28 September 20
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28 September 20
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FOCUS: Charles Pierce | Trump's Tax Returns Have Exposed Him as a Massive Failure Who Thrived in the Age of Plutocracy
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "The New York Times report is the final and conclusive evidence that the president failed at a time in which politics and government were rearranged to keep his particular genre of failure ever from being fatal."
y happy accident, the latest bombshell from The New York Times dropped one day after some nice folks in New York sent along a copy of Without Compromise, a collection of pieces written for the late, lamented Village Voice by the late (and equally lamented) Wayne Barrett, who wrote that newspaper's "Runnin' Scared" column for almost 40 years. There is absolutely no point in trying to understand the current president*, the sleazoid New York milieu that birthed him as a public figure, and our immediate peril without having read Barrett's dogged pursuit of Manhattan's landshark demimonde and how it put the screws to everyone else. From the Go-Go Gordon Gecko 1980s all the way through Rudy Giuliani's fealty to developers (and criminal cops) as the city's mayor, without fear or favor, as the old muckrakers used to say, and using the country's signature city as his index patient, Wayne Barrett traced the steady corruption that came along with nearly a half-century of shoving the nation's wealth upwards, a process that, hitched to retrograde politics, made someone like El Caudillo Del Mar-a-Lago not only possible, but inevitable. That Barrett died the day before this president*'s thoroughly corrupt inauguration is one of those episodes in which history and Providence get together to rob us blind.
Barrett was onto the president* early on. In 1979, Barrett published an insanely detailed two-part epic in the Voice describing not only the president*'s initial rise to New York power broker, but also his own battle with the president*, who already was ham-handedly trying to manage his own press. "In this two-part history," Barrett concludes, "we've been looking into a world where only the greed is magnified. The actors are pretty small and venal. Their ideas are small, never transcending profit. In it, however, are the men elected to lead us and those who buy them. And in it, unhappily, are the processes and decisions that shape our cities and our lives."
And, in 2016, those two groups merged into one vulgar talking yam, someone whose innate contempt for democratic government was reinforced, as Barrett explains, by how easy it was to buy his way into it, or around it, if needs be.
He had prided himself on never having met a public official, a banker, a lawyer, a reporter, or a prosecutor he couldn’t seduce. Some he owned, and others he merely manipulated. As he saw it, it was not just that everyone had a price, it was that he knew what the price was. He believed he could look across a table and compute the price, then move on to another table and borrow the money to pay it. "Everybody tries to get some money" was his assessment in one unpublished interview of what motivates the people he dealt with. It was his one-sentence summary of human nature.
So, as stunning as the Times series is, and the fact that he may have run for president in the first place because the revenue stream from The Apprentice was drying up is my personal favorite, it functions best as the final verdict on five decades in which the institutions of democratic government surrendered themselves to the implacable forces of plutocracy. The tax code—and therefore, the tax burden—has been rigged against most Americans. (As bad as the fact that the president* once paid $750 in federal income tax is, we should remember, that $750 is $750 more than Amazon paid in 2018.) There were giants who profited from this transformation of American society and politics, and there also were some bottom-feeders. Our current president* is one of the latter.
The Times report is the final and conclusive evidence that everything the president* has sold about himself to his business partners, his lackeys in the press, his bankers, the Republican Party and, ultimately, the country, is the purest moonshine. He stands exposed now as a massive failure. As a businessman, he's a debt-ridden mess, deeply in hock to God alone knows who. As a president*, he has set new standards for incompetence that may well stand for centuries, assuming the country does, of course.
But he stands also exposed as a failure who was allowed to thrive because he failed at a time in which politics and government were rearranged to keep his particular genre of failure ever from being fatal. In fact, if he hadn't run for president*—and, especially, had he not been elected president*—he likely would have floated gracefully into eternity, leaving a complex disaster for his heirs to straighten out, and remembered in history as a crude, wealthy wastrel with some interesting eccentricities. And measured only against his fellow plutocrats, posterity might have gotten away with remembering him that way. But measured against the presidency, he was what Wayne Barrett said he was in 1979: small and venal, with no ideas big enough to transcend profit, a fitting epitaph for the republic in the age of the money power.
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