No. of Recommendations: 13
And delay is the name of the game. If Trump can get elected POTUS he feels he can make all his troubles go away.
Which is probably why he sounds more desperate and unhinged all the time. He MUST win at any cost.
----------------
From this vantage point in the proceedings, it would be a fascinating parlor game to try to estimate the true sources and magnitudes of the fears driving Trump. Psychologically, he is clearly one seriously defective carbon-based life form. For someone with his particular set of neuroses, the fear of being shown to the world to be far less wealthy than he has claimed to be his entire adult life is clearly capable of driving extreme risk taking to prevent that outcome. It also REQUIRES enormous mental energy to be continually exerted against reality to keep recognition of those consequences from overtaking the effort needed to maintain the appearance of normalcy.
But his behvavior could be driven by another fear... The fear of the two financial settlements triggering such massive shuffling throughout his portfolio that it exposes other financial fraud triggering more criminal cases against him. Two things are worth pondering in this area.
First, Trump is likely confused about assets he owns OUTRIGHT versus assets he owns SHARES of. For someone as egotistical and divorced from reality as he is, it's easy to adopt the mental shorthand that concludes "if my name's on the building, I own it." Well, there's a big difference between owning one hundred percent of ten properties each worth $100,000,000 dollars -- congratualations, you're a billionaire -- and a ten percent share of ten properties worth $100,000,000 dollars -- congratulations, you're a centibillionaire. Big difference. Especially when your need to appear far richer than you are requires you to leverage your tenth of a billion in wealth to extremes which means you might be worth $100 million but you have virtually ZERO liquidity. And if you "own" a ten percent share of those assets but actually owe money on them, then you're not really event a centibillionaire.
When you're worth $100 million, have expensive tastes, zero liquidity AND you are consistently bad at operating businesses, you burn through lots of cash and your finances get worse, not better. You become more desperate each time loans come due and require refinancing, leading you to adopt more shady practices in an industry (real estate) seemingly optimized for financial fraud and work with darker and darker tiers of funding sources to continue funding your financial charade.
This is precisely the position Trump and his family are in. He has had $550 million in civil judgments levied against him. He needs to go through the motions of appealing the cases to delay an eventual reckoning but must cough up the cash (or some portion of it as a bond) in order to even start an appeal. His financial arrangments are so convoluted that NO ONE can untangle them in thirty days to even identify what could be sold to begin collecting the judgment and he isn't even likely a majority owner in any of the assets avaialable. Any attempt to begin cashing out one of these assets is likely to trigger an avalanche of debt covenant violations on other assets that will make him instantly insolvent.
Also keep in mind that dating from the early 1990s as his father was dying, Trump made an attempt at cheating his siblings from their share of inheritence from his father's fortune. Even his Alzheimers addled father somehow recognized something was afoul with paperwork Trump tried to trick him into signing, refused to sign it and led his wife to contact the other siblings who then found out about the ploy. At that point, the siblings all realized that the set of businesses had already been redirecting wealth out of Trump Senior's business entities through shell janitorial service companies in New Jersey into Trump's entities to avoid estate taxes and all of the siblings at that point signed on to continue that scam. At the time the father died, his business, previously valued by the Trump family at $1.3 billion had been hollowed out completely and was worth a mere $30 million dollars.
With that track record of fraud and corruption, if the mental energy being exerted by Donald Trump to suppress recognition of the consequences of these facts coming to light could be harnessed somehow, we could eliminate fossil fuels overnight.
WTH
