Trump the Genius
I know it's just campaign bullshit...but imagine actually believing that Donald Trump is a genius.
Anyway, David A. Graham:
Anyway, David A. Graham:
Viewed from some angles, this spin is absurd. Nothing about Trump successfully negotiating the tax code to his advantage makes him more qualified to overhaul the code; in fact, he’d seem to have an incentive to keep it the way it is, and anyway, if the trick was so neat, isn’t his accountant the real genius who ought to be running for president?
posted by Winston Smith at
8:09 AM
2 Comments:
What I find funny about this whole thing is this: The Trump campaign’s official line is that while the tax codes are a mess, because it’s possible for a person of Trump’s stature to avoid paying taxes, he has done nothing wrong because he has broken no laws. Christie said on Fox News the other day, “We need to change the tax laws because they are hurting Americans every day with their complexity and favoring people that they shouldn’t favor.” So the implication in all this (and remember that Trump is in damage control right now) is that Trump is just as outraged as you are about the fact that someone like himself is allowed to not pay taxes! The stance is basically something like-- “it’s morally impermissible for me to not pay my taxes (evidenced by the fact that he wants to change to laws because "they favor people that they shouldn't favor"), but since it’s legally permissible to not pay my taxes, I’ve therefore done nothing wrong.” By his own logic (disregarding the equivocation on ‘wrong’) he implicates himself in participating committing immoral acts, but then white washes it by saying that he’s absolved due to the legality of the thing.
It seems that we cannot rightfully charge Trump with any crime, but if we accept his own stance on the situation one is led to believe that he is a hypocrite because he implicates himself in immoral behavior. It’s a beautiful irony!
Yeah...ignoring all the obvious stupidity here...it's pretty interesting that he's getting any credit at all for his exploitation of the tax code. It's not like he does his own taxes.
Plus, that ginormous "loss" was almost certainly engineered for this particular end. It's also exactly in line with his character to claim large values like that without much grounding in reality, relying on his own "interpretations" of value to establish the figures. He's done that again and again. He wrote about his strategy of "truthful hyperbole" in his book, and lawyers take him to task regarding his questionable valuations in the court documents that you referenced previously on this blog.
So yeah.
I can't believe these people are willing to go down in history claiming that trump is, of all things, a genius. Yikes. I guess they're just banking on good old fashioned American political amnesia to keep from experiencing any real consequences from their proclamations...
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