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Is Trump actually always innocent?
From the Laetita James suit I have to come to the conclusion that he is in fact always innocent. Reddit lefties are salivating that they’ve finally caught their guy. I see three main issues at play:
He likely has some personal guarantees on loans and that’s why he has to submit net worth documents to banks. He was aggressive on some valuations but valuations are subjective. Banks have underwriters for this stuff. And real estate developers always have lofty views on their property valuations. These properties he has loans against the banks would have first underwrote them at the property level before considering a personal guarantee.
Discrepancies between say property tax valuations and what he submitted. These always differ on everyone’s property.
He donated some property for conservation. She’s saying the property had some issues and the value should be lower. His total tax savings were 3.5 million. Assuming 40% federal rates and 10% New York that means he saved 700k in NY. If the properties worth less then maybe he owes NY a couple hundred thousand. This is something you deal with in an audit not a civil case or criminal case.
I can’t comment on the FBI raid as I don’t know anything about what’s normal with classified information. I do know the tax code, accounting, real estate development, banking. And this is just a loud press conference and book report for something that just sounds like an audit.
Also no victims who lost money at any of the banks he did business with. Art of course is a whole legalized fraud of donating after making your art look really valuable. JB pritzker legendarily removed toilets from his house to make it “uninhabitable” and lower his property tax bill. This just breaks down to tax law is complex and people play games to lower their taxes.
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Trump was not a great president, but I never expected him to be. I expected him to be pretty much as it turned out, that he could never achieve what he claimed he wanted to achieve, but also that he was not the combination of Hitler and Stalin who would start a nuclear war with Korea and kick off the Third World War while his administration threw LGBT people into torture camps and cut down the redwoods for commercial firewood that the opposition claimed.
The best way for the Democrats to deal with Trump, after he lost, was to ignore him. Instead, they've spent all this time creating a boogey-man out of him, painting him and MAGA America as the Greatest Threat To Anything, Ever so that right now he remains as relevant and influential as ever. They could have let him sink into obscurity in retirement, to be futilely flailing around on social media for people to laugh at, but they didn't.
Now they have created the very real possibility of Trump as 2024 candidate, and even worse, a viable one not a joke one. This is so self-defeating on their part, I can't understand it. Yes, Trump's an easy target and all they have to do is keep churning out the same old rhetoric about him, but by ignoring him they would cut all his pretensions to power. Find another Republican boogey-man (I think DeSantis is a good choice) to rile the base up about, and let Trump fall out of notice. But no, they couldn't let it go that he beat their Sure Thing in 2016, and they keep shooting themselves in the same foot over and over.
I think a fair amount of people are going to look at culture war cases, and think "If the Democrats are for X which I think is appalling, and the Democrats are telling me Trump is against X, maybe this time round I'll hold my nose and vote for Trump" - or at least, vote for the Republican candidate running in the local election (see Virginia).
Imagine a Trump presidency 2.0. One can hope that surely this time he will drain the swamp after all of this. From an accelerationist perspective it would be glorious at the very least.
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How is protesting the Government and requesting redress "evil and contemptible," even if you were 100% wrong about everything you believed?
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@urquan didn't make that claim, and it's uncharitable to rephrase his words in the way you did. Presumably, he is referring to the people who charged into the Capitol and then ran around taking photos, carrying off pieces of furniture, and what have you. While I certainly think that "evil and contemptible" is too harsh an assessment, those people were also definitely going beyond simply protesting and requesting redress from the government.
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