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The latest Trump legal woes comes once again from NY where a judge ordered his business dissolved for fraud. Nobody losts money and it came down to some misstatements. I haven’t read the full case, but the judge on a high profile part of the case is completely off. Not even ballpark off.
He valued Mar-a-Lago at 17-25 million. I texted a broker in the area and he told me 100 million for an ocean acre and 25 million for a non-ocean acres. Mar is between 17-20 acres depending where you look online. Palm Beach has gone up a lot since COVID so maybe divide those numbers by 2 since Trump made his filling. He listed the property at 450-650 million. Without doing a full underwriting (maybe zoning issues where it couldn’t be worth the raw land price) it still appears Mar is worth a lot of money.
If you are going to do lawfare shouldn’t you avoid obvious mistakes? It’s easy to see a headline and write this whole case off as political. It weakens public perception of all other cases if you make mistakes that are this stupid.
If I am remembering this case correctly he did likely violate the law and include some statement that were obviously false but in a category that no one besides Donald Trump gets prosecuted for. So the case of Mar-a-Lago violates a principle of maintaining plausible deniability.
Edit: @AshLael looked up the prosecutors brief and it appears they did not use the tax assessment for valuation purposes. Which would negate my main point. The judge has a history of making stuff up against real estate developers and being later reversed. It’s quite possible this judge hates developers and just does stupid things.
https://twitter.com/goodguyguaranty/status/1707232241925910944?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://nypost.com/2023/09/27/mar-a-lago-judges-developer-hating-past-is-a-big-win-for-donald-trump/
Which would change the ruling and it’s citations to much more of all developer are bastards story (which is culture war) than my why are you lawfaring stupidly story
I broadly agree, but one nitpick:
Does it? Aren't most people pretty thoroughly cemented into their positions at this point? I know I'm basically just a hack at this point, but my basic thought is immediately, "sure, this isn't any more retarded than claiming that paying off some hooker with an accountant that recorded a detail incorrectly is a felony on the basis that it furthered an unspecified crime". Or that arguing with state election officials about how they've allowed a bunch of fraud is actually a conspiracy to deny people their rights. Or that the guy with sole discretion of classification is actually a felon for having documents that he failed to correctly file paperwork declassifying.
Meanwhile, people watching the movie on the other screen just see it as example thirty seven thousand of how Trump is a crook that commits fraud everywhere and isn't even actually all that rich.
It does weaken public perception, I think.
There was one poll recently that had Trump at 52% vs. Biden at 42%, so it's not like the only people who would vote for Trump are his core supporters.
I think Trump is a bad person and a bad President, but this case further updates me in the direction that Trump is the victim of politically motivated lawfare. Not everyone is a committed team player. In fact, independents are a plurality of the population. It's possible that ridiculous decisions such as this one will move the needle at least a little bit. Trump says he's being treated unfairly. That wasn't necessarily obvious before. But here comes clear and obvious evidence of it happening.
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