The ultimate Trump fraud story was told by Maggie Haberman in her book Confidence Man. It wasn’t about Trump. It was about one of his supporters, a middle-aged gentleman Haberman interviewed at a Trump rally in Iowa. Haberman asked why he supported Donald. “Because I watched him build his business,” the man replied.
Actually, he didn’t. He watched Trump play a role on a television series, The Apprentice. Haberman spends much of her book describing how Trump really built his “business,” which was marketing fraud—or, to put the most positive possible spin on it, play-acting. Trump was “Donald Trump” the same way Paul Rubens was “Pee-Wee Herman.” He was, and remains, a genius at it.
Trump’s business—as we New Yorkers always knew—was bilking people. Oh, he had a few slam-dunk construction projects early on, using his daddy’s money. And he did prove himself more competent than the City of New York when it came to completing the Wollman Rink in Central Park. But almost everything else crashed. He declared bankruptcy four times. He stiffed the small contractors who built his casinos. He stiffed his lawyers. The real property developers in New York—no shrinking violets themselves—told jokes about what an egomaniacal phony he was.
Trump only began to make money when he signed on as an actor playing a billionaire in a reality TV series. This enabled him to take the grift to new levels: he sold his name to overseas developers who slapped it on apartment buildings, he sold steaks and wine and bottled water; he used the money to buy golf resorts and a few buildings. He fantasized a “university,” luring in suckers with the promise that he could make them rich. This was a central promise of his presidential campaign—and it remains at the heart of his “brand,” the notion that the economy was somehow better when he was President. It wasn’t. It flew on the fumes of the Obama recovery after the Great Recession and then, with Covid, it crashed. It was re-inflated by Trump before he left office and then, more aggressively, by Joe Biden—who is now reaping the dubious rewards of that inflation (while also making the sort of investments in infrastructure and technology that will begin to pay off years after Biden leaves office, which is what statesmen and women do.)
Now a New York Supreme Court Judge, Arthur Engoron, has said the magic words. As Charlie Sykes summarized today:
Justice Engoron ruled that Trump family members had a "propensity to engage in persistent fraud," and had lied for years about the company’s net worth, and inflated the value of his real estate portfolio.
Engoron wrote in his order that Trump, his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr., and the other defendants fraudulently inflated the value of properties including Trump's Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida and his own triplex apartment in New York City, as well as 40 Wall Street, Trump Park Avenue, multiple golf courses, and an estate in upstate New York.
The judge found that the evidence was so overwhelming that there was no need to go to trial.
So, a question: Does that poor guy in Iowa still believe that he watched Trump build his business? And another: At what point does not-so-Hawkish-eye come to understand he’s been played for a sucker? Probably never.
And this may be the central conundrum we’re facing as a society: The distinctions between reality and entertainment have been fudged. We react, as a society, to gestures not policies, scams not plans, fraudsters like Trump not people of character like Mitt Romney or Joe Biden. The Republican Party has become so immersed in fraudulence that pols like Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio are embracing the mortal sleazeball Robert Menendez, who is—yes, yes—innocent until proven guilty, but a disgrace either way. Fox News has made nothing of the fact that Trump said—theoretically, always theoretically—that General Mark Milley should be hung. (I checked in on Sean Hannity last night and he was not expressing shame or remorse that Trump had played silly buggers on him, but—you’ll be shocked—regurgitating the Biden “scandals.”…and—yes, yes, Hunter is every bit as skeevy as Menendez, but innocent until proven guilty, too.)
A basic rule: You can’t do democracy if you can’t do reality. Facts matter, especially the details of policy. You can’t do democracy if you can’t construct stable institutions and subtle policies that will prove valuable in the long-run—you support Ukraine, without risking American lives, in part because Ukraine’s stiff defense of its sovereignty sends a message to China about what might happen if it moves on Taiwan. John Maynard Keynes said, “In the long run, we are all dead.” But there is no long-run in 21st century America; there is only now. There is only the immortality of the moment. We may build our family’s cash reserves during Covid because we can’t spend on vacations and trinkets, but we squander those resources as soon as we can. As John Ellis notes today:
Americans outside the wealthiest 20% of the country have run out of extra savings and now have less cash on hand than they did when the pandemic began, according to the latest Federal Reserve study of household finances. For the bottom 80% of households by income, bank deposits and other liquid assets were lower in June this year than they were in March 2020, after adjustment for inflation. All income groups have seen their balances decline in real terms from a peak in 2021, according to the Fed survey. But among the wealthiest one-fifth of households, cash savings are still about 8% above their level when Covid hit. By contrast, the poorest two-fifths of Americans have seen an 8% drop in that period. [My italics.]
American education was never all that good. It sufficed for a society that ran on muscle labor. But that is no longer enough; to be strong, we need to be smart. To govern ourselves, we need to be discerning, judicious. That almost always involves discipline and study. We are too busy with our sacred mission, “the pursuit of happiness,” to make even the most basic efforts to prepare our children for the world they will inherit. That involves rigor; it involves a society based in service and sacrifice. I don’t have much time for Vivek Ramaswamy, but his idea that you can’t vote unless you pass a basic civics test—the one that every naturalized citizen has to take—has merit.
Trump is a fraud and also a traitor. He tried to overthrow our government. But he persists, an icon, because he doesn’t “sound like a politician.” Nice work if you can get it. And the Democrats can’t seem to understand that they will make little progress against him if they don’t address the issues that built his brand—the crisis at the Southern Border and the refugees in Northern cities, crime (Target is closing nine stores, including one in Harlem, because of rampaging hordes of shoplifters), the false pomposities of identity politics…and, of course, the fact that Joe Biden seems to be doddering.
That places Trump perilously close to the Oval Office. It also places an increasing burden on those putatively honorable Republicans—people like Senators John Cornyn and John Thune who want to replace Mitch McConnell as Senate Leader (and yes, McConnell too)—to finally stand up and say we cannot support a fraud as our party’s nominee. It is time for Kevin McCarthy to say, we’ll keep the government open with the bipartisan deal we agreed upon. It is time for Republicans to send the Truthers and Stealers and conspiracy-Qanincompoops back to the fetid sinkholes in which they’ve always festered. This is it, guys. Your lives, your fortunes and your sacred honor are on the line once again.
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