'This is the smoking gun': Carl Bernstein claims Trump's taxes expose his 'grifter presidency'

[kpete]

‘”That Donald Trump and his family are grifters, and they have created — he has created –the first grifter presidency in the history of the United States, in which his purpose in running for the presidency and exercising the powers of the presidency, the fundamental reason is to bail himself and his family out,” Bernstein remarked.

“It shows in policy,” he continued. “It shows in his foreign relationships especially with Erdogan and Turkey, it shows the fundamental corruption and criminality of Donald Trump, and now we have the definitive evidence, and he is trying to make the conduct of the press the issue, instead of the conduct of himself in his refusal to pay taxes adequately, and also to keep them secret.”

“This is the smoking gun about who Donald Trump really is, and what his presidency really is,” he added.

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/09/this-is-the-smoking-gun-carl-bernstein-claims-trumps-taxes-expose-his-grifter-presidency/

[Rule of Claw]

1. One thing though

I don't think this is the only gun.

[dalton99a]

2. It's all about looting and thievery. Trump has no interest in working an honest job

[gratuitous]

3. If only there had been something to tip off the American people

Like suspicious behavior during the 2016 campaign about concealing his tax returns while publicly claiming he wants to release them. Or paying $25 million to settle a civil fraud case. Or, I dunno, a trail of business bankruptcies including casinos.

It cracks me up to watch all these earnest news readers treating the true state of Trump's finances as some kind of bolt-from-the-blue revelation.

[Cyrano]

4. Knowing in 2016 wouldn't have made a difference

His cult following couldn't care less if he ate live babies on TV and tortured kittens. Dear Leader can do no wrong.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. Not to the cult, but part of his 2016 vote was people who thought he was "on their side"

and tax avoidance on a massive scale would piss them off. It would only have needed a small shift in PA, MI and WI for him to lose the electoral college.

[Eyeball_Kid]

6. Amen. Four years ago, he was a phenomenon. The press loved the circus.

Fox News was jizzing in their collective pants. Morning Joe was flying high. News execs were buying their third yachts. It was boomtown. There were always more millions to be made. Donnie was the headliner and he was a media whore. The gravy train was running at full speed. Brad Parscale was glistening with wealth. Nothing could stop MAGA. Yet they all knew that Trump was all sizzle, no steak. And they also knew that his MAGA followers were addicted to the sizzle and didn't give a rat's ass about the steak. So all was good.

Not a lot has changed since then. Donnie is still lying through his teeth, just as he always has. But his voters at the margins have back away-- those voters who went for Donnie for reasons other than his charisma and his Mussolini jaw and his posturing as an international strong man. More than Reagan ever showed, Donnie's manufactured, con-man persona rules his every appearance. He always thought that he could lie his way to world domination and pay off his massive debts to boot. He never did want to work. At his core, he's lazy and self-indulgent. But that's who we have now. That's who we're going to discard. The globe is on fire with catastrophic events that could doom the planet as uninhabitable in a few short decades. It's where we live as a species. Donnie, as President Pennywise, is exactly the wrong kind of person to be in a position of leadership. For four years, we as a nation have neglected our responsibilities. We are failing to address existential issues and are coming closer to that point of no return as a habitable planet. And there Donnie sits, blaming and denying and planning his next con job.

[c-rational]

7. +1

[lindysalsagal]

5. profiting off the presidency. Who could have imagined it?

Um, everyone with eyes, ears, and a half-way functioning brain...

[WyattKansas]

9. Donald Dumbass ignored the COVID-19 threat, never prepared, and never responded to it...

Because he is cash poor and desperately depends on the hospitality business to survive, so that is why it was better for him to let Americans get the virus and die. To him, even the mention of a pandemic was very destructive to his businesses.

Just like being a very poor businessman, he failed to see that allowing the virus to spread would only make it much much worse on people and the economy. So what if it eventually destroyed his businesses, now he has the U.S. Treasury to bail him out of his debts especially when he claims he won the election in his authoritarian fantasy.