In this latest white-hot news cycle, it's hard to track the ways Donald J. Trump showed us what a miserable human being he truly is. Just to get to the heart of the matter, I'm obliged to gloss over his recent 3am reality show level mud wrestling against a highly capable, classy contest winner, the off-script unfounded juvenile conspiracy theories leveled personally against his political opponent, the revelation about his charitable foundation which turns out to be charitable only to himself, and showing up eighty minutes late for his own rally, only to thin his own crowd by engaging in an embarrassingly childish reality-bereft tirade. Not that these things are in any way unimportant - it's just that The Donald has a much, much bigger, more important message for us.
It's one thing to find that - to the surprise of very few - that Donald Trump is the poster child for all that's wrong with the Republican championed class disparity system in this, the richest nation on earth. Bush Manchild's Bankruptcy Abused Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 wasn't meant for oligarchs like Trump - it was passed to make bankruptcy harder for you and me. Who can write off nearly twenty years of paying taxes by filing a large enough business loss? Certainly no one I know. That's a privilege only available to the truly rich, and the laws which make that write off painless apply only to them. The chances are minuscule at best that we'll ever put together the pool of money necessary to ever take advantage of these sorts of reserved loopholes, just as the chances are that we won't waste away that treasure cache if ever we do assemble it. That level of business incompetence takes someone truly special, and Republican laws are there to safetynet those very few if ever they should so stumble.
The write-down sum Trump lost in 1995 looks to be close to one billion dollars. That's an amount which might be almost a quarter of even his own wildly exaggerated net asset figure. How hard would it be for you or I to be so incompetent as to lose a quarter of our net worth? A billion dollar net operating loss despite being "smart" enough to likely pay no more than 14% Federal Income Tax - when he actually pays any taxes at all. A billion dollar net operating loss despite routinely stiffing and extorting his business partners into taking a tiny fraction of what's actually owed them - business partners like this music store owner, this commercial glass enterprise, this prestigious architectural firm, and this generations-old cabinet maker - sometimes driving those business partners to permanently close their doors.
Not just anyone in the robber-baron elite can do what Trump has done. Donald Trump's accomplishments are truly special - possibly even singular. It's not so much that the elite Mister Trump has avoided paying taxes for almost two decades - Republicanism has seen to the blatant legality of that sort of thing for the privileged years ago. It's the loss of one quarter of his personal wealth, despite every imaginable advantage, both ethical and unethical. Yet there are voters who are seemingly willing to give this incompetent and narcissistic oligarch the keys to the treasure of the richest country on the face of the planet.
It's utterly unconscionable.