Sometimes when things start to move, they move quickly. And this is one of those times. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance announced that he already has Trump’s financial and tax records, and the investigation is continuing. Apparently Vance wasted no time, collecting the documents from Trump’s accounting firm within hours of the Supreme Court’s decision. The game is now well and truly afoot, my dear Watson.
There’s a word that you may as well start getting used to, because I have a feeling you’re going to start hearing it more and more in the media going forward. And that word is leverage. There are two different kinds of leverage I’m talking about here. The first is the leverage that those documents are going to give to investigators when they seriously start questioning people like Allen Weisselberg, Trump’s CFO, other organization executives, and even Trump’s shiftless and worthless children. Kind of risky to lie when you don’t know what they can prove.
But more important for you current purposes is Trump’s use of financial leverage. Trump isn’t the proudly self proclaimed King of Debt for nothing. The man literally doesn’t believe in equity. And this is what is going to kill him, because his many billions of worth are literally paper.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say that Trump brokers a building worth $500 million. Immediately, before the ink is even dry, Trump rushes to the nearest bank and takes out a loan for up to 80% of the property value, using the building as collateral. Trump now has more play money, and the bank crosses their fingers and hopes he pays on the loan, a 50-50 shot at best.
Let’s just say that New York Attorney General slams the Trump organization in her civil lawsuit, and gets $1 billion in fines and penalties. No problemo, right? After all, Trump sells 2 $500 million buildings and pays the check, right?
No, because those two buildings aren’t worth $500 million each to Trump. He leveraged those two buildings to the hilt, remember? To the tune of $400 million each. So, if he sells 2 $500 million buildings, the first $800 million will go to the banks holding the paper, leaving Trump a paltry $200 million. To pay New York $1 billion, Trump would need to sell $2.5 billion in assets!
And this is why, no matter what else happens, Trump must maintain as much power in, and control over the Republican party as possible. Because Trump already knows that he’s going to be spending the rest of his life in court, and that costs money. Just look at what he got when he did his impeachment defense on the cheap. And no bank in the world will touch Trump with fireplace tongs.
The Republican party, and his feeble minded supporters, are his bottomless sucker pool. Just look what happened following the 2020 election. Trump immediately set up a legal defense fund on order to stop the steal! It was nothing but a pure scam. What Trump actually set up and misrepresented was a Leadership PAC, the sleaziest kind of PAC, which has almost no constraints on what Trump actually spends the money on. It is literally his personal slush fund.
And it was wildly successful, on the first two months, it raised something like $255 million, of which Trump spent almost nothing, letting the RNC foot the bill for the legal challenges in state and federal courts. This source was only really shut off when Trump lost his social media privileges, cutting off his mass appeals, and he left office.
Trump is desperate. After all, hw has $450 million in personally guaranteed debt coming up in the next two years, and no way to raise it. His easiest out is to get loyal Trombie incumbents, as well as RNC loyalists to start using their own resources to start filling the net with mass e-mails and texts pimping Glorious Bleater’s vaunted defense fund. And in order for that to work, he has to at least appear to be in full control of the party, and as strong as ever he was. This is why his CPAC speech on Sunday is so important to him. Listen for plenty of thinly veiled pleas for cash in his speech if you dare.
Never forget, Trump is a totally transactional individual. With both his personal fortune, as well as quite possibly his personal liberty in grave danger, dicking around with trying to stay relevant in the GOP as a purely ego fulfilling act would be a stupid distraction. But when you look at the GOP, and its millions of compliant sheeple as the goose from which all of those lovely golden eggs flow, then it makes perfect sense. Here endeth the lesson.
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I see two problems with this strategy. For one, the cult is not exactly rolling in cash to start with and getting lesser in numbers by the day (either through defection or die off). Two, those corporate donors who are already closing their pocketbooks behind the insurrection (and likely were bilked out of millions to billions of dollars by Trump’s campaign and the complicit RNC) are going to have no desire to pay up anytime soon on any 2022 Congressional campaigns with Trump. So my bet is the payday will be MUCH less than he needs.
If 45 is in the news, my only hope, prayer, wish, is that he’s being brought up on some charges. He’s a crook. I remember telling my neighbor, who was outside discussing 45 in 2016, that 45 was an asshole. He yelled “at least he’s MY ASSHOLE!” This is how the idiots think. He may be a criminal, snake oil salesman, but he’s theirs.
They want to ignore what he’s cost them, fine by me. I’m looking forward to him taking the rest of it away.
Joseph, there’s no such Spanish word as problemo; this incorrect version was popularized by the Mutant Ninja Turtles. The correct word is problema. Keep up the good work; I love your commentary.