It's a huge grift

 

All about the image

 

UPDATE 04:17 pm:

Trump 2.0 - Always soak the taxpayers

 

Raskin is trying

 

They won't, and he wouldn't even if they did.

Bret Baier isn't giving her what she wants

 

Did Bret quit drinking the Koolaid?

Probably futile, but...

 It might matter. Especially if you're in a red state.

UPDATE 05/13/2025:

When you hear that Pam Bondi says this isn't quid pro quo or a bribe, remember this:  it really is, but it doesn't matter if it isn't.

Trump is gonna be so mad if he doesn't get his plane.

But I expect he will get it.

Trump 2.0 - Taking down America

 

Profitable for Trump Towers, disastrous for the United States.  

Not that we didn't know it was happening

Donald J. Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday that show how much he received from overseas transactions while he was in the White House, most of it from China.

  NYT

Oh wait. I thought it was BIDEN who was a puppet of China.

They paid millions to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas; Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; and Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York.

That just makes him smart, right?

The transactions, detailed in a 156-page report called “White House For Sale” that was produced by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully, to prove that President Biden did as they work to build an impeachment case against him.

One of the reasons they're laboring to prove it against Biden.  They knew what was in the report.

Donald Trump would never seek consent from anyone before doing anything.

And extremely difficult to prove, I would imagine.  But there is definitely a violation of the emoluments clause.  I guess there's no enforcement mechanism for that.  Or else the Democrats didn't really care when they were in control of the House.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01/05/2024:

I suspect Trump put him up to it, directly or indirectly, making it just another case of "every accusation is a confession."

The story in more detail (rebutting Trump ally excuses).

Raskin tried

Since Congress won back the House in 2018, [Congressman Jamie] Raskin had pushed to take action on the issue of Trump allegedly violating the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution, which prohibits federal office holders from receiving gifts or compensation from foreign leaders.

Pelosi did not want to move on the issue at the time, and vulnerable Democrats in pro-Trump districts also did not want to launch another investigation into the then-president.

According to Politico’s Playbook, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) asked Raskin during a discussion in 2019: “What’s the point? We know the end of this story.”

“Sometimes, we have to do these things,” Raskin responded.

  The Hill

Yes, yes, yes.

A few weeks later, in October 2019, Raskin again raised these concerns to Pelosi during an impeachment strategy session related to Trump’s threat to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dig up dirt on then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Trump at the time was planning to host the annual Group of Seven (G-7) conference of foreign leaders at Trump Doral, his private resort in Miami, which meant foreign officials would be spending money at Trump’s businesses and the president himself would spend taxpayer dollars there.

[...]

Pelosi told Raskin at the October meeting to prepare a resolution, calling Mulvaney a “liar and a creep” and Trump a “sick man and a freeloader,” according to Politico.

But when Trump ultimately reversed his decision to host the G-7 conference at Trump Doral, Pelosi eased up.

Still, Raskin refused to give up, repeatedly pushing for the emoluments probe.

Pelosi warned him to back down, threatening to withhold an impeachment manager position he wanted in the upcoming Senate impeachment trial over the Trump-Zelensky conversation.

It's past time for Pelosi to leave Congress. And I, for one, would like to see Adam Schiff or Jamie Raskin - or actually any number of qualified Democratic Congresspersons - to take her place as Speaker. The Schiff personality might be better able to herd the Democratic crew than Raskin, but they both have the integrity and courage to lead.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Scrub the Supreme Court

The news this week that Justice Amy Coney Barrett has signed a $2 million book deal should strike even capitalists such as myself as unseemly. Barrett has been on the Supreme Court for less than a year and she is already cashing in for seven figures. I publicly supported her confirmation to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg but her decision to accept a $2 million advance for a book she could not have sold for $200 before her confirmation casts serious doubt on her judgment, and judges, especially Supreme Court justices, need good judgment.

Technically, Barrett has done nothing wrong. The United States Code limits a judge’s outside earned income at 15 percent of the judge’s salary. Barrett’s current salary as an associate justice of the Supreme Court is $265,600, which means her outside earned income cannot exceed $39,750. Although I do not teach math for a living, I do know that $2 million is a lot more than $39,750. But in a federal statutory schema littered with loopholes, book royalties inexplicably do not count as outside earned income for purposes of government ethics.

  The Hill

It's not inexplicable. It's lawmakers making sure they keep themselves in big money.

Among current members of the Supreme Court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor tops the list, with more than $3 million in book advances in 2010 and 2012 for her memoir “My Beloved World” and for a children’s book. Justice Clarence Thomas received a $1,500,000 advance for his 2007 memoir “My Grandfather’s Son.” Justice Neil Gorsuch was paid $225,000 for “A Republic, If You Can Keep It,” a book about the “essential aspects” of the Constitution, as well as events that shaped his life and outlook.

Justice Barrett’s book is projected to be about how judges should avoid letting their decisions be shaped by personal feelings. Although it is probably fair to say that almost everyone would agree with that proposition, it is equally fair to say that anyone not looking to cash in on a Supreme Court justice’s fame — in Barrett’s case, the publisher is the conservative Sentinel imprint of Penguin Random House — would not pay $2 million for a book about a proposition as obvious as that.

[...]

[S]cholars who write about corruption understand that even more worrisome than the classic quid pro quo, where the publisher for instance pays the justice a big advance in exchange for the justice casting votes strongly protective of freedom of the press, is the use of public office for private purposes or gain, even when legal.

[...]

There is also the issue of the Constitution itself, the fundamental law that Barrett and her colleagues on the Supreme Court have sworn an oath to uphold. The emoluments clause, which rose from obscurity to prominence during Donald Trump’s presidency, forbids public servants from benefiting from their positions while holding their offices.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Emoluments?

Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, which never received a cent from the former president, moved an estimated $2.8 million of donor money into the Trump Organization—including at least $81,000 since Trump lost the election.

In addition, one of the campaign’s joint-fundraising committees, which collects money in partnership with the Republican Party, shifted about $4.3 million of donor money into Trump’s business from January 20, 2017, to December 31, 2020—at least $331,000 of which came after the election.

The money covered the cost of rent, airfare, lodging and other expenses. All the payments are laid out in filings the campaign submitted to the Federal Election Commission. Representatives for the Trump Organization, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

  Forbes

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Speaking of Qatar and Trump family corruption

Here’s a consolidated excerpt of this podcast with Dan Alexander from the interview about Donald Trump’s previously secret payments from the nation-state of Qatar:

“The president does not have to disclose who has tenants are. He’s asked to say to federal ethics officials where he is – which companies are paying him money – but he doesn’t have to say which companies are paying those companies money. So, it’s a loophole that allows him to take any enormous sums of money from lots and lots of different places without any disclosure.

And so what I wanted to do is figure out where all that money is actually coming from. And so I went through, property by property, and looked to try to see who the tenants were. And I found a document that was sorta like the ‘Holy Grail’ that I’ve been missing, that listed all of the tenants inside Trump’s two hardest-to-access buildings, which were 1290 Avenue of the Americas in New York City and 555 California Street in San Francisco. These are actually Donald Trump’s two most valuable buildings in his entire portfolio, and they have a lot of tenants paying a lot of money.

I saw on this document that one of the tenants was the Qatar Investment Authority, and my eyes popped out of my head because I never heard of this! The Qatar Investment Authority is a sovereign wealth fund that basically acts as an arm of the Qatari government. So, if you were to picture a tenant who would be a problem for a president to have, one of the top five names that you would come up with would be the Qatar investments.

[...]

But the strangest thing, what was it?

There was no one there!

At the reception desk behind the glass, there was no one in their conference rooms that have glass walls. I could see through into a lot of the office. I walked to other entrances. There was no one in other parts of the office. I knocked as hard as I could. They were glass doors. I didn’t want to break them, but I knocked as hard as I could without breath, without threatening the break. No one answered. I ended up coming back the next day at a different time, thinking, you know, maybe their hours are just strange. The same thing, nobody answered. Then, your mind starts connecting the dots:

Here is a foreign government leasing space in Donald Trump’s most valuable building.

No one knows about it.

  Dworkin Report

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Is this now the new norm?

I don't expect a Biden administration to be solid enough to investigate and prosecute.

Source and expanded info.

He's lost money being president, my ass

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The hypocrisy of the Trump attacks on Hunter Biden

It's not just Rudy's humiliating bullshit.

Donald Trump is the first president in modern history to refuse to divest from his business interests upon taking office. As a result, he reportedly took in at least $73 million from foreign sources during his first two years in office, creating an unprecedented tangle of conflicts of interest with countries like the Philippines, India, and Turkey that are home to Trump-branded buildings.

Meanwhile, Trump’s adult sons — who said before his inauguration that they’d stay out of politics to avoid conflicts of interest — serve as key political surrogates for their father while running the family business, which has benefited from Trump’s presidency both directly and indirectly.

Somehow, none of this has stopped the president or his family from making his closing reelection case about corruption. Not his, mind you.

[...]

Very few people would argue that there isn’t something unseemly about Hunter Biden seemingly cashing in on his family name while his father was still serving as vice president. But if there’s anybody who should refrain from making that case, it’s the Trump children.

  

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Heads will roll

The New York Times investigators are still working on Trump's finances, and they've unleashed a doozie: they got his tax returns.

The [New York] Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.

[...]

All of the information The Times obtained was provided by sources with legal access to it. While most of the tax data has not previously been made public, The Times was able to verify portions of it by comparing it with publicly available information and confidential records previously obtained by The Times.

  NYT

He would have been grifting and lining his pockets with taxpayer money anyway, but it does raise questions about what he may have lined up with Russia and/or Saudi Arabia.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public.

How many people could there be who didn't assume that already?

His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

As we also assumed.

This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

Lawsuits coming!

By their very nature, the filings will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

In response to a letter summarizing The Times’s findings, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate [...] .”

Of course.

After The Times declined to provide the records [used for this article], in order to protect its sources, Mr. Garten took direct issue only with the amount of taxes Mr. Trump had paid.

“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in a statement.

With the term “personal taxes,” however, Mr. Garten appears to be conflating income taxes with other federal taxes Mr. Trump has paid — Social Security, Medicare and taxes for his household employees.

In hopes we'll do the same.

Mr. Garten also asserted that some of what the president owed was “paid with tax credits,” a misleading characterization of credits, which reduce a business owner’s income-tax bill as a reward for various activities, like historic preservation.

[...]

[The records] reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” — that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

Pretty sure that's not news to anyone. Even MAGAheads.

“While you claim that President Trump paid no taxes in 10 of the 15 previous years,” Mr. Garten said, “you also assert that President Trump claimed a massive refund for tens of millions for taxes he did pay. These two claims are entirely inconsistent and, in any event, not supported by the facts.”

Sounds like his tax lawyer isn't any better than his other lawyers. Technically, he PAID taxes. he just got them back. For most of us, that means he didn't pay taxes.

“The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

And hopefully, when he's been removed from office and in total disgrace, his name will be mud.

[W]ithout any explanation in his returns, the general and administrative expenses at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey increased fivefold from 2016 to 2017. And he has previously bragged that his ability to get by without paying taxes “makes me smart,” as he said in 2016. But the returns, by his own account, undercut his claims of financial acumen, showing that he is simply pouring more money into many businesses than he is taking out.

The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise.

[...]

His revenue from “The Apprentice” and from licensing deals is drying up, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have helped him plug holes in his struggling properties.

[...]

And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans — obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.

[...]

His properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.

[...]

The vast new trove of information analyzed by The Times completes the recurring pattern of ascent and decline that has defined the president’s career. Even so, it has its limits.

Tax returns do not, for example, record net worth — in Mr. Trump’s case, a topic of much posturing and almost as much debate. The documents chart a great churn of money, but while returns report debts, they often do not identify lenders.

The data contains no new revelations about the $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford, the actress who performs as Stormy Daniels.

[...]

While the tax records revealed no previously unknown financial connection [to Russia] — and, for the most part, lack the specificity required to do so — they did shed new light on the money behind the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

But then I wouldn't expect his tax records to contain any information about money laundering for Russian mobsters.

The records show that the pageant was the most profitable Miss Universe during Mr. Trump’s time as co-owner, and that it generated a personal payday of $2.3 million — made possible, at least in part, by the Agalarov family, who would later help set up the infamous 2016 meeting between Trump campaign officials seeking “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton and a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin.

[...]

The committee interviewed a top Miss Universe executive, Paula Shugart, who said the Agalarovs [- singer Emin Agalarov and his father, Aras, a billionaire who boasts of close ties to Mr. Putin -] offered to underwrite the event; their family business, Crocus Group, paid a $6 million licensing fee and another $6 million in expenses. But while the pageant proved to be a financial loss for the Agalarovs — they recouped only $2 million — Ms. Shugart told investigators that it was “one of the most lucrative deals” the Miss Universe organization ever made, according to the report.

That is borne out by the tax records.

[...]

Mr. Trump’s avoidance of income taxes is one of the most striking discoveries in his tax returns, especially given the vast wash of income itemized elsewhere in those filings.

[...]

Even the effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans could have caused him to pay more than $100 million.

[...]

So how did he escape nearly all taxes on that fortune?

[...]

The answer rests in a third category of Mr. Trump’s endeavors: businesses that he owns and runs himself. The collective and persistent losses he reported from them largely absolved him from paying federal income taxes on the $600 million from “The Apprentice,” branding deals and investments.

[...]

That equation is a key element of the alchemy of Mr. Trump’s finances: using the proceeds of his celebrity to purchase and prop up risky businesses, then wielding their losses to avoid taxes.

[...]

As The Times’s previous reporting on his 1995 return showed, the nearly $1 billion in losses from his early-1990s collapse generated a tax deduction that he could use for up to 18 years going forward.

The newer tax returns show that Mr. Trump burned through the last of the tax-reducing power of that $1 billion in 2005.

[...]

For 2005 through 2007, cash from licensing deals and endorsements filled Mr. Trump’s bank accounts with $120 million in pure profit. With no prior-year losses left to reduce his taxable income, he paid substantial federal income taxes for the first time in his life: a total of $70.1 million.

As his celebrity income swelled, Mr. Trump went on a buying spree unlike any he had had since the 1980s, when eager banks and his father’s wealth allowed him to buy or build the casinos, airplanes, yacht and old hotel that would soon lay him low.

[...]

By the end of 2015, he had 15 [golf] courses and was transforming the Old Post Office building in Washington into a Trump International Hotel. But rather than making him wealthier, the tax records reveal as never before, each new acquisition only fed the downward draft on his bottom line.

[...]

Mr. Trump has an established track record of stiffing his lenders. But the tax returns reveal that he has failed to pay back far more money than previously known: a total of $287 million since 2010.

[...]

[C]onfidential records show that starting in 2010 he claimed, and received, an income tax refund totaling $72.9 million — all the federal income tax he had paid for 2005 through 2008, plus interest.

The legitimacy of that refund is at the center of the audit battle that he has long been waging, out of public view, with the I.R.S.

[...]

If the auditors ultimately disallow Mr. Trump’s $72.9 million federal refund, he will be forced to return that money with interest, and possibly penalties, a total that could exceed $100 million. He could also be ordered to return the state and local refunds based on the same claims.

[...]

Although he had more than enough credits to owe no taxes at all, his accountants appear to have carved out an allowance for a small tax liability for both 2016 and 2017.

When they got to line 56, the one for income taxes due, the amount was the same each year: $750.

[...]

It is possible that the [IRS audit] case has been paused because Mr. Trump is president, which would raise the personal stakes of re-election. If the recent Fox interview is any indication, Mr. Trump seems increasingly agitated about the matter.

“It’s a disgrace what’s happened,” he told Mr. Hannity. “We had a deal done. In fact, it was — I guess it was signed even. And once I ran, or once I won, or somewhere back a long time ago, everything was like, ‘Well, let’s start all over again.’ It’s a disgrace.”

"I guess it was signed."

Examining the Trump Organization’s tax records, a curious pattern emerges: Between 2010 and 2018, Mr. Trump wrote off some $26 million in unexplained “consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects.

In most cases the fees were roughly one-fifth of his income.

[...]

Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.

The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.

[...]

Ms. Trump had been an executive officer of the Trump companies that received profits from and paid the consulting fees for both projects — meaning she appears to have been treated as a consultant on the same hotel deals that she helped manage as part of her job at her father’s business.

Maybe she'll get an audit, too.

The I.R.S. has pursued civil penalties against some business owners who devised schemes to avoid taxes by paying exorbitant fees to related parties who were not in fact independent contractors.

[...]

There is no indication that the I.R.S. has questioned Mr. Trump’s practice of deducting millions of dollars in consulting fees. If the payments to his daughter were compensation for work, it is not clear why Mr. Trump would do it in this form, other than to reduce his own tax liability. Another, more legally perilous possibility is that the fees were a way to transfer assets to his children without incurring a gift tax.

Where have we seen that before?

A Times investigation in 2018 found that Mr. Trump’s late father, Fred Trump, employed a number of legally dubious schemes decades ago to evade gift taxes on millions of dollars he transferred to his children. It is not possible to discern from this newer collection of tax records whether intra-family financial maneuverings were a motivating factor.

We may not have proof, but we have common sense.

On the failed hotel deal in Azerbaijan, which was plagued by suspicions of corruption, a Trump Organization lawyer told The New Yorker the company was blameless because it was merely a licenser and had no substantive role, adding, “We did not pay any money to anyone.” Yet, the tax records for three Trump L.L.C.s involved in that project show deductions for consulting fees totaling $1.1 million that were paid to someone.

In Turkey, a person directly involved in developing two Trump towers in Istanbul expressed bafflement when asked about consultants on the project, telling The Times there was never any consultant or other third party in Turkey paid by the Trump Organization. But tax records show regular deductions for consulting fees over seven years totaling $2 million.

[...]

The tax records show that the three [Trump] siblings had each drawn a salary from their father’s company — roughly $480,000 a year, jumping to about $2 million after Mr. Trump became president — though Ms. Trump no longer receives a salary.

[...]

The ethical quandaries created by Mr. Trump’s decision to keep his business while in the White House have been documented. But the full financial measure of his extraordinary confluence of interests — a president with a wealth of business entanglements at home and in myriad geopolitical hot spots — has remained elusive.

The tax records for Mr. Trump and his hundreds of companies show precisely how much money he has received over the years, and how heavily he has come to rely on leveraging his brand in ways that pose potential or direct conflicts of interest while he is president.

[...]

It did not take long for conflicts to emerge when Mr. Trump ran for president and won. The Philippines’ strongman leader, Rodrigo Duterte, chose as a special trade envoy to Washington the businessman behind the Trump tower in Manila. In Argentina, a key person who had been involved in a Uruguayan licensing deal that earned Mr. Trump $2.3 million was appointed to a cabinet post.

[...]

When Turkish-American relations were at a low point, a Turkish business group canceled a conference at Mr. Trump’s Washington hotel; six months later, when the two countries were on better terms, the rescheduled event was attended by Turkish government officials. Turkish Airlines also chose the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Virginia to host an event.

More broadly, the tax records suggest other ways in which Mr. Trump’s presidency has propped up his sagging bottom line. Monthly credit card receipts, reported to the I.R.S. by third-party card processing firms, reflect the way certain of his resorts, golf courses and hotels became favored stamping grounds, if not venues for influence-trading, beginning in 2015 and continuing into his time in the White House.

The credit card data does not reflect total revenue, and is useful mainly for showing short-term ups and downs of consumer interest in a business. While two of Mr. Trump’s marquee draws — the Washington hotel in the Old Post Office and the Doral golf resort — are loaded with debt and continue to lose money, both have seen credit card transactions rise markedly with his political ascent.

[...]

One Trump enterprise that has been regularly profitable, and is a persistent source of concern about ethical conflicts and national security lapses, is the Mar-a-Lago club. Profits there rose sharply after Mr. Trump declared his candidacy, as courtiers eagerly joining up brought a tenfold rise in cash from initiation fees — from $664,000 in 2014 to just under $6 million in 2016, even before Mr. Trump doubled the cost of initiation in January 2017. The membership rush allowed the president to take $26 million out of the business from 2015 through 2018, nearly triple the rate at which he had paid himself in the prior two years.

[...]

Walgreens, the pharmacy giant that resolved an antitrust matter before federal regulators in 2017, pays $3.4 million a year for a lease at 40 Wall Street, a Trump-owned office building in Manhattan.

Another renter at 40 Wall, for $2.5 million a year, is Atane Engineers, which changed its name in 2018 after a corruption scandal that culminated in two former top executives’ pleading guilty to paying bribes for city infrastructure contracts. Despite the criminal case — which landed the company on New York State’s list of “non-responsible entities” that require a waiver to obtain state contracts — the newly christened Atane registered as an eligible federal contractor with no restrictions listed in its file.

[...]

The tax records show that the cost of existing leases there has risen. and at least four law firms appear to have moved in since Mr. Trump ran for president.

[...]

{Trump's] tax records make clear that he is facing a battery of threats to his business and his own financial well-being.

Over the past decade, he appears to have filled the cash-flow gaps with a series of one-shots that may not be available again.

[...]

What’s more, the tax records show that Mr. Trump has once again done what he says he regrets, looking back on his early 1990s meltdown: personally guaranteed hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, a decision that led his lenders to threaten to force him into personal bankruptcy.

This time around, he is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years.

[...]

While business owners can use losses to avoid taxes, they can do so only up to the amount invested in the business. But by taking personal responsibility for that $421 million in debt, Mr. Trump would be able to declare that amount in losses in future years.

[...]

In Mr. Trump’s telling, any difficulty in his finances has been caused by the sacrifices made for his current job.

So quit.

UPDATE:

And many of them cheat on their taxes, too, I would imagine.  So, it's more than they don't care: they admire him for it.

Jackass.  Of course he knew.  That's why he was whining on Sean Hannity.

UPDATE:

Your tax dollars at work

President Trump’s luxury properties have charged the U.S. government more than $1.1 million in private transactions since Trump took office — including for room rentals at his Bedminster, N.J., club this spring while it was closed for the coronavirus pandemic, new documents show.

The documents, including receipts and invoices from Trump’s businesses, were released by the Secret Service after The Washington Post filed a public-records lawsuit.

  WaPo

Imagine what he will do if given a second term

It doesn't take a lot of imagination.

Now imagine what would have happened if Obama did this.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Here's what David Farhenthold has been up to:

The story he wrote is here.

Also, Zach Everson has a story at Mother Jones on Trump's DC hotel: here.

Trump has guaranteed Fahrenthold two things: 1) fame; 2) Twitter followers; and probably death threats.

Grifters gonna grift

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Grifter in chief

And Kennedy and Hoover didn't use the office to fill the coffers of their personal businesses to the tune of income that dwarfs the presidential salary.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.