Let’s start with three totally obvious things that need to said about the NYT bombshell on Trump’s taxes:
- This story will do nothing to convince anyone who is fully on-board with the MAGA train to hop off
- It will not be the thing that beats him in November (indeed, there won’t be one “thing” because there never is, but that’s a different argument)
- Yes, this shouldn’t be shocking to anyone who pays any attention to Trump or the news or billionaires in general
So, case closed, who cares, let’s go back to watching Chiefs-Ravens tonight.
Except I want to hit #3 just a little bit more, because it’s something I’ve been coming across a lot lately from two groups that generally don’t have a ton in common: the doomscrolling resistance liberals and the Biden-voting-but-hating leftists.
Their reaction to this story was basically the same, though. The liberals are like “well of course, everyone knows Trump is like this and nobody seems to care” while the leftists were “gosh, sooooo shocking to hear a rich guy getting a break.”
And, FWIW, both of those opinions are perfectly correct! Except both miss the entire vibe of the American electoral experience, which is that you know all this if you’re already paying attention.
As a news junkie — and I mean that in the sweatiest and most addicted possible way — I am extremely aware of what’s going on. If you’re on this site and read the open threads and even click on one or two links a day, you too are aware of what’s going on.
But we are a vanishingly small minority. People talk about the corrosive influence of Fox “News” (and is it ever!) but even its highest-rated programs have a smidge over 1% of the country tuned in. Lump all the cable news together and it’s still about a 2% share.
Want to know what got a much higher rating than all of cable news put together? For starters, how about “The Apprentice,” which is the thing that set Mango Unchained on the path to the presidency and also gave millions of Americans the wrong idea about his business acumen.
Are some of the people who watched “The Apprentice” also aware of what’s going on? Possibly! But most people simply aren’t plugged in at all when it comes to the news. That includes people who watch cable news (it’s all trash) or who get an occasional headline on social (also bad!) … or who just tune it all out for other things.
Perhaps none of those people will ever see this story no matter how big it feels to those of us who are interested in the news. But also maybe not: Things like this have a way of being omnipresent, even in the short-term. All it takes for a few people to see this and think “Yeah, he’s a joke” and this goes from a stealable Biden win to requiring a recount in Texas to see if he topped 400 electoral votes.
And yes, Trump did a thing that rich people have been doing forever; we already knew he was leveraged up to his botched implants in debt; we knew he was as cash-poor a rich person as America can create; we knew he was a walking conflict of interest from the first moment; we always suspected his entire campaign was “The Producers 2: Electric Hiter-loo” from the jump; the whatabouters will be screaming that Hunter Biden exists too; and yes, Biden sucks ass and should have finished 12th in the primaries.
But if we want to get to a world where we actually have the ability to take away the loopholes the rich craft for themselves, stories like this help provide very obvious hand-holds for people who know instinctively that the system is rigged, but can’t always point to examples so glaringly obvious that they’re visible from space.
Moreover, this isn’t the palace intrigue that sustains political desks but is utterly meaningless outside of Washington. This isn’t a former insider lobbing grenades after being fired, which can always be interpreted as baseless acrimony. This is actual news and comes with concrete figures and evidence (which you can tell because it did NOT come from the NYT politics desk.)
Biden isn’t going to do enough to fix economic inequality. But he has said he wants to put more money and staff back in the IRS so it can go after people like Trump … which is exactly what it should be doing, and is a win for people who want the government to be able to fund things and for the rich to actually have to pay their already too-small share of taxes.
So yeah. This isn’t shocking. And what Trump did on his taxes may not be overtly illegal — though if he fudged loan documents compared with what he filed on his taxes, that’s a whole other kettle of fraud. But it may not sit right with people who paid a lot more, and are now on the hook for his deductions, which as president, we all are, a horrifying thought I try to repress daily.
And like Hillary’s emails in 2016, it’s not usually one thing that’s a knockout blow in an election. Voters get a sense of someone and then as things wind down, the news either confirms that perception or makes them take a second look at it.
If you’re plugged in, this might just be No. 75,847 as to why you shouldn’t vote for him. But if you’re not, this is yet another nail in the empty reality TV suit that some people were fooled by in 2016 — but might not be this time around.
Yep, nothing shocking there. And yet, I keep running into the arguments that Trump is a highly successful businessman. Every time I encounter that “fact”, I text/e-mail this link.
Six. F-cking. Business. Bankruptcies.
He’s only been successful at not completely burning up his family’s fortune.
I don’t think he’s actually successfully kept the family fortune. I need to dig more into his tax bullshit, but it sounds like he’s borrowed far more than he can ever repay, which is why he’s been grifting so frantically for the last four years. Once he’s out of office, I’m not sure even another bankruptcy will save him. And in addition, there seems to be some fraudulent misrepresentation on his tax bills as well. The house of cards is definitely collapsing.
…if I were better at getting .gifs to work in these comments there’d probably just be a cheering section here
…but since I’m not…& there isn’t…although you definitely deserve one…speaking of clicking a link or two I just wanted to give a shout out for that NYT piece with the timeline that I included a link to in the DOT?
…it’s one of those flashy things that flings up annotations & shifts the graph-looking graphics about as you scroll down but it has the advantage of the whole visual aids thing & the below-zero part of the picture does a pretty good job of showing that the guy who won’t shut up about how much richer he is than everyone else is in a bunch of ways more broke than many of his adherents despite a pretty lavish income that most people would think of as being beyond their wildest dreams
…& if more people could just understand that all the talk about him being a grifting-ass snake oil salesman is not a question of exaggerating for comic effect then maybe less people would talk themselves into voting for a presidential candidate nobody in their right mind would dream of buying a used car from…particularly the ones who think they’re doing it to put a successful businessman in he White House?
…you’re absolutely right about the whole most-folks-aren’t-paying-as-much-attention thing but it’s always been a mystery to me that his fundamental shyster-ness isn’t the first thing people think of every time they see him…let alone after he opens that puckered orifice of his to spew more bullshit into the world
But, see, that’s exactly the thing: this fundamental shyster-ness is a feature, not a bug. These knuckle-dragging morons eat that shit up because they see themselves in him. Sticking it to The Man. Getting away with shit and laughing all the way to the bank. They say, “yeah, that’s how it should be for us, because our lives suck so any chance we get to fuck over the gubmint, or some big bank, we’re going to take it.” But, as always, they fail to make the very small and basic mental leap to recognizing their idol isn’t some schmuck working for minimum wage, but a fucking billionaire (maybe) who also happens to be President. They never grasp the simple reality that it’s exactly assholes like Trump who get to benefit because schmucks like them get to pay the price.
That’s exactly right (well, except for the billionaire part — he’s never been a billionaire, ever). For MAGAs, Trump is aspirational. He’s who they want to be. MAGAs want his glamorous (tacky) life, his pretty (creepy and disposable) wife, his jet-setting (on borrowed and swindled money) lifestyle, his fabulous (again tacky) properties, all of those things. People have been saying this since Trump got into office — he’s exactly what poor white people think a “billionaire” should be, and he’s exactly the kind of person they would be if they only, only could. Sadly, none of them inherited wealth and they aren’t going to win the lottery, and even if they did, someone smarter will steal all their money.
Economics is harder to grasp than social issues; a lot of people have no concept that they’re voting against their own interests — and to make the left case: the Dems are only mildly better here and don’t stand out enough to beat racism or sexism as a self-interest. (Not even to mention how brain-poisoned many of these people are in thinking that somehow the local factory closed in 1997 because, uh, gay marriage in 2015.)
Anyone voting for Trump because they like the cruelty is a lost cause and I suspect most of us here would not back any candidate who tried to siphon those voters up on those terms. (Call this the “Rogan voter” who might be gettable in other ways, but isn’t going to respond well to egalitarianism just for the sake of it.)
More well-off people voted for Trump than poor people did already in 2016. Part of that is – ha ha! – structural racism showing up in economic form, but it’s also that rich people like being rich and don’t care who needs to get broken to do it. The “Boaters for Trump” is such a great tell on this: He’s helping the little guy! It’s just he thinks the little guy owns a speedboat and one car dealership as opposed to actual working-class people (especially the not-white version of said person).
This is also why “Trump is a bad person” never stuck because either they liked that about him or they didn’t care so long as the stocks did well.
I’m pretty sure the “unknown” financial institutions that have the majority of loans on him are also Russian/Russian mob connected.
We already know it’s Deutsche Bank — which has certain Russian connections and used to employ Justice Kennedy’s kid, which even if it’s all aboveboard is *INSANELY* sketchy.
Lots of good points. One of the things that has driven me crazy since 2016 is the lazy equivalence between Trump fanatics and other groups — the working class, religious people, whites, Southerners, Midwesterners, Farmers, senior citizens, etc.
The entire diner safari cliche reporting comes from this, so does a lot of online doom forecasting. There may be a lot of overlap in these groups, but getting lazy about it means surrendering the margin between victory and defeat.
If Trump only holds his fanatics, who by definition will always stick with him even if he eats live puppies on TV, he will lose in a landslide. He has to either convince all of the undecided voters or steal a lot from Biden, and his latest tax exposure makes it a bit harder to pull that off.
His only other option is to steal the election and hold it through Inauguration Day, and this makes it a little harder to pull off. Not much, but any distraction for him is a bit of a problem.
The scary thing, of course is that the more desperate he gets the more likely he is to go nuts, and he may decide to roll the dice on a one in ten chance of winning even if every other result leads to huge damage all over.
I agree, lots of good points and also agree none of this will change opinions. If someone claims to be an “undecided voter” at this point, they are either full of shit or too stupid to be allowed to vote. I’m still of the view that it doesn’t matter how many actual votes Biden wins by because we all know Biden wins in a fair election. The biggest takeaway I get from the taxes is that Trump has never and will never play by the rules. Trump will never tell the truth and will not give up power. He will do whatever it takes to stay in power and Moscow Mitch will just sit back and watch. Be it Russian hacking, Barr invalidating all mail in votes that don’t say Trump or this 12th Amendment bullshit, he is now fighting for his life.
I actually disagree that there are no undecided voters. If you told me that there was a strong correlation between undecided voters and all of those drivers going 52 in the passing lane on the interstate, those people who freeze up trying to decide between getting turkey sausage or regular sausage on their pizza, and the people who carefully count out their coins before walking away from the cash register, I’d believe it.
Trump or Biden, Biden or Trump. First I need to agonize whether to go with the medium or heavy cycle on my washing machine and choose between cold or warm water. Plus, I have All and Tide. Which one works better with cotton-poly blends? Better call a few people for help.
Exactly right — the margins may be thin but they exist. He’s doing very poorly there with no signs he’s going to be flipping anyone who’s not in his camp already.
Plus, the double bonus here: A 0.2% margin of victory is steal-able in the courts; a 2% margin is gonna be hard to overturn.