Behold Ben, a 42-year-old white guy from Texas, explaining to a focus group why he's moving away from Trump:
As far as porn stars go for affairs, he could have set a better example for who to have an affair with.... There are so many wonderful porn stars out there.... But I want a president who’s going to be able to cover up a $130,000 bribe to Daniels. If he can’t pull that off, I’m not going to trust him with the nuclear football. This seems like such an easy thing for him to screw up. I’m kind of leaning toward Biden now.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: the traditional way of paying hush money is with a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills. If Trump had stuck to that he never would have been caught.
But no. Like the Nazis meticulously accounting for every death at Auschwitz, Trump had to bribe Stormy Daniels in a way that required meticulous accounting on his company's books. Idiot. So now he's a convicted felon.
It wasn't meticulousness. It was because a) he didn't want to pay the money himself, and b) he wanted to write it off as a business expense.
Right? The attempt to write it off as a business expense is what got him. If he'd just made a withdrawal from a secret account to bribe porn stars that Melania didn't know about and handed it off, none of this would have happened.
As a general matter it highlights Trump is a bungler in all things operational. Anything operational he is a fool.
Now as a salesman to the rubes he is a cunning animal genuis, but everything else, a bungler.
Greed makes people stupid.
Also, stupid makes people stupid.
If Trump were greedy but clever, he would be like any of the other aristocrats who inherited their wealth: he would have hired people to manage it for him, not bungle his way from bankruptcy to bankruptcy pretending to manage a vast corporation that is in actuality a family business that primarily licences its name. And he'd likely be far richer and few of us would know that much about him.
It could have still been an illegal campaign contribution that could've triggered the same scrutiny, if discovered. Let's recall that Cohen was convicted for FEC violation.
But there wouldn't have been any falsification of business records, so the charges would have had to be for the contribution directly. And, as Kevin said, the chances of detection were much lower.
My Boy pal makes $seventy five/hour at the internet. She has been without a assignment for six months however remaining month her pay have become $16453 genuinely working at the internet for some hours. immediately from the source***** https://shorturl.at/gpOfr
Trump can spend as much of his own money o his campaign as he wants, but it has to be reported. If he paid Stormy with his own cash he’d be committing a crime if he didn’t report it…and Stormy would know if he didn’t
I'm hearing both sides on that particular point. Some are insisting that if Trump had paid her off with his own money then it would have been legal even if unreported. The crime was that he had his business pay her and falsified records to cover it up.
BUT others, like you, are insisting that the reason for paying her was to help his campaign, therefore that payment was a campaign contribution which must be reported regardless of the source of funds.
I'm not sure what I believe about this. There are people on both sides of this issue who know more about the law than I do.
I had thought that both are correct but one is a state crime, which he was convicted of, and the other a federal crime, and it's a federal crime not just because he didn't report it but because the purpose was to prevent the public release of information that could have highly colored the election.
Yeah, but if he'd just paid cash out of his own pocket and kept the Trump Org itself (and David Pecker) out of it, then he could have credibly argued that it was to spare his family embarrassment rather than protect his election chances, and we wouldn't have a felony case.
I assume Melania would be in line to contribute to Trump sleeping with other women so she didn't have to.
It was because a) he didn't want to pay the money himself, and b) he wanted to write it off as a business expense.
I guess that's why he did it. But that part never really made sense to me, either. His firms aren't public companies—he calls the shots. He could simply have paid himself a bonus out of one of the Trump Organization payroll accounts (gross up the amount to account for the increased personal income tax burden) and then promptly written a personal check to Cohen. It's not against the law to pay your lawyer fees for services rendered!
Many years of successfully running a criminal enterprise made him hubristic about his ability to dupe the law, and he got sloppy.
"These weren't very smart people and things got out of hand..."
I have to say Mr White* of Texas has a compelling logic (without taking a view per se on Ms Stormy Daniels, as person or porn star).
[ETA, I realised I somehow changed his name in my mind in writing, but post-facto the error is too amusing for me to correct myself, rather I draw attention to the error as amusing]
My favorite exchange from the group.
----
Ben, 42, Texas, white, college adviser:
"But he was having an affair with a porn star and not a particularly attractive one at that. There are so many wonderful porn stars out there."
Jonathan, 37, Florida, Black, operations manager:
"That’s not a crime."
Ben:
"After talking to you, Jonathan, I’m thinking about voting for Biden now."
Jonathan:
"Trump is not a moral compass to a lot of his supporters. He’s the bad guy that’ll do things on our behalf. He’s the Tony Soprano or the Walter White —"
Ben:
"Don’t bring my `Sopranos' into this."
Jonathan:
"He’s an antihero."
Ben:
"Come on, man."
---
Ben, you are my new hero!
I find Jonathan very credible. I think a lot of MAGA voters think like Jonathan. I don't know about him, but lots of those voters are in fact people of faith.
The question I am dying to ask Jonathan is this: "Is it a good idea to make a deal with the devil to do God's will? Of course, God can make anything work to his will, but do you think God wants you to make a deal with a devil to further His will? Doesn't doing that imply that you don't trust God to work out his will without you making a deal with the devil?"
Sigh. The Iron Age in media has much to answer for.
DJT's support among Evangelical Christians is stronger than any other demographic group. They know about the, um, moral issues with Trump, but they excuse it all based upon Bible stories about King David, Samson, or even Nebuchadnezzar.
Are you now wondering why they couldn't give Bill Clinton a similar pass? Policy. It's all about policy. Anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ, anti-regulation, anti-immigrant, pro-business. Trump checks the right boxes.
The devil usually comes through on his end of the bargain. Trump is slightly worse: he will take your money and your soul and will give you nothing in return.
American Evangelicals have long abandoned the teachings of Jesus Christ.
This is getting closer to my view of that human stain in 2015.
I told a family member who is enthralled by him that in my view, Donnie was disqualified by pre-political concerns. Even if you like whatever it is you think you'll get from him, policy-wise, you'd be a fool to trust a shitbag con man to carry through.
And sure enough, unless you are extremely wealthy, you didn't get whatever policy you wanted. Ridiculous tax cuts were the beginning and end of his policy "accomplishments". (My relative is not extremely wealthy.)
I'm asking every Trump voter I know if I, as their elected local inspector, can hold their wallets.
KD has explained a few times what his list of accomplishments "looks like" from the perspective of "typical" Republican voters. It's not nothing, and it's not just tax cuts.
Evangelicals wanted an end to Roe v. Wade, and got that, although not during the Trump presidency.
trump tried to bully the president of mexico into paying for the wall, tried bullying ukraine into faking dirt on biden, tried bullying a bunch of states into faking election results, and stood by for 3+ hours while his thugs took a big steaming dump in the halls of congress
remember benghazi where republicans faked apoplexy that the state dept didn't send the the marines half way around the world within 20 minutes to kill some a-rabs?
not so much outrage from them when their boy was sitting in DC drinking a diet coke and watching porn in the oval office while his supporters are smashing up the capitol
Yeah, plus, come on, Stormy or Melania? How can Trump’s fans forgive him for shunning the all American blonde?
Trump was used to women faking orgasms, but he wanted a woman who was really good at it.
Really, Really made me laugh. Thanks. Traveller
So you think he should have gone for the failed porn actress than the successful one?
I don't have a strong opinion myself, but I'm surprised the media hasn't picked up on the obvious cognitive dissonance for his fans of rejecting the all-American girl for the immigrant.
Trump is not really a billionaire. Real billionaires would shrug off a low-six-figure payment without a moment's thought. But Trump? He concocted a scheme to have his business pay for it, illegally. No real billionaire would do that. Not because they care for the law, but because $130k is such a trivial figure (to them) that it's not worth taking any legal risk.
His assets are heavily leveraged and his incomes barely cover his debt service. I'm saying he's teetering on such a fine line that $130k is real money to him. Definitely not a billionaire.
I just assume that's the general received wisdom. "Don't tell me you're a man of wealth and taste, show me."
This. I think that this also is a critical insight to understanding what a shitty businessman he is. A real businessman who is central to the operation of a real company isn't going to waste a bunch of time starring in a stupid game show. Ask yourself if Steve Jobs or hell, Elon Musk would have thought spending time out of his day memorizing lines and posing in a stage to tell people that they were fired was the highest and best use of his time.
He got paid 300 million dollars to star in that show. You've got to be well outside of Trumps alleged wealth to ignore 300 million. Musk is putting all of his effort into X and there is no chance it will make 300 million for him.
Trump owned half the rights to The Apprentice and thus got half the profits, which I have read was closer to $400M. That, and the Trump Tower Manhattan, are the only two really good deals Trump has made in his entire life. Everything else that he has touched has turned to sh*t, which is why he is perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy and has never really been a billionaire.
Over the course of ten years, sure. But that's exactly my point (and made clearer by Parrots's note below): a real businessman wouldn't make far more as a gameshow host than he would actually running his business. Because Trump isn't a businessman--he's a teevee clown.
I mean, Robert Downey Junior made even more money playing a tech billionaire in a bunch of movies, and nobody is like "Wow, RDJ must be a genius at business--maybe he should be president!"
Sam Walton, the richest man in america when he was alive, war really famous for being a really cheap prick.
You're assuming he wouldn't have had his CFO keep a false record of pulling out "miscellaneous cash", however. See, the point where he fucked up was being a cheap bastard, wanting to pull pre-tax money from his company to pay for his personal indiscretions rather than his personal bank accounts.
To be fair, I think there were MORE than two cars used for Ivana's funeral.
"I've said this before and I'll say it again: the traditional way of paying hush money is with a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills. If Trump had stuck to that he never would have been caught." He actually did want to pay cash for the playboy bunny but Cohen refused. I always assumed it was because any time you withdrawal or deposit $10,000 or more in cash you commence a government money laundering investigation, which Trump really couldn't afford. And Trump would have gotten away with this if Cohen hadn't gone down for his taxi business.
Oh please let there be someone on the Biden-Harris campaign who is whipping up an ad based on appealing to this perspective. Please, very please!
Probably the most incredible aspect of the Donald Trump story is how incredibly incompetent he is. At literally everything. And yet, this just doesnt matter to his devoted worshippers.
Speaking of the nuclear football, I'm curious why T didn't strike Iran after they torched those Saudi refineries in 2029. Seems as though it would have been the perfect excuse for him to show everyone how tough he was.
sorry- fat fingers and lousy eyesight should have entered "2019"
Trump's idea of "being tough" (he uses "being strong") is suppressing the population, like Putin, Xi and Kim are doing, and that is what he wants to do in the US (and will do if he wins).
Nuking other country does not seem to be something he cares much for.
Just wanted to leave a link to a substack entry of the author Paul Street who, IMHO, really tells it the way it seems to many of us baffled and befuddled by "BS on Stilts." I especially recommend this to Mr. Drum. I think he should be revising is opinions about Genocide Joe.
https://paulstreet.substack.com/p/the-united-states-looks-like-a-sick?r=1h74z
I love reading what you all have to say. But I think that painting this story as "paying hush money to buy the silence of a porn star" is missing the real point of the crime that was committed.
Trump had a secret agreement with David Pecker to kill damaging stories, and invent negative stories against his opponents (first Republicans in the primaries, then Clinton in the election). This secret agreement was an illegal in-kind campaign contrition. The payment for Stormy Daniels was at the tail end of this, when Pecker who was still actively in the conspiracy, just didn't want to pay himself ("I am not a bank"). They could not have had an open agreement because the in-kind contribution was too large. In total, when you count the doorman story, the McDougal story, the Stormy story, and the paying back Cohen part, you get seriously above half a million dollars of illegal in-kind contribution to his campaign. And that's the part that has come out that we know about. There could be more.
A super PAC could have done this kind of thing in the open, as long as it does not "coordinate" with the Trump campaign (b.s. of course, but legal). However, killing negative stories in the open is a contradiction, so it has to be done in an underhanded way. Also, Trump wanted to be really involved and control the decisions, so it had to be "coordinated" with his campaign.
Finally, at the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians, the campaign tried to setup a similar secret agreement to get dirt against Clinton. But it turned out that the Russians did not really have anything. The purpose of the Russians may have just been to compromise the Trump campaign in fact.
So, this was a truly vast conspiracy, not just one payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels.