Tax fraud verdict again exposes illusion of Trump
the master businessman
David Smith
in
Washington
The former president can add tax fraud to his
accomplishments after his company was convicted of a 15-year criminal scheme
Tue 6 Dec 2022
22.48 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/06/trump-organization-tax-fraud-guilty-verdict-analysis
When
sorrows come, Shakespeare observed, they come not single spies, but in
battalions. The same goes for former US president Donald Trump’s legal
troubles.
The latest
trouble for Trump strikes at the heart of his identity as a wealthy businessman
who wrote the bestselling The Art of the Deal. On Tuesday his property company
was convicted of a 15-year criminal scheme to defraud tax authorities.
“Add tax
fraud to the long list of Trump’s accomplishments,” tweeted Adam Schiff,
chairman of the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee.
The case
centered on charges that the Trump Organization, which operates hotels, golf
courses and other assets around the world, paid personal expenses like free
rent and car leases for top executives without reporting the income, and paid
them bonuses as if they were independent contractors.
Trump
himself was not charged but prosecutors alleged that he “knew exactly what was
going on”. During his closing argument, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass showed
jurors a lease Trump signed for a company-paid apartment and a memo Trump
initialed authorising a pay cut for another executive who got perks.
“Mr Trump
is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud,” Steinglass argued.
In a normal
political universe, such a revelation would sink Trump’s hopes of a White House
comeback in 2024. But given that he once boasted he could shoot someone in the
middle of New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, explicitly
sanctioning tax fraud might not quite cut it.
Indeed, as
comedian Dave Chappelle noted in a recent Saturday Night Live monologue, Trump
has turned his ability to bend and break rules into a political virtue. “He
said, ‘I know the system is rigged because I use it’.” When Hillary Clinton
accused him of not paying taxes, Trump retorted: “That makes me smart.”
In
Chappelle’s view, this rare willingness to expose what goes on behind the doors
of the rich man’s club endeared Trump to working-class voters in 2016. The
implication is that you would do it too, if you could, so good on him.
But six
years later, the political landscape is different and the act is looking tired
to many, even – increasingly – in his own party. No previous former US
president, and no previous presidential candidate, has faced such a mountain of
allegations and investigations.
The Trump
Organization also separately faces a fraud lawsuit brought by New York state
attorney general Letitia James. She wrote on Twitter on Tuesday: “Today’s
guilty verdict against the Trump Organization shows that we will hold
individuals and organizations accountable when they violate our laws to line
their pockets.”
Trump
himself is being investigated by the justice department over his handling of
sensitive government documents after he left office in January 2021 and his
attempts to overturn the November 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
A
prosecutor in Georgia is scrutinising Trump and his allies over an attempt to
subvert democracy in that state. Last month the US supreme court cleared the
way for the handover of the former president’s tax returns to a congressional
committee.
In the
attrition of legal trench warfare, these cases may be gradually wearing down
Trump’s political resilience, especially combined with three successive
elections that suggest he more of a loser than a winner.
His winning
argument in 2016 was that, having cultivated the image of a successful
businessman on his reality TV show The Apprentice, he could now bring the same
acumen to governing the country. And in a sense, he did: with fraud, deceit and
contempt for the rule of law.
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