Brief Comments on the Trump Fraud Case

 

So, what do I think about the New York civil action for fraud, which has just ordered the shutdown of Trumps (New York) business empire?

To be honest, it is hard for me to care. Yes, this is more serious than payoffs to mistresses, though less serious that rape or theft of classified documents, to say nothing of election subversion.  And frankly, it is long overdue, but too late to matter.

Trump's business empire has been a giant fraud from day one.  If someone (Rudy Giuliani, maybe, or Elliott Spitzer, both of whom prided themselves in being the scourge of white collar crime) had moved against the Trump Organization before he got a job with The Apprentice, Donald Trump would long (and deservedly) forgotten.

If someone had moved against Trump when he was a reality TV show host, no doubt there would be anger and outcry, but it would have kept him from launching a political career.

If someone had launched an action, or a thorough-going expose of Trump's business practices in 2016 -- well, it is hard to say.  It could be a little hard to dismiss as political persecution, given that Hillary Clinton was also under FBI investigation.

I don't think being exposed as a fraud would have hurt Trump with his hardcore supporters.  I think that a lot of his hardcore supporters liked that he was a fraud.  He appealed to the sort of people who see the system as hopelessly corrupt and rigged and believed that only someone low down and dirty would be able to fight back.  He actually made his crookedness a selling point for that very reason.  He also appealed to people why saw everyone as crooked and Trump at least as our crook

It might have made a difference to people who genuinely believed that Hillary Clinton was the more crooked of the two candidates.

But what I think might actually have made a difference is 2016 was not so much showing Trump up as a crook, as showing him up as an incompetent businessman.  Because I do believe that a lot of Trump's appeal outside the really hardcore was the sort of mystique a lot of people have about businessmen -- the believe that they are competent while government is incompetent and that businessmen will get everything done and especially run the economy much better than politicians.  And Trump, being very rich, was seen as especially successful and therefore especially competent.  I think it might have mattered to his less hardcore supporters to know that he wasn't.  That is, after all, a standard page from Karl Rove's playbook -- hit your opponents where they are strongest.  Trump's greatest strength was supposed to be his supreme competence and business acumen.  It might have made a difference to show that up as false.

But of course, it is too late now.  His supporters will simply see this as persecution. And they will have a point.  The fact that he got away with it up till now really does show that no one would have made any attempt to hold Trump accountable if he hadn't decided to run for President.  And even to me, it seems a bit like piling on.