The dirty-linen revelations in Mary Trump’s new book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” are grounded in firsthand and up-close exposure to the man who would be king. Beside that, Mary Trump (daughter of the late Fred Trump Jr. and the acting president’s niece) is a clinical psychologist and, brother, does Donald J. Trump desperately need one.
But while leaks of Mary Trump’s account of how Donald became The Donald might be fascinating, they do not address the problem at hand: the country is being run by a bundle of psychological disorders. Emphasis on disorder. As of this morning, her uncle’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has cost the lives of over 130,000 Americans. His election, she wrote in now-deleted tweets, was the “worst night of my life.”
Per press reports, Mary Trump provided a bundle of financial records that formed a core piece of the New York Times’ 2018 Pulitzer-winning, 14,000 word investigation on the Trump family’s shady finances. After initially turning away 2017 inquiries by Times reporter Susanne Craig, Trump eventually delivered 19 banker’s boxes of documents from her lawsuit against the family over her inheritance from grandfather Fred Trump’s estate.
Only after reading the Times expose did Mary Trump realize how badly she and her brother Fred III had been cheated. Paul Waldman details:
When Fred Sr. died, Mary was told his estate was worth only around $30 million; the portion of that figure that became her inheritance was the subject of the dispute that led to a financial settlement and her NDA. She later gave Fred Sr.’s business records to the New York Times, which published a blockbuster story showing that the patriarch had transferred over $1 billion to his children (a scheme mostly carried out after Fred Jr.’s death), potentially defrauding the U.S. government of half a billion dollars in tax revenue.
Which brings us to the few unsettled cases on the U.S. Supreme Court’s calendar. One of them involves Donald Trump’s tax and financial records (newer than what the Times received). CNN:
For over three hours in early May over the telephone, the court delved into two momentous cases that will determine whether the House of Representatives and a New York prosecutor can subpoena Trump’s accounting firm and banks for his financial documents.
The justices focused on Trump’s effort to shield his documents but they also prodded the lawyers to look into the future and gauge how an eventual decision will impact the separation of powers and the White House’s broad claims of immunity.
Trump’s attorneys argued that the House subpoenas were “unprecedented in every sense” and asked for “temporary presidential immunity” against the subpoena from a New York prosecutor for the President’s tax records.
The release of any Trump financial documents before the election could be another bombshell for the President in an already dramatic year.
Lower courts in Washington and New York ruled against Trump.
Trump’s older sister, federal appellate Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, already surrendered her judgeship. She announced her retirement in April 2019, 10 days after notification of an ethics investigation into her involvement in the Trump family’s tax avoidance schemes revealed by the Times. A House of Representatives investigation of Donald Trump’s taxes could embarrass him, possibly revealing financial ties to the Russian government. But it would not likely further damage him politically with his tenacious base.
Prosecution by the state of New York, however, could cost Donald Trump real money. Whatever tax crimes the Trump family may have committed decades ago are long past the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution. “There is no time limit, however, on civil fines for tax fraud,” Craig and her Times colleagues wrote. Trump is overdue for a reckoning.
In the depths of the Great Depression, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration refused to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards” as the Barack Obama administration did when faced with the Great Recession. Out of the Pecora Commission grew the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and eventually the creation of the Securities Exchange Commission for regulating Wall Street, writes Kevin Kruse at Vanity Fair. “The Glass–Steagall Act, meanwhile, forced commercial banks out of risky investments and established the FDIC system which guaranteed deposits in case of bank failures.”
Neutering those checks and Obama’s failure to prosecute Wall Street miscreants helped lead us here, with a career criminal in the White House who practices “cheating as a way of life.” A Biden administration should not make the same mistake. “If Democrats actually want to move on from the Trump era, they’ll first have to provide a real reckoning with the past,” Kruse writes.
From Vanity Fair to My Fair Lady: “Wouldn’t it be loverly?”
Update: Per SCOTUSBlog, the Trump opinion from SCOTUS should come down tomorrow (Thursday).
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.