We all remember HRC asking that pointed question at the debates, some of us with a chuckle perhaps, though after November the yucks just don’t seem to be there anymore….
But some of us remember with consternation that, unlike Barack Obama’s vicious filleting of Mitt Romney’s financial misadventures in the 2012 campaign, complete with harrowing two minute commercials laying out how Mittens hollowed out properties and interviews with the workers he fucked, Hillary’s campaign team kinda just let the charge hang out there, continuing to bang away at Trump’s moral failings, which really needed no advertisement and were, in any case, unfortunately baked into the cake of American Presidential succession, starting with Thomas and leading to her own William Jefferson, with smarmy stops at Warren G. Harding, FDR, Ike, JFK, and Lyndon Johnson.
An over active libido was never a disqualifier for the office it seems, but actual law breaking sometimes is.
But as Yglesias points out at Vox the tale of how Trump busted out Atlantic City for his own fun and profit was a complicated one and most of it happened when Hil’s husband should have been guarding the hen-house.
“Thanks to a leaked copy of his 1995 tax return, the basic story fact that Donald Trump built a mini empire of Atlantic City casinos that crashed and burned in the early 1990s is now well-known. What’s not yet well-understood by the public is the even more important story of what happened next. As Russ Buettner and Charles Bagli write in Wednesday’s New York Times, 1995 was also the year in which “Trump began the transaction that would eventually free him from his financial travails.”
Trumps way out was to take advantage of the stock mania of the mid 1990s, take his Atlantic City Property public, while, crucially, maintaining his rotten to the core stewardship of it…
The Public Company that bought the property from the orange huckster paid 490M dollars, a price some think was around 100M over-inflated. Ever eager to double dip his beak, the Dumpy Don paid himself a $880,000 brokerage fee for facilitating the fleece. In the next year…
“Donald J. Trump received a $7 million pay package in 1996, including a $5 million bonus and a 71% salary increase, despite a more than 70% drop in the shares of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. from their high last year.In addition to his bonus, Mr. Trump, the company's chairman, received a salary of $1 million and another $1 million to cover services rendered by Mr. Trump's privately held companies to Trump Hotels, according to the company's recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
I urge you to read the entire story yourself, but you may weep at the opportunity lost. Obama killed Romney with just such a narrative, but, then, he didn’t have much in the way of sexual scandal to work with Mittens.
So he had to stick explaining how he ripped off Joe Schmoe.
The upshot of this story, if you choose not to go there:
“The fact of the matter is, however, that whatever mistakes Trump has made in his career, the Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts episode was a tour de force. The total sum Trump netted — not just in terms of salary and fees but in terms of cash paid to his other businesses, personal debts canceled, and overpriced assets bought — is incalculable. And while it would be a mistake to say it was all perfectly legal (there were money laundering fines, securities law violations, campaign finance fines, etc.), it was legal enough to work.
For voters, of course, the question is what side of the table you’re sitting on. Trump now says he’s going to put his skills and shrewdness to work on behalf of the American people, striking great bargains for us vis-à-vis China, Mexico, Japan, and our NATO allies. But of course Trump’s investors thought the same thing. Any casino enterprise is inherently a con; it’s just that they thought the gamblers were the marks and they were in on the con. In the end, the joke was on them. But Trump says it’s different this time.”