Two recent verdicts have now left Donald Trump on the hook for nearly half a billion dollars.
On Friday, a New York judge handed the former president a $355 million penalty, and banned him from serving in a leadership position in any business in New York for three years, for fraudulently inflating his net worth to lenders in order to receive more favorable loan agreements. And in January, a Manhattan jury ordered Trump to pay the writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her after she accused him of raping her. (A separate jury in May had found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the 1990s.)
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“It’s pretty scary from an ethics perspective,” said Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group that has chronicled Trump’s abuses of power and filed lawsuits against him.
You don’t have to look far to find the reasons why. Trump’s first term was riddled with conflicts of interest, and that’s in no small part because of his financial well-being (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it). At the time that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, he was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, largely stemming from loans to help rehabilitate his struggling businesses, and most of which would be coming due over the subsequent four years. Throughout his presidency, he refused to divest from his businesses, which made millions of dollars in revenue from taxpayers and continued to do work with other countries while he was in office — a practice he indicated he would repeat in a second term.
The funniest thing is that he could have replenished his coffers on Inauguration Day with one phone call to the Saudi embassy.
“Hey, here’s the deal. $20 billion in my account by tomorrow night, or I call for the Green New Deal AND accuse you guys of being part of 9/11.”
Even Fredo Corleone could have handled that.
And when that recorded call is leaked? It would be damning enough Republicans might consider impeachment.
The leaked bribery call he made to Ukraine resulted in impeachment, but because Democrats were in charge. His trial in the Senate found he wasn’t guilty. And ever since, Republicans have been trying to get revenge.
So I have no idea why you think that.
I mean, I am thoroughly unconvinced that any amount of damning evidence will erode his suppose among Republicans. He just has to keep running the same plays and claim it’s “fake news”, that it was some kind of deep fake, let QAnon float around a conspiracy, or even at this point maybe even sit back and let the base contort itself from condemning the move to hailing it as a political master stroke of putting pressure on an American adversary.
Oh, don’t be so dramatic. Americans don’t do shit about corruption in their government unless it’s a blowie from an intern.
Are we talking about the same republicans?
Now you’re just nitpicking. A few minutes consideration could come up with dozens of ways of securely getting the message across.