There Is One Born Every Minute
Trevor K. McNeil
Is There Really an ‘American Dream’?
The promoted mythology holds that anyone in the United States can achieve greatness through vision, persistence and hard work. Sadly, as Hunter S. Thompson bluntly put it after narrowly losing his run for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado “I,unfortunately proved what I set out to prove … that the American Dream really is f**ked.’
One of the great myths of the ‘American Century’ is that of the ‘Self-Made’ man. Statistics counter that claim, suggesting almost no one born poor in this country ever achieves staggering wealth; and those who do rarely achieve it by ‘hard work’ within the established system. Think lottery.
Donald Trump first hit the national radar during the glitzy big hair days of the 1980’s and 1990’s. It began slowly, with small mentions in the gossip columns of Palm Beach and New York. By the end of the 90’s Trump had become a staple in New York society columns and the tabloids. In fact, the tabloids and reality TV created the Donald Trump persona we know today.
Everything was over the top for the future president. He had a big airplane with the Trump name emblazoned on its side. He was a billionaire businessman playing himself on a weekly reality TV series. Being seen at the right places with a harem of plastic barbies on his arm came easy and he did it all with a Gordon Geko-esque swagger (ask your parents).
Reality Meets Fantasy
Trump always presented himself as a real true American success story. A man who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and built a “10 billion dollar fortune” without any help from anyone. He did admit to a million dollar loan from father, Fred C. Trump to seed his first project, a loan he has claimed he paid back with interest. ‘The Donald’ was bigger than life, he was living the ‘American Dream’ created by print ink and celluloid.
On Tuesday October 3, 2018 the NY Times published an explosive 13,000 word expose on the Trump family and their elaborate schemes to circumvent both state and federal income tax laws. Over at least 50 years, Donald Trump, his father Fred C. Trump, his mother, Mary Trump, his brothers and sisters, most notably his sister Maryanne Trump Barry an attorney and judge on the federal bench, all actively participated in an aggressive use of loopholes to reduce Fred’s tax liability, so aggressively that it appears there may have been conscious, pervasive, intentional wide spread tax fraud.
A Consistent Use of Tax Scams & Dodges
The bombshell article was one of the longest investigative pieces ever published by the Times. The Donald J. Trump image is mostly fantasy. About as real as world peace and honesty in politics. The truth is that Donald Trump is the born-rich, fortunate son of a scheming, corrupt, mafia connected, KKK associated, first generation American who built a massive real estate empire from a healthy inheritance from his German born father.
The tax shimmy done by the Trump family is a shocking revelation about the leader of the free world. The fact that Donald, and his siblings actually helped build the fortunes they would later inherit and then add to them, at least in the case of Donald Trump, through the ingenious use of various tax dodges that make the crooks at Enron look like rank amateurs. The reporting is based on more than 100,000 pages of documents from public, private and government sources that leave little doubt as to the truth of the claims against the president.
Tax Smart or Felony Tax Evasion?
Even more confusing than the dimensions of Trumps physics defying comb-over is how the Trumps managed to conduct these financial shenanigans, some of which ran contrary to law for years, without attracting the notice or audit by the Internal Revenue Service. Tax evasion was, after all, how they finally got Al Capone off the mean streets of Chicago.
Turns out there is a difference between the sort of financial fandango that seems like second-nature to the Trump clan, most of it qualifying as ‘Tax Avoidance’, and out-right, years-in-prison Tax Evasion. This difference being somewhat murky. Trump is, of course, doubling down and denying everything. According to his lawyer Charles J. Harder: “The New York Times’s allegations of tax schemes, fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory.”
Showman, Con Man, Grifter
For all Trump’s faults and short-comings, and there are many, he does possess an innate shrewdness and a deft knack for narcissistic self-promotion, and aggrandizement, becoming a legend not only in his own mind but within the greater cultural zeitgeist. So perhaps the root of the current controversy stems from Trump fooling himself as much as anyone else. Believing himself to be John D. Rockefeller when he is actually a toxic mix of P.T. Barnum and Bernie Madoff.
To be fair, writing Trump off as simply a Trust-Fund Baby who engaged in some questionable tax tweaking to build on the fortune he was born with is to underestimate him. There are lots of people born with money who build on it without reaching the same level of cultural status as Donald Trump, his surname itself having become a recognized brand as well as a sort of cultural short-hand for tacky, gold flake luxury.
Final Take
The most important take away from this story, for me is that if Trump had never been elected president, these devastating stories would never have seen the light of day, with Donald J. Trump going to his grave without the core of his corruption ever being publicly autopsied.
