The Law and Donald Trump

Today on TAP: The Mar-a-Lago gang will need more lawyers.

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As bad days in court go, Donald Trump had himself a doozy yesterday. Actually, it was a bad day in courts: In New York, state Attorney General Letitia James sued Trump for serial misrepresentation of his assets, while in Atlanta, a three-judge federal appellate panel (two of those judges Trump appointees) unanimously reversed a lower court’s ruling that had blocked the Justice Department from continuing its investigation of Trump’s post-presidential possession of classified documents. While James’s action is a civil suit, she also made clear that the evidence she’d collected was available to the Manhattan DA and the Justice Department should they be interested in initiating criminal prosecutions for fraud and tax evasion.

And the evidence she’d amassed sure looks dispositive. I can’t imagine how you can evade the charge of asset inflation (undertaken to get bigger bank loans and insurance at lower rates) when you claimed your 10,000-square-foot apartment was a 30,000-square-foot apartment. Or when you gave inflated valuations to the banks and deflated valuations to tax agencies for the same property. Day is often night in Trump-land, but claiming that midnight is noon at the same time you claim midnight is midnight does push the envelope.

Deliberate numerical fictions are inextricably part of Trump’s DNA. His inaugural crowd was the biggest ever; he won re-election in 2020 by millions of votes. On that latter claim, he’s managed to bring along the majority of Republican voters and elected officials, and on the others, I don’t doubt that he can convince those Republicans to echo him should he insist upon it. I await Kevin McCarthy’s declaration that Trump’s Fifth Avenue apartment really is 30,000 square feet, and if McCarthy comes under attack from Jim Jordan for being insufficiently pro-Trump, then it’s really 40,000 square feet!

Correction: Some numerical fictions are the product of just plain mistakes, and I certainly made one in Tuesday’s On TAP when I wrote that the recent Hart Research poll undertaken for the Worker Power Coalition showed that young voters in nine swing states favored the Democratic candidate for Senate by a 48 percent to 42 percent margin. I was reading the wrong columns. The 48-to-42 margin was for all voters; among voters ages 18 through 39, the margin was 57 percent to 29 percent. My sincere apologies to the millennials and Gen Zers.

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