Donald J. Ponzi

 As promised, the New York Times dropped another report on Trump's finances. This one lacks the easy hook of the $750 tax bill. Jon Chait does a nice job of simplifying and explaining why the combined reports paint the picture of Trump as a crooked conman.

As was reported back in 2016 and 2018, Fred Trump was a very successful builder in postwar New York, especially the outer borough on Long Island. I mean, he was a slumlord and all who violated fair housing laws, but he was legitimately rich. But he was also excluded from the Manhattan scene. His son Donald would be different. So he laundered money to his son, created a fake empire for him and launched him with every possible advantage into high profile Manhattan real estate.

Donald went bankrupt. 

If he had just invested his dad's money in an index fund, he'd be much richer than he is today. Instead, he managed to lose money on gambling, which I didn't was possible. The image of the rich playboy developer, however, was now part of the cultural landscape. (Spy Magazine in the '90s ripped him to pieces.) 

What yesterday's report shows is that Trump took his image and leveraged it into a series of Ponzi schemes, basically. The Apprentice was the keystone of his new fraudulent endeavors. He would use his reputation as a celebrity businessman to launch nakedly exploitive institutions like Trump University or the Trump Network. He would then borrow on those entities to buy golf courses (which are apparently money sinks). 

There is then ample evidence that he used those golf courses to launder money. For whom? Well, he certainly was close to a lot of Russian oligarchs who need to keep their money from Putin. Especially in the '00s, Putin was stripping the oligarchs of their wealth and transferring it to his cronies (the oligarchs had largely supported Yeltsin). They needed some way to hide their money. Enter (probably) a desperate and unethical real estate guy in constant debt who was not averse to breaking the law. 

All of this is why Trump has worked so hard to avoid releasing this information. All of this is why Trump has been so solicitous of Putin and other dictators. 

Back in the 2016 debates, Clinton was asked to say something nice about Trump and she offered some anodyne statement about him loving his kids.  If I had to say something nice about Trump, it's that he was - in a weird way - a hustler. He can't do hard mental or physical labor, but he has the emotional endurance to live on the razor's edge of insolvency while keeping a hundred plates spinning frantically as turns one liability into a future asset...that he will then turn into a liability which will become a future asset, mercilessly wrecking and ruining those who would get in his way.

Trump is a con man. There's a little larceny in every good salesman, but Trump's uniquely high profile persona and obvious narcissism has created a frantic series of Ponzi schemes...well, maybe not a Ponzi scheme, because Trump never pays out the early investors. It's a Trump Scheme. Borrow, strip the asset for money, declare bankruptcy, lather, rinse, repeat.

And yeah, 40% of Americans think he should have the nuclear codes.