish in the state is Jefferson-- Trump territory. It's mostly white and Trump beat Hillary there 55.3% to 40.5%. Jefferson Parish has 17,459 cases... but every single parish in the state has cases. Some are spiking very badly now. On Friday Caddo, Lincoln, Lafayette and West Feliciana led the way in new cases. Hillary won 50% of the votes in Caddo but those are parishes... Trump country.

Though the state elected a Democratic governor-- his election and reelection were outliers. The state Senate consists of 27 Republicans and 12 Democrats. The state House consists of 68 Republicans, 35 Democrats and 2 independents. The Louisiana Democratic Party is a hot mess. Yesterday PBS broadcast a focus on how the party is struggling to stay relevant.

Natasha Williams from Louisiana Public Broadcasting explains that rural voters are Trump's base in the state. "The Democrats," she said, "basically have lost a lot of the rural voters because in their estimation, rural voters feel like the Democratic Party has gone too big. They've gone to big city politics and they basically deal with issues that don't pertain to rural voters."

The Trumpist Secretary of State attempted to promulgate rules that would make it harder-- and in some cases impossible-- for voters to vote by mail. He was shot down by a federal judge who, said Williams, "stopped just short of saying that this was a political move and we are going to not put people in danger while politics kind of rears its ugly head in mail-in voting as well."

Louisiana is very concerned about healthcare and jobs. Education is also a big deal here. A lot of folks are really kind of struggling with the pandemic. You know, how do I pay my bills? How do my kids get a good education? How will I maintain and get what I need for my family?

...[I]n New Orleans in fact, even though we're in phase three, a lot of New Orleans is still closed down. The governor has been very sensitive to the fact that people want to go back to work. We need to open our economy. But also gauging those numbers, watching those numbers. And anywhere you go, you see evidence that the state is trying to indicate to you, we're not out of the woods yet. We need to do what we can to kind of, you know, keep that curve going in the right direction.

The only current polling I've seen in Louisiana was about oil ad gas drilling but they did ask some election questions. Trump's approval has fallen by 10 points, although it's still 51% approve/45 disapprove. And when they asked who people will vote for-- 48% Trump, 42% Biden, a serious erosion for Trump since 2016.

How could that be happening? Andrew Sullivan had an idea about how, generally speaking, on his blog last night. He compared Trump-- a would-be tyrant-- to Shakespeare’s fictional Richard III. "Denial. Avoidance. Distraction. Willful ignorance. These are all essential to enabling a tyrant’s rise," wrote Sullivan. "And keeping this pattern going is Richard’s profound grasp of the power of shock. He does and says the unexpected and unthinkable in order to stun his opponents into a kind of dazed passivity. It’s this capacity to keep you on your heels, to keep disorienting you with the unacceptable (which is then somehow accepted), that marks a tyrant’s relentless drive. He does this by instinct. He craves chaos, lies, suspense, surprises-- not because he’s a genius, but because stability threatens his psyche. He cannot rest. He is not in control of himself. And whenever the dust settles, as it were, he has to disturb it again.

This is what we’ve been dealing with in the figure of Donald Trump now for five years, and it is absurd to believe that a duly conducted election is going to end it. I know, I know. I’m hysterical and over-the-top and a victim of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Trump is simply too incompetent and too lazy to be an actual tyrant, I’m constantly scolded. He’s just baiting me again. And so on. But what I think this otherwise salient critique misses is that tyranny is not, in its essence, about the authoritarian and administrative skills required to run a country effectively for a long time. Tyrants, after all, are often terrible at this. It is rather about a mindset, as the ancient philosophers understood, with obvious political consequences. It’s a pathology. It requires no expertise in anything other than itself.

You need competence if you want to run an effective government, or plan a regular campaign, or master policy with a view to persuading people, or hold power for the sake of something else. You need competence to create and sustain something. But you do not need much competence to destroy things. You just need the will. And this is what tyrants do: they destroy things. Richard III ruled for two short years, ending in his own death in battle, and a ruined country.

This is Trump’s threat. Not the construction of a viable one-party state, but the destruction of practices, norms, civility, laws, customs and procedures that constitute liberal democracy’s non-zero-sum genius. He doesn’t need to be competent to destroy our system of government. He merely needs to be himself: an out-of-control, trust-free, malignant narcissist, with inexhaustible resources of psychic compulsion, in a pluralist system designed for the opposite. All you need is an insatiable pathological drive to avoid any constraint on your own behavior, and the demagogic genius to carry a critical mass of people with you, and our system, designed as the antidote to tyranny, is soon unspooling into incoherence, deadlock, and collapse.

I’m told he’s been ineffective even as a tyrant, so no worries. To which I can only say: really? Once you realize he doesn’t give a shit about any actual policies, apart from doing all he can to wipe the legacy of Barack Obama from planet earth, he’s been pretty competent. Note how he turned Congressional subpoenas into toilet paper; how he crippled and muzzled the Mueller inquiry; how he installed a crony at the Department of Justice to pursue his political enemies and shield him from the law; how effectively he stymied impeachment; how he cucked every previous Republican opponent; how he helped destroy the credibility of news sources that oppose him; how he filled his cabinet with acting secretaries and flunkies; how he declared fake emergencies to claim the power of the purse assigned to the Congress; and how he has reshaped the Supreme Court with potentially three new Justices, whom he sees solely as his loyal stooges if he comes up against the rule of law.

And gotten away with all of it!

In protecting his own power over others, he has been as competent as hell. Imagine where we’d be in four more years. Despite a mountain of criticism, he has not conceded a single error, withdrawn a single statement, or acknowledged a single lie. His party lost the mid-terms, but seriously, what difference did that make? His control of the Republican party, and his cult-like grip on the base, has never been greater than now. Yes, he has said and done racially polarizing things-- but the joke is he may yet have more support from blacks and Latinos in 2020 than he did in 2016. Think of his greatest policy failures: the appalling loss of life in the Covid epidemic and the collapse of law and order in the cities. Now recall that on February 1 of this year, Trump was at 43.4 percent approval; 200,000 deaths later, and the wreckage from Seattle to Portland to Minneapolis, and his approval today is at 43.1 percent.

This is, of course, not enough to win re-election. And Trump has no interest in broadening his appeal, because it would dilute the tribalism he feeds off. So he has made it abundantly clear that if the results of the election show him the loser, he will not accept them. Simple, really. He said this in 2016, of course, refusing to honor the result in advance. But this year, he has stumbled upon something quite marvelous for his purposes. Because of Covid19, it is likely that mail-in ballots will be far higher in number than before, and, as Barton Gellman has shown in this essential new piece, this gives Trump an opportunity he has instinctively seized. He has been saying for months now that: “MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE... WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR GREAT NATION.” In late summer, Gellman noted, Trump was making this argument four times a day: “Very dangerous for our country.” “A catastrophe.” “The greatest rigged election in history.” He is telling us loud and clear that, if he has anything to do with it, this election will not be decided at the ballot box, but at the Supreme Court, which he expects to control.

...All he wants is chaos, because in chaos, the strong leader wins. Would he incite violence on his behalf if the votes seem to be drifting away from him? You bet he would. Would he urge his supporters to physically prevent ballot-counting? He already has. Would he try to corral Republican state legislators to back him in electing electors? Gellman has sources. Would he take this country to the brink of civil conflict? Way past it. Will anyone in the GOP do anything to stop him? We know the answer to that already. If they cannot condemn him this week, when would they? And he will do all this not out of some strategic calculation or tactical skill but because he cannot do anything else. He is psychologically incapable of conceding anything. And he has no understanding of collateral damage because his narcissism precludes it.