The Tale Of The Tape

By insinuation and timing it’s likely that the limited Tax Transcripts the New York Times released are filings related to his Casino ownership mandatory financial disclosure. I didn’t find much of a smoking gun because I’m looking for a wholesale Real Estate/Money Laundering scheme with branches at least in the Middle East and Russia.

Among the truly wealthy Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio is a notorious mendicant and scam artist famous not just as a deadbeat but poor. “He doesn’t have any real money dear.”

On the other hand the very rich are different from you and me. During this 9 year downturn in his business Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio lost $3 with every breath.

Still has plenty for those Black Velvet pictures of Elvis in the gilt frames.

Stunning new revelations underscore urgency of getting Trump’s tax returns
By Paul Waldman, Washington Post
May 8, 2019

The documents cover only the broad picture of Trump’s income and losses in those years, not the details. But they demonstrate once again why it is so critical that the public obtain his full tax returns for more recent years. As Trump fights like a cornered mongoose to keep those returns secret, these documents offer hints about what exactly he’s trying to conceal.

As I’ve often said, if Trump’s tax returns showed only that he is a successful and shrewd businessman, he’d have plastered them on a billboard in Times Square. He is hiding something; the only question is how bad it is.

There are two explanations for what Trump is trying to conceal. The first is that there are scandalous or even criminal activities that he has engaged in — partnerships with shady characters, cases of money laundering — and the returns would point the way to discover them.

To understand why, you have to remember that the Trump Organization is not an ordinary corporation in the way you might think of it. In fact, it is an amalgam of approximately 500 separate partnerships and pass-through companies (which is why Trump almost certainly reaped millions of dollars in tax benefits from the 2017 tax law, which included a 20 percent deduction for pass-throughs). If we had Trump’s returns, each of those arrangements could be investigated, and no one who has reported on Trump’s business activities would say there aren’t shocking things to discover.

The second explanation for Trump’s determination not to allow the returns to become public is in some ways more innocent: that as so many have speculated, he’s not nearly as rich as he always says. Is it possible that Trump’s motives are only the most petty, shallow and vain ones? After all, we’re talking about Donald Trump.

Of course, both things could be true. Trump’s returns could show him to be less wealthy than he says, and also reveal instances of scandalous or criminal behavior. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say that’s what’s most likely.

Trump’s own personal greed and his sense that the rules don’t apply to him have never been in question. But why would he be so threatened by people learning that he isn’t as wealthy as he claims? Part of it is ego, of course; he plainly equates money with one’s value as a human being. But it’s also because he built his career on the belief that if he could convince people he’s impossibly rich, he’d become impossibly rich and remain so.

That’s what Trump has always sold, whether it was to the people he conned out of their life savings with Trump University or to the voters. I am hugely wealthy and hugely successful, and if you associate yourself with me you will reap the reflected rewards.

And if Trump isn’t so wealthy after all, what is he? A small-time grifter, a business failure, a gossip-pages lech, a reality-show buffoon.

That’s what he’s hiding, for sure. And maybe much more.

The man could go bankrupt running a Casino. It’s really the most scathing I can say.