
Donald Trump is fired by his own accounting firmMazars USA went on to disavow all its Trump-related work product and declare them completely unreliable. This astonishing turn of events came to light after New York Attorney General Letitia James filed documents with the court pertaining to her ongoing civil investigation into the former president’s business dealings. Among them was Mazars’s letter informing Trump that the last decade of his financial life just became a bonfire for Jesus.
This story has so much to offer that it is hard to choose where to start. I know! Let’s do the “Time Warp” again. The Trump family fortune was amassed over decades by lying about the actual worth of various real estate holdings, and then using that false info to fraudulently obtain massive loans so the Trump family could bathe in gold while buying more property with other people’s money. Despite multiple bankruptcies, virtually no taxes were ever paid. Humphrey Bogart remarked on this. The Maltese Falcon’s sham treasure, “It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.”
…and then along comes 2011, and President Obama trolls Donald Trump straight into the sun at the Correspondents’ Dinner, and the racist wrath of Ol’ Thin Skin Donny was loosed upon the land. Five precious, pandemic-free decades later, President-elect Trump declared his victory before a stunned nation that had just elevated an evil-minded con man into the office where the nuke button goes boom-boom.
Why did Donald Trump run to be president? Was Obama’s rag-out session so thoroughly unrecoverable that Trump thought he could survive five years — campaign and administration — under the biggest, well-lit microscope on Earth, just for the chance to get even? He didn’t have a lawyer explain to him the exposure he was getting. “No one cared about his tax returns before the campaign,” I wrote way back in 2018, “his lawyers weren’t coughing up file cabinets filled with all the dirty deeds done dirt cheap over the years, and it didn’t cost people 500 grand in legal fees to be his friend.”
Whatever the reasons, Trump did it and here we stand. Around one year into his presidency, the bricks began falling. The first was the aforementioned report on the family fortune’s deceptionfully obtained and kept. The following May and as a result of multiple investigations, Deutsche Bank — a thoroughly shady operation that was the last large lender in the world willing to loan money to Trump — rolled on the former president in a walloping act of legal self-defense.
The white whale of Trump-era journalism — his unexpurgated tax documents — was boated and boiled down to oil at the end of September 2020, about a week before Trump caught COVID, smack dab in the final stretch of his reelection campaign. The documents showed a desperate man dancing on the edge to calamity. More than a billion dollars in debt, with half of that coming due within the next few years, “Trump is only a few short years away from being subsumed by a tidal wave of red ink that will wash him out of most of his properties and leave him stranded on the beach like some strange orange whale,” I wrote at the time.
It has been over a year since Trump and his Island of Misfit Toys administration departed town. At the moment, there are more than 19 open civil and criminal investigationsInvestigate his business transactions and activities while in office. This includes what kind of hand might have been given in the sacking at the Capitol. Most of us are still numb to Large and Horrible Trump Things, because the endless deluge of them remains too fresh in mind… but gnaw on that bone until you find the marrow: 19 ongoing investigations more than a year after he left! I’ve never, ever seen the like.
I said at the outset that this was a story to be enjoyed, and I stand by that… but truly, there is no joy in Mudville. At the moment, Donald Trump is the most powerful politician from either party in the United States. He fundsraises like a blue-eyed whale, eating huge meals and baleen full of krill. Millions upon millions of voters have, disturbingly enough, found something inside him that feels like home. They cling to him in a way that beggars modern thinking.
He can take any super-Nazi who is irrational or racist and put a suit on his back. Then he’ll drop a check into their pocket. Your state has a new Republican front-runner for that Senate seat, or school board, or election commission, thanks to Trump’s base. It is happening all over the countryIt is unaffected by any signs of slowing.
Perhaps most concerning, Donald Trump has been the president of the United States four years and stands a better-than-even chance of winning it again in 2024. Some 74 million people voted for him last November, and with the ongoing pandemic serving as a millstone around President Biden’s neck, he may get even more with a second try.
The only thing potentially standing in Trump’s way is the kaleidoscope of investigations that appears to be beginning to engulf him. It’s cheerful to think one of these may be the medicine needed to blow his nascent campaign train off the rails once and for all, but he will still long be with us if he doesn’t run, all the while counting 74 million reasons why P.S. Barnum was correct.
Meanwhile, terrifyingly, Trumpism has gained a full life even apart from Donald Trump, and it’s still going strong. Regardless of Trump’s fate, the particular amalgam of white supremacy, truth denial and capitalist cruelty that his presidency nurtured will no doubt remain with us for years to come.