For a very long time, we here at AP have been struggling to understand why Donald Trump thinks he’s such hot stuff.
He used to have a TV show that made him a lot of money. The TV show was just a bit of fluff, but it satisfied Trump’s insatiatable need to be in front of cameras and to have people fawn on him.
He is also a hopelessly shameless braggart.
While running for the highest office in the land, he let everybody know how rich he is, and that he was the only one who could do anything.
As in, Anything.
He infamously rode down his escalator at his gold-plated Tower on June 15, 2015, and said he wanted to be Our Leader — or, as it turned out, a man just like Rome’s Emperor Caesar Augustus (27 BCE-14 AD) or, in twentieth-century terms, Der Fuhrer — so he could deport people trying to come to the land of Lady Liberty, many of whom, he said, are criminals and rapists.
Donald Trump is a businessman, he’s never been anything other than that.
Only, as we just learned from The New York Times, he’s not at all a good businessman — but he sure knows how to take advantage of the Internal Revenue Code — one of the most incomprehensible pieces of legislation ever written.
Donald Trump doesn’t like to pay his taxes.
Not only that, it is a truth universally acknowledged that most Republicans don’t like to pay taxes either.
Democrats pay their taxes too, but they do so as part of their civic duty.
Donald Trump’s idea of paying taxes is to pay $750 a year to the United States Treasury, and to pay lots of money in taxes to folks in the Philippines and elsewhere, for his Projects, and to deduct $50,000 to get his hair looking good (that’s a really tough thing to do) and for makeup, for his never entertaining TV show.
And to pay First Daughter Ivanka a big fat consulting fee.
In 2017, Trump told his close personal friend Mitch McConnell — who’s worth a paltry $22 million — to pass standard orthodox Republican anti-tax ideology by cutting taxes for rich people like him.
At the instance of McConnell & Co., and numerous House Republicans (notably Ohio’s Republican Attack Dog-in-Chief, Jim Jordan; Devin Nunes, the now-deposed Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as then House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Cal.) and then Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin — note, Paul went back to Janesville or maybe to K Street in DC — ) Congress passed something called the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (TCJA) that, among other things, inappropriately cancelled the individual mandate provisions of the Affordable Care Act — which, we hasten to add, is before the Supreme Court of the United States, on Donald Trump’s persistent and so far fruitless efforts to scuttle President Obama’s signature legislation, and future SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett is hell-bent to invalidate it when it will be argued before HER on November 10, a mere seven days after Trump’s certain defeat.
Speaking of Amy Coney Barrett, our Chief Congressional Correspondent, associate solitary reporter Melissa Smith, and our Chief Investigative Reporter, California-based associate solitary reporter Susanna Sherman, just spoke with highly endangered Maine Senator Susan Collins, and Alaska’s Senior Senator, Lisa Murkowsi, about Coney Barrett’s prospects for being confirmed, despite the fact that their Leader, McConnell, broke the Rule that he set in 2016 upon the death of the late ungreat Justice Antonin Scalia — Judge Barrett’s Mentor.
Their conversation with Collins and Murkowski turned out to be very interesting, because they both told Smith and Sherman (who often collaborate in projects dear to the heart of DNC Chair Tom Perez) that they had just today received a telephone call from Judge Barrett, in which she told them that, after reading the in-depth reporting by the Times on Trump’s years-long tax dodges, she has decided (after consulting with her family and with her parachurch group, People of Praise, that Trump knows nothing about Mark 12:13-17 and Matthew 22:15-22, in which Jesus told his disciples that when it comes to taxes, Caesar gets to have those.
Barrett also told Sherman and Smith that with the in-depth reporting by the Times, she now realizes that the guy that did the bidding of McConnell and Federalist Society Honcho Leonard Leo is not the kind of guy she wants to be ruling on when he breaks as many laws as he’s already broken.
The good Judge will return to South Bend and continue with her work on the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit, where she will continue to do her utmost to rule against things like the Affordable Care Act, and other good stuff put forward by Democrats, for the benefit of the American people.
Judge Barrett has already written that when Chief Justice John Roberts ruled in favor of sustaining the Affordable Care Act, he went too far.