Trump, the Successful, "Populist" Business Man

[homersapien 11,440]

I will fight for all you common man, hard working MAGAs against the elite, establishment.

Drain the swamp!

 

".........On Thursday, a judge in New York ordered Trump, along with his daughter Ivanka and his son Donald Jr., to testify within 21 days at civil depositions in the New York attorney general’s investigation of potential fraud at the Trump Organization. The judge’s opinion brutally rejected Trump’s arguments for blocking the depositions: It would have been “blatant dereliction of duty” for the attorney general not to take the testimony, the judge explained, because prosecutors have unearthed “copious evidence of possible financial fraud” in Trump’s business.

That evidence includes a letter that might turn out to be, as a practical matter, the biggest blow Trump has ever suffered, even bigger than his six corporate bankruptcies and two presidential impeachments. A blow dealt not by prosecutors, plaintiffs, politicos or the press — but by his own longtime accountants.

As the judge noted, and as revealed in court papers filed on Monday by the attorney general, Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, sent a letter on Feb. 9 to the Trump Organization terminating its relationship with Trump. The letter was astounding in many respects.

Mazars said that 10 years of Trump’s financial statements, from 2011 to 2020, “should no longer be relied upon,” and that Trump should tell that to the people he gave them to. The accountants explained that they reached this conclusion based upon court filings previously made by the New York attorney general, as well as the accountants’ own investigation and other sources.

Dana Milbank: We need a ‘Mazars warning’ on everything Trump says

And then they quit. Under the “totality of the circumstances,” Mazars wrote, “we have also reached the point such that there is a non-waivable conflict of interest with the Trump Organization. As a result, we are not able to provide any new work product to the Trump Organization.” Oh, and by the way, Donald and Melania’s tax returns are due in four business days — but, hey, we promise “to facilitate a smooth transition to your new tax preparers.” Best regards, Mazars."

Translated from legal-accountingese, the letter was an unmitigated disaster for Trump, far beyond his possibly having to file late returns. By saying the statements “should no longer be relied upon,” the accountants effectively announced, You misled us. By “totality of the circumstances,” they likely meant, The prosecutors investigating you, and the case they’re making, are serious.

By pronouncing “a non-waivable conflict of interest,” they were all but saying, We’re on team A.G. — or we might have to join someday soon. And by saying no “new work product” and quitting, they essentially declared, We don’t trust you — and we’re certainly not going to jail for you.

All this could threaten Trump’s livelihood — his all-important mogulhood — in a way no setback ever has before. Even a guilty verdict in a Senate impeachment trial would have affected only his entitlement to temporary government housing. And when he ran into financial trouble in the 1980s and ’90s, he had legions of lawyers and accountants to help him work things out with the banks and the courts.

Now the man who long has had trouble finding decent legal representation might find it all but impossible to find new auditors and tax preparers. It’s hard to imagine that any reputable accounting firm will touch his tax returns, let alone fix and bless his financials for a decade or more.

Even if lenders don’t exercise any rights they might have to call in their loans, Trump apparently still needs to refinance hundreds of millions’ worth of them soon. As Trump biographer Timothy L. O’Brien of Bloomberg Opinion puts it, “Good luck refinancing your debt when the accountants” — who have just declared a decade of your financials utterly worthless — have “just walked out the door.”

So Trump would face a heap of problems even if the New York attorney general (and the Manhattan district attorney she’s working with) closed up shop tomorrow. No wonder Trump’s son Eric was all but crying when he mentioned the prosecutors this week on Fox News.

But as Thursday’s ruling makes clear, the prosecutors aren’t going away anytime soon. And in 21 days, absent some relief from a higher court, Trump will face a profound conundrum at his deposition.

Will he testify and (assuming he’s even capable of it) tell the truth, and possibly implicate himself in crimes? Or will he provably lie under oath, and virtually guarantee himself an indictment for perjury?

Or will he do the sensible thing — plead his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination hundreds of times, as Eric Trump and the company’s finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, already have done — and face the political embarrassment (and, in civil litigation, the negative inferences) that would entail? In court Thursday, Trump’s lawyer said that he was advising his client to do precisely that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/18/george-conway-trump-mazars/

[homersapien 11,440]

And it's not like this is news:

Donald Trump is the establishment, no matter what he says

By Allan J. Lichtman - 10/12/16

 

 

© Getty Images

Republican nominee Donald Trump claims to be the anti-establishment candidate who will shake up the status quo in politics.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In fact, Trump is the poster boy for the establishment in the United States. Rather than change, a Trump presidency guarantees business as usual in America. That is business that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the ordinary Americans that he falsely claims to represent in this campaign.

Conventional pundits have failed to challenge Trump's phony outsider persona because they have myopically looked at only half of what constitutes the American establishment: the men and women who hold political office. The other half of the establishment consists of the wealthy special interests who manipulate the political system for their own ends.

The business establishment is far more important than the political establishment. Politicians come and go. Party power rises and falls. But the wealthy special interests are always with us.

How effective is Trump's establishment of wealth? A recent study by political science professors Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University found that rich individuals and business-controlled interest groups largely shape the policies and decisions of our government. They concluded that "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

Trump is the epitome of this most critical part of the establishment. He has manipulated our political system for one and only one end: his own enrichment. Nothing could be more emblematic of Trump's complicity in money-driven establishment politics than he openly confessed history of buying politicians. "As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do," Trump told The Wall Street Journal in July 2015. "As a businessman, I need that."

Trump's contributions are carefully targeted to maximize Trump's personal benefit. A 1980s Newsday study found that Trump was the single largest donor to members of the New York City Board of Estimate, which then had the authority to approve all land-use development projects.

Beyond contributions, he has lobbied Congress to open — not close — the loopholes that benefited him personally at the expense of ordinary taxpayers who have to make up for this tax avoidance. And he has lobbied to for concessions and tax breaks to benefit his personal business.

Trump's cozy, insider relationships with the political half of the establishment, beginning with connections first gained from his politically well-connected father, have been integral to building his personal wealth. For his first major business venture — the renovation of a hotel in Manhattan — Trump received an extraordinary 40-year abatement on property taxes from the city. He also gained a $163.8 million tax break on Trump Tower, his opulent building in midtown Manhattan.

Trump has also won special tax breaks for construction at his opulent Mar-a-Largo club in Florida, paying property tax only on the value of the clubhouse and not on the approximately $9 million value of the golf course itself. In 2011, after his Atlantic City, New Jersey, bankruptcies, Trump cut a deal with the administration of Gov. Chris Christie (R) that cut an overdue state tax bill of $30 million down to just $5 million.

Jared Meyer, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, sums up Trump's establishment history of working the political system for his benefit: "All Trump is doing is using his political influence and taking advantage of how naïve lawmakers are on economic-development projects to get special treatment that no one else gets." He concludes, "It's a pretty messed-up system when people can use their money and political influence to get a special deal that no one else can."

In claiming that he will change the system that has made him rich, Donald Trump is trying to pull off the greatest con in American history. Remember, his children will be still running his enterprises if Trump becomes president. For anyone who still thinks that Trump is suddenly going to mend his ways and help the average American at the expense of his family, I have a big bridge in my hometown of Brooklyn that I would be happy to sell you.

https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/300579-donald-trump-is-the-establishment-no-matter-what-he

[CoffeeTiger 5,169]

I'll believe it when i see it. 

For his entire life Trump has been able to get away with being a fraud because he had money and was a charismatic New York socialite with connections. 

 

I'll continue to doubt that anything substantial will come of all this until proven otherwise. 

[SaltyTiger 7,859]

4 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

I'll continue to doubt that anything substantial will come of all this

Good assessment Coffee…some folks get all excited over nothing.

[DKW 86 7,440]

7 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

I'll believe it when i see it. 

For his entire life Trump has been able to get away with being a fraud because he had money and was a charismatic popular with the brain-dead crowd New York socialite with connections. 

I'll continue to doubt that anything substantial will come of all this until proven otherwise. 

Since 1987, that has been my one and only take on this bastiche.