Donald Trump and his family have been in New York real estate for decades and are notoriously scummy, even by the standards of their fellow capitalist elites in the City. The guy routinely dodged taxes, misrepresented assets and liabilities, sourced capital and labor from known mobsters for years, for example, as did many other well known local developers. That’s just how you get things done in a large and very old city filled with labyrinthine interests and regulations, even today. Even something as banal as the Transit Authority doesn’t operate
without the mafia getting their piece of the pie. None of this was a problem when he was donating thousands of dollars to high profile Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, Andrew Cuomo… yes, even Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, and he was always able to deflect and dodge state and federal investigations.
From 2011, he went from donating primarily to Democrat candidates, to exclusively backing Republican candidates. Unsurprisingly, that coincides with the emergence of his status as a criminal mastermind working with Putin to become the next Hitler. The chance any legally dubious methods he engaged in to shield his assets from tax or debt liabilities over the years just so happened to be uncovered for the first time since he became president approaches zero. It’s used as kompromat by his political enemies to seize his assets and remove any independent source of funding he might be able to leverage for his political ambitions. As noted previously, if the Party can do this to him, they can do it to anyone.
We see similar tactics used by Party elites in China to go after wealthy capitalists who run afoul of the Party line, magically uncovering massive tax fraud as a means to strip them of their assets and remove them from public life. Like in Trump’s case, the fraud allegations aren’t far-fetched - indeed, widespread corruption is endemic to China’s economic growth story. I just never thought I’d see the same naked politicization of law enforcement in a nominally pluralistic, western country like the US. The liberal establishment is completely drunk on its own dominance, and the precedents they have set using the levers of state power to target not just Trump, but any conservative who is perceived as a threat to them, may be the final nail in the coffin of our constitutional protections.