“Require the Trump Organization to prepare, on an annual basis for the next five years, a GAAP-compliant, audited statement of financial condition showing Mr. Trump’s net worth,”
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are to TFG as crucifixes are to Dracula.
Jared got his $2 Billion. If he's smart, and I tend to think he is, he'll run from Trump as soon as he can. I can't believe he believes the garbage is father-in-law is spewing. Hell, his father went to jail - he's gotta realize that the house of cards is starting to fall.
So Stephanie Slade is the voice of the radical libertarian centre? Her argument is bothsidesism dressed up in academic speak. She cleverly skips over the part about one side wanting to overthrow democracy. I agree that I sometimes have trouble sympathizing with the ACLU and shutting down free speech on campus is like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. But it still comes down to one side being an immediate threat to democracy and the other side needing another 10 years to grow up. There’s a very big difference.
I thought back in 2015 that Trump was probably guilty of tax, insurance and bank fraud from what I had read about him over the years. It was pretty obvious that he has been gaming the system for decades and its all just caught up with him. It doesn't speak well of the authorities in New York that he has gotten away with it for so long.
I have to object that equating the far left with the far right, moderate rght or what we thought was the "normal" right is BS. The left is not remotely equal in courting authoritarianism. Yes, some try to cancel people that do not use pronouns correctly or other ridiculous stuff, but nowhere do they do anything close or in the same universe as the MAGA's or their enablers, the spineless GOP.
“On the left, a new crop of socialists hope to overthrow the liberal economic order, while the rise of intersectional identity politics has supplanted longstanding commitments to civil liberties. On the right, support for free markets and free trade are more and more often derided as relics of a bygone century, while quasi-theocratic ideas are gathering support.“
If I am missing something here, please let me know, but I find this false equivalence infuriating. This article quotes Jacobin repeatedly. Jacobin does not have any influence I can discern on the Democratic Party platform. Yes, there is a left wing in the Democratic Party, and the pronoun crowd is obnoxious and overbearing. There are real problems with the demands of the transgender activists, and they need to be countered. But Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, not Bernie Sanders. According to Axios, in 26 Democratic primaries with endorsements by Sanders, Warren and AOC, the progressives won only 15 and lost 11. Meanwhile, where Trump endorsed, he won 21 and lost 5. And whatever policy disagreements one has with Sanders, Warren and AOC, they are not supporting coups or violence when they don’t get their way.
There is nothing on the left that is equivalent to the right’s refusal to accept the results of elections they lose, of attempting a coup, or attacking and threatening violence against anyone who tries to hold Trump accountable for his crimes. There is one party that values democracy and is fighting to preserve it and that is the Democratic Party. In these dire times it doesn’t help that effort when one chooses to engage in fictitious false equivalence.
Well said. Thank you. Strange how people who try to dress up bothsidesism keep forgetting that one side wants to overthrow a democratic election and the other side doesn’t.
Although we may enjoy the juicy details of the NY AG's civil suit, the Orange Menace will likely be long dead by the time this litigation reaches conclusion. Every legal trick and maneuver will be employed to elongate this litigation for as many years as possible.
The answer to Michael Beschloss's question is simple: Reaganism & a culture of decadent wealth-worship that started in the 80's and continues through present times.
Once we embraced rich people as the best people in the world to aspire to be, we set ourselves up for failure. Low taxes instead of high taxes, TV flattery instead of shame, praise instead of blame. It didn't matter HOW they got rich, only that they were rich and needed to be protected financially, because hey, you could be rich someday yourself too right? We're a silly decadent little nation who thought that billionaires at the top of rent-seeking industries were "job creators" rather than people who made it to the top in the worst ways possible just to live their best decadent lives in lavish high rises with golden fucking toilets and what not.
What the fuck is wrong with this country? Why did we ever think Reaganism was a good fucking idea? If Reaganism and wealth-worshipping was the Boomer generation's failure then the failure of Millennials to fix the inequality after Occupy Wall Street is just as bad. This country is going to economically fuck itself into anocracy and so many people can't see the writing on the wall because they just don't fucking understand how people stop caring about democracy when the economy is unfair as shit. We reap what we sow people. This is the America we refuse to stop building. "America: come for the wealth inequality, stay for the coming anocracy."
In fairness to the Millennials it's not like they had the effective power to actually work within the system to make structural changes after OWS.
Reaganism? Oh yeah, the Boomers loved that. It is hard to explain if you didn't live through the era, but it's very fitting that cocaine was the drug of choice. We were coming off a crippling loss of confidence post-Vietnam/civil rights/Weathermen etc., and there was a very real perception that the country was on the brink of collapse. (Lot of post-apocalyptic fic in that era, and frankly some similar vibes to now in that history rhyming over repeating thing.)
Then along comes Reagan with the city on the hill and blah blah blah. There was a crying need for an optimistic public figure and Reagan rolled right into that. We were strong, we were rebounding, etc.
On the economic side, what distinguished us most from the Soviets? They were drab, dull people who waited in line for bread. America? We got so much bread you can buy a loaf every day and go throw it at the ducks!
Add in that Michael J Fox yuppie vibe of anybody can be rich if they just make the right moves, and it felt like an era of possibility. So you don't want to restrict wealth accumulation because any day now you might be the rich man.
The eighties weren't about thinking, they were about moving. They were about boldness and big bets and winning.
Caveat to all that, a lot of that optimism was for straight white men.
I think what really boosted Reagan was what happened in Iran. How dare those devils take down the US embassy, imprison Americans, etc. The move Argo actually did a decent job of that mess. Reagan kept pushing how bad Carter was, the military screwed up, and Iran leadership of course played along with Reagan. When the hostages were released, Reagan would have won "president for life" with Gingrich's help. (A side note: I got a link to the Reagan Foundation which is STILL pushing Gingrich as some kind of hero!) He didn't mess up the economy until later, which, of course, Clinton had to fix.
Oh yeah, Reagan was definitely a practitioner of the never let a good crisis go to waste playbook. And it did set the stage for all the major flex of reasserting our military power. Our confidence was utterly shot after Vietnam, not only did we lose the war, we couldn't move on some revolutionary mullahs who were shaming us on the world stage.
It got to the point where an extremely minor operation like Grenada was a huge deal because it showed that we could actually do something right.
The Millennials did the same wealth-mating shit--oh sorry, we call that "assortative mating" according to the NBER--that their Boomer parents did and concentrated wealth even further in the present generation as a matter of decadent tastes. The post-college Millennials all married each other, which created much of the political divide between the "streets versus the elites" that we have today in addition to concentrating wealth further. Their kids are going to be the richest rich kids in history to ever have been born. Their wealth-mating and concentrating their wealth into their children is just another future generational slide into economic and political division, and they never gave a shit to think about the consequences--even with all of that time they had to delay adulthood and family-rearing in college and for years in their professional careers afterward until they hit their late-20's/early-30's as a cohort and got busy with the wealth-mating. Classists of a feather man, they sure do stick together.
Okay so the fractional portion of the millennials who are essentially the Ivy League or other high end college set did the nob thing that nobs usually do, but that doesn't speak to the broader generation.
It's not my age bracket, I'm an Xer, but most of the millennials I know aren't accumulating wealth, they're living the usual fraught middle class existence.
Also, why is "the nob thing that nobs always do" so socially tolerated? Why doesn't the current generation that is so "woke" take a stand and end classism the way they wanted to end racism, etc.? Seems to me this is something we ought to be shaming the way we shame racism. Maybe I'm nuts, but it seems like a huge societal problem that is only getting worse generation to generation.
Give this one a read. If you've done graduate stats then this'll be even more eye-popping in terms of covariance, etc. If not, just check out the abstract and then heat maps at the end ("assortative mating by return on assets, conditional on assortative mating on wealth") and look at how tightly correlated class is with household wealth establishment by quintile.
Trump is absolutely a creature of the eighties. Listening to him, you can easily tell that a lot of his ideas of how the world works comes from eighties media.
Even MAGA is basically just repackaged America FUCK YEAH machismo that Hollywood made mad bank on back in the day.
The man is a walking mold of what people in the 1980's considered American Success. Having "fuck you money" and living like a king while shitting on your enemies. Tell me I'm wrong.
After the radical optimism of the sixties the seventies were disappointing and the eighties were heartbreaking but by then we had kids to feed and, if we were persistent and fortunate, a job we could sometimes believe in. Then, before we knew it, we had grandchildren and everyone thought we were old. Like a blink even though we didn’t give up believing and now, I believe in the new generation. We’re leaving them a heck of a mess but we lost more battles than we won, and believers didn’t get to be the rich class.
His one gift has always been public image cultivation and he built himself to present that exact model.
But multiple generations of wealth parasites also made their bank on propping him up on that. The funny thing is that by the late nineties he was considered to be something of a joke, having been exposed for the bullshit artist he was. But that was among people who paid any attention to the world of finance, while the rest of the public still remembered him as the rich guy who had the big affair and a cameo in Home Alone.
Then they propped him up yet again and used him to make bank with The Apprentice, which cemented his reputation in some quarters as the generational dealmaker businessman instead of the business failson he'd been all along.
I grew up just a bit later (booze and concerts were an early 90's thing for me, but never Mad Dog). For me the 80's was cold war, all the time. Grade school kids making the sophisticated joke about Andropov dropping off when he died, Day After Tomorrow, Red Dawn, Red Storm Rising, way too much lay knowledge about the differences between an F14, F-15, F111, and an A-10, etc.
My young brain soaked up the optimism of Reagan vs. the malaise of Carter and locked in for a generation until the combination of the values I was raised on and the drift towards religiosity from the GOP started to wake me up. A healthy dose of Bush II's incompetence helped seal the deal.
First...any time I see "MAL", my brain thinks "Mid Atlantic Leather"....blast from the past.
On Trumpity-Trump, I personally would not be the slightest bit surprised if SDNY & the IRS hop on the Tish James posse. The All County scheme showed a solid history of tax cheatery on Trumpity-Trump's part...and regardless of marital cheatery (looking at you, Hegseth) or tax cheatery, you know it is an ongoing thing with that person. If he thought his audit was bad, just wait until the IRS runs a criminal probe...
Barnes & others should do counter-ads AGREEING that our country is descending into crime & anarchy, while showing Jan 6 at Capitol & state capitols, headlines of Whitmer abduction plot, unruly crowds outside vote counting facilities, screenshots of the anarchists' social media threats, ending with 'a vote for Republicans is a vote to downplay & ignore crime.' Another option is an ad on Repub operatives that have been arrested for child porn and the like. Another option is to portray GOP as soft on white crime but hard on non-white crime.
In this era, Democrats cannot win by explaining their positions. They must turn the Republicans' words, actions, and lack of actions against them. They must take the actions of a few and make the GOP own them. And as Sarah says, why are these candidates not working abortion rights???
"The New York lawsuit raises a legitimate question: how did our American political system allow someone who had for so long committed such offenses, if he is guilty, to be elected President in 2016?"
-- Michael Beschloss, 9/21/2022
I have to say I've been wondering about this since 2016. Why do our election laws allow an unrepentant criminal like Donald Trump to even be on a ballot???
I've worked for two financial institutions during my career and both times I was fingerprinted and background-checked. I highly doubt I would have been hired if those investigations uncovered any financial chicanery, and neither of my positions were anywhere close to upper management.
Also, during yesterday's press conference, AG James was asked a question along the lines of how Trump was allowed to get away with his financial crimes for so long. I asked the same question when I was following Paul Manafort's financial fraud trial in 2018. There was some major-league crimin' going on with him too!
It all re-enforces the notion that Donald Trump, and white-collar criminals in general, are "living proof that [no one is above the law] is objectively not true."
When you think about it, it is absolutely ridiculous that anyone who could not qualify for the highest level security clearance is allowed to hold the office of the President. More than that, it's dangerous!
LATEST TRUMP DEFENSE: he clicked his heels together three times while thinking about the docs: and said there’s no place like MAL, there’s no place like….and next thing he knew the docs were in MAL.
The 11th Circuit to Donald Trump:
People who are under criminal investigation often feel uncomfortable and embarrassed.
“Require the Trump Organization to prepare, on an annual basis for the next five years, a GAAP-compliant, audited statement of financial condition showing Mr. Trump’s net worth,”
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles are to TFG as crucifixes are to Dracula.
Trump v DeSantis...it's ON!!!
‘These Are Human Beings’: Jared Kushner Hits Ron DeSantis For Using Migrants as ‘Political Pawns’
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/jared-kushner-criticizes-ron-desantis-move-on-migrants-them-being-used-as-political-pawns-is-very-troubling-to-me/
Jared got his $2 Billion. If he's smart, and I tend to think he is, he'll run from Trump as soon as he can. I can't believe he believes the garbage is father-in-law is spewing. Hell, his father went to jail - he's gotta realize that the house of cards is starting to fall.
So Stephanie Slade is the voice of the radical libertarian centre? Her argument is bothsidesism dressed up in academic speak. She cleverly skips over the part about one side wanting to overthrow democracy. I agree that I sometimes have trouble sympathizing with the ACLU and shutting down free speech on campus is like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. But it still comes down to one side being an immediate threat to democracy and the other side needing another 10 years to grow up. There’s a very big difference.
Regarding those attack ads on Mandela Barnes, they sound as if they simply lay out the facts that you, Charlie, laid out for us in these pages.
I thought back in 2015 that Trump was probably guilty of tax, insurance and bank fraud from what I had read about him over the years. It was pretty obvious that he has been gaming the system for decades and its all just caught up with him. It doesn't speak well of the authorities in New York that he has gotten away with it for so long.
I have to object that equating the far left with the far right, moderate rght or what we thought was the "normal" right is BS. The left is not remotely equal in courting authoritarianism. Yes, some try to cancel people that do not use pronouns correctly or other ridiculous stuff, but nowhere do they do anything close or in the same universe as the MAGA's or their enablers, the spineless GOP.
Isn't it about time to remove the redactions in the Mueller Report?
“On the left, a new crop of socialists hope to overthrow the liberal economic order, while the rise of intersectional identity politics has supplanted longstanding commitments to civil liberties. On the right, support for free markets and free trade are more and more often derided as relics of a bygone century, while quasi-theocratic ideas are gathering support.“
If I am missing something here, please let me know, but I find this false equivalence infuriating. This article quotes Jacobin repeatedly. Jacobin does not have any influence I can discern on the Democratic Party platform. Yes, there is a left wing in the Democratic Party, and the pronoun crowd is obnoxious and overbearing. There are real problems with the demands of the transgender activists, and they need to be countered. But Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, not Bernie Sanders. According to Axios, in 26 Democratic primaries with endorsements by Sanders, Warren and AOC, the progressives won only 15 and lost 11. Meanwhile, where Trump endorsed, he won 21 and lost 5. And whatever policy disagreements one has with Sanders, Warren and AOC, they are not supporting coups or violence when they don’t get their way.
There is nothing on the left that is equivalent to the right’s refusal to accept the results of elections they lose, of attempting a coup, or attacking and threatening violence against anyone who tries to hold Trump accountable for his crimes. There is one party that values democracy and is fighting to preserve it and that is the Democratic Party. In these dire times it doesn’t help that effort when one chooses to engage in fictitious false equivalence.
I inject Jacobin directly into my veeeeiiiinssss!
It's weird. Conservatives seem to think a literature prof at some random university is "the elite," but the CEO is a powerless man of the people.
Well said. Thank you. Strange how people who try to dress up bothsidesism keep forgetting that one side wants to overthrow a democratic election and the other side doesn’t.
One side wants to ban plastic straws. The other wants to ban marriages. Which one is the real threat to freedom?
Although we may enjoy the juicy details of the NY AG's civil suit, the Orange Menace will likely be long dead by the time this litigation reaches conclusion. Every legal trick and maneuver will be employed to elongate this litigation for as many years as possible.
But think of the children! At least his repellent, grifting brood will be (eventually) held to account.
It has been a comfort that not all of the judges appointed by the Federalist Society are as incompetent as District Judge Cannon.
I think "corrupt" is the word you're after. :)
The answer to Michael Beschloss's question is simple: Reaganism & a culture of decadent wealth-worship that started in the 80's and continues through present times.
Once we embraced rich people as the best people in the world to aspire to be, we set ourselves up for failure. Low taxes instead of high taxes, TV flattery instead of shame, praise instead of blame. It didn't matter HOW they got rich, only that they were rich and needed to be protected financially, because hey, you could be rich someday yourself too right? We're a silly decadent little nation who thought that billionaires at the top of rent-seeking industries were "job creators" rather than people who made it to the top in the worst ways possible just to live their best decadent lives in lavish high rises with golden fucking toilets and what not.
What the fuck is wrong with this country? Why did we ever think Reaganism was a good fucking idea? If Reaganism and wealth-worshipping was the Boomer generation's failure then the failure of Millennials to fix the inequality after Occupy Wall Street is just as bad. This country is going to economically fuck itself into anocracy and so many people can't see the writing on the wall because they just don't fucking understand how people stop caring about democracy when the economy is unfair as shit. We reap what we sow people. This is the America we refuse to stop building. "America: come for the wealth inequality, stay for the coming anocracy."
In fairness to the Millennials it's not like they had the effective power to actually work within the system to make structural changes after OWS.
Reaganism? Oh yeah, the Boomers loved that. It is hard to explain if you didn't live through the era, but it's very fitting that cocaine was the drug of choice. We were coming off a crippling loss of confidence post-Vietnam/civil rights/Weathermen etc., and there was a very real perception that the country was on the brink of collapse. (Lot of post-apocalyptic fic in that era, and frankly some similar vibes to now in that history rhyming over repeating thing.)
Then along comes Reagan with the city on the hill and blah blah blah. There was a crying need for an optimistic public figure and Reagan rolled right into that. We were strong, we were rebounding, etc.
On the economic side, what distinguished us most from the Soviets? They were drab, dull people who waited in line for bread. America? We got so much bread you can buy a loaf every day and go throw it at the ducks!
Add in that Michael J Fox yuppie vibe of anybody can be rich if they just make the right moves, and it felt like an era of possibility. So you don't want to restrict wealth accumulation because any day now you might be the rich man.
The eighties weren't about thinking, they were about moving. They were about boldness and big bets and winning.
Caveat to all that, a lot of that optimism was for straight white men.
I think what really boosted Reagan was what happened in Iran. How dare those devils take down the US embassy, imprison Americans, etc. The move Argo actually did a decent job of that mess. Reagan kept pushing how bad Carter was, the military screwed up, and Iran leadership of course played along with Reagan. When the hostages were released, Reagan would have won "president for life" with Gingrich's help. (A side note: I got a link to the Reagan Foundation which is STILL pushing Gingrich as some kind of hero!) He didn't mess up the economy until later, which, of course, Clinton had to fix.
Oh yeah, Reagan was definitely a practitioner of the never let a good crisis go to waste playbook. And it did set the stage for all the major flex of reasserting our military power. Our confidence was utterly shot after Vietnam, not only did we lose the war, we couldn't move on some revolutionary mullahs who were shaming us on the world stage.
It got to the point where an extremely minor operation like Grenada was a huge deal because it showed that we could actually do something right.
The Millennials did the same wealth-mating shit--oh sorry, we call that "assortative mating" according to the NBER--that their Boomer parents did and concentrated wealth even further in the present generation as a matter of decadent tastes. The post-college Millennials all married each other, which created much of the political divide between the "streets versus the elites" that we have today in addition to concentrating wealth further. Their kids are going to be the richest rich kids in history to ever have been born. Their wealth-mating and concentrating their wealth into their children is just another future generational slide into economic and political division, and they never gave a shit to think about the consequences--even with all of that time they had to delay adulthood and family-rearing in college and for years in their professional careers afterward until they hit their late-20's/early-30's as a cohort and got busy with the wealth-mating. Classists of a feather man, they sure do stick together.
Okay so the fractional portion of the millennials who are essentially the Ivy League or other high end college set did the nob thing that nobs usually do, but that doesn't speak to the broader generation.
It's not my age bracket, I'm an Xer, but most of the millennials I know aren't accumulating wealth, they're living the usual fraught middle class existence.
Also, why is "the nob thing that nobs always do" so socially tolerated? Why doesn't the current generation that is so "woke" take a stand and end classism the way they wanted to end racism, etc.? Seems to me this is something we ought to be shaming the way we shame racism. Maybe I'm nuts, but it seems like a huge societal problem that is only getting worse generation to generation.
Why can Kylie Jenner start a gofundme to put her over the top for being a billionaire? Society is a weird organism.
I'm from the eat the rich wing of the left, I'd strip every inheritance down to respectable trust funds in my dream world.
You and me both brother lol
Give this one a read. If you've done graduate stats then this'll be even more eye-popping in terms of covariance, etc. If not, just check out the abstract and then heat maps at the end ("assortative mating by return on assets, conditional on assortative mating on wealth") and look at how tightly correlated class is with household wealth establishment by quintile.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29903/w29903.pdf
I'll have to hit this one later when I've got the time to digest. Thanks for the link.
I am completely down for railing the aristocracy of any generation, though. Workers of the world unite and so on.
So Trump is the apotheosis of Reaganism! A city on the hill, mortgaged to the hilt and a ton a deferred maintenance.
Trump is absolutely a creature of the eighties. Listening to him, you can easily tell that a lot of his ideas of how the world works comes from eighties media.
Even MAGA is basically just repackaged America FUCK YEAH machismo that Hollywood made mad bank on back in the day.
The man is a walking mold of what people in the 1980's considered American Success. Having "fuck you money" and living like a king while shitting on your enemies. Tell me I'm wrong.
After the radical optimism of the sixties the seventies were disappointing and the eighties were heartbreaking but by then we had kids to feed and, if we were persistent and fortunate, a job we could sometimes believe in. Then, before we knew it, we had grandchildren and everyone thought we were old. Like a blink even though we didn’t give up believing and now, I believe in the new generation. We’re leaving them a heck of a mess but we lost more battles than we won, and believers didn’t get to be the rich class.
His one gift has always been public image cultivation and he built himself to present that exact model.
But multiple generations of wealth parasites also made their bank on propping him up on that. The funny thing is that by the late nineties he was considered to be something of a joke, having been exposed for the bullshit artist he was. But that was among people who paid any attention to the world of finance, while the rest of the public still remembered him as the rich guy who had the big affair and a cameo in Home Alone.
Then they propped him up yet again and used him to make bank with The Apprentice, which cemented his reputation in some quarters as the generational dealmaker businessman instead of the business failson he'd been all along.
Can I ask about your age? Did you live the Reagan experience or learn about it later? Just curious.
Learned about it later. I'm 36 now. Was born in '86.
I grew up in the 80's, and where the politics of the 80's should be in my brain I find a blackhole in between the Mad Dog and Journey concerts ;)
Judas Priest concerts for me. :fistbump:
I grew up just a bit later (booze and concerts were an early 90's thing for me, but never Mad Dog). For me the 80's was cold war, all the time. Grade school kids making the sophisticated joke about Andropov dropping off when he died, Day After Tomorrow, Red Dawn, Red Storm Rising, way too much lay knowledge about the differences between an F14, F-15, F111, and an A-10, etc.
My young brain soaked up the optimism of Reagan vs. the malaise of Carter and locked in for a generation until the combination of the values I was raised on and the drift towards religiosity from the GOP started to wake me up. A healthy dose of Bush II's incompetence helped seal the deal.
First...any time I see "MAL", my brain thinks "Mid Atlantic Leather"....blast from the past.
On Trumpity-Trump, I personally would not be the slightest bit surprised if SDNY & the IRS hop on the Tish James posse. The All County scheme showed a solid history of tax cheatery on Trumpity-Trump's part...and regardless of marital cheatery (looking at you, Hegseth) or tax cheatery, you know it is an ongoing thing with that person. If he thought his audit was bad, just wait until the IRS runs a criminal probe...
Barnes & others should do counter-ads AGREEING that our country is descending into crime & anarchy, while showing Jan 6 at Capitol & state capitols, headlines of Whitmer abduction plot, unruly crowds outside vote counting facilities, screenshots of the anarchists' social media threats, ending with 'a vote for Republicans is a vote to downplay & ignore crime.' Another option is an ad on Repub operatives that have been arrested for child porn and the like. Another option is to portray GOP as soft on white crime but hard on non-white crime.
In this era, Democrats cannot win by explaining their positions. They must turn the Republicans' words, actions, and lack of actions against them. They must take the actions of a few and make the GOP own them. And as Sarah says, why are these candidates not working abortion rights???
"The New York lawsuit raises a legitimate question: how did our American political system allow someone who had for so long committed such offenses, if he is guilty, to be elected President in 2016?"
-- Michael Beschloss, 9/21/2022
I have to say I've been wondering about this since 2016. Why do our election laws allow an unrepentant criminal like Donald Trump to even be on a ballot???
I've worked for two financial institutions during my career and both times I was fingerprinted and background-checked. I highly doubt I would have been hired if those investigations uncovered any financial chicanery, and neither of my positions were anywhere close to upper management.
Also, during yesterday's press conference, AG James was asked a question along the lines of how Trump was allowed to get away with his financial crimes for so long. I asked the same question when I was following Paul Manafort's financial fraud trial in 2018. There was some major-league crimin' going on with him too!
It all re-enforces the notion that Donald Trump, and white-collar criminals in general, are "living proof that [no one is above the law] is objectively not true."
When you think about it, it is absolutely ridiculous that anyone who could not qualify for the highest level security clearance is allowed to hold the office of the President. More than that, it's dangerous!
The best!
Andrew Weissmann 🌻
@AWeissmann_
LATEST TRUMP DEFENSE: he clicked his heels together three times while thinking about the docs: and said there’s no place like MAL, there’s no place like….and next thing he knew the docs were in MAL.
8:11 PM · Sep 21, 2022
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