People that you've never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows -- US Politics September 2020

Also no one watches tv

I don't want to watch these debates, but afaict Trump has declined significantly since the last set. Perhaps so has Biden, but at least Biden began his decline from a position of coherence, Trump is now notably even more imcoherent. I'm not sure how he counters anything. It will just be his predictable word salad. Flights from China! Water flow! Religion! Socialism/antifa! Judges! Seems pointless to me.

do you cognitive declind?

*decline

Is that the name of a dance? Looks like I somehow misspelled incoherent, despite correcting an initial typo, so ... yes, I am declined

I wonder if those 2016 debates--especially the one right after the Hollywood Access tape (the first?)--would have been different without the albatross of Bill Clinton. Maybe Hillary would have directly confronted him, summoning forth every bit of disgust within her. BC made that more difficult, if not untenable, and she no doubt thought the clip itself made anything more unnecessary.

Cognitive Decline? Isn't that one of the B-52's 16 dances?

I'll try watching the debates, and I'm sure I'll regret it.

thread title

None of that is happening" = they're not considering it?

I don’t know who’s considering what - Warren would 86 the filibuster and Bernie would pack the court and so on, but Schumer doesn’t want to eliminate the filibuster, no one in the moderate and elderly part of the Senate wants to pack the court, and there’s no chance they admit two new states on a 51-49 party line vote.

People are scaremongering about the Court if the GOP regained power but they’d be much quicker to create East, West and Central Dakota if they hold all three bodies again.

so... the NYT has Trump's tax paperwork now, do i got that right?

Here's the piece:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html

and there's the tax returns

JUST IN: 7th Circuit stays district court injunction allowing Wisconsin ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if received up to 6 days later. No list or count of judges backing the order. No rationale given. Earlier: https://t.co/wuiUGyzIhd pic.twitter.com/6d2HRVSIEO

— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) September 27, 2020

and there's the tax returns

― reggie (qualmsley), Sunday, September 27, 2020 4:46 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

How long have you been waiting to post that, qualms?

If I could I'd buy you a beer right now.

Can someone post a salient chunk of that NYT story for those of us out of stories

congrats qualmsley, you spoke it into existence

He paid $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017. That’s the story that makes sense to most people. All the stuff about losses is too complicated.

raymond i may be able to retire from ILX now altogether

I think the debates will matter a little bit it’ll be the opposite of 2016; we all know what Trumps gonna say, he’s obviously gonna lie a bunch and make no sense most of the time, while Biden needs to convince that tiny section of persuadable voters that he’s competent, so as long as he does okay and doesn’t say anything stupid I think it’ll be considered a win

Soooo....takeaways from the tax returns are A) he’s paid no taxes and B) he’s massively underwater? How the fuck is a United States President who’s lined his pockets with federal government money for FOUR YEARS $400 million in debt?

i'm out of clicks too and i want to read about the losses :(
relatedly, is there a trick to the nytimes? no more incognito mode. i guess i have to delete cookies. i don't want to give them money.

xpost It's because he's smart.

Paywall Bypass for Chrome works if that’s your browser

Old lunch other. Trumpian spin: Because he's smart and has used the chapter laws cleverly to minimize his tax liability while he cleans up on profits for dodgy stuff like licensing his name to be on buildings owned and managed by someone else?

Just tryna save some time. The Trump spin is already on record; no one's mind will be changed by any of this.

Those who think he's a charlatan and a loser still think so.

Those who think he's a genius at manipulating the system still think so.

Congrats, I guess, to people who think this was going to be a game changer. So sorry to be the one to tell you that it won't be.

Old lunch OTM

that's what i need, thanks xxp

Tips re reading NYT articles: I'm using Chrome on a MacBook. I open the link to the article in an incognito window and very quickly (like, within 10 seconds) hit the ESC key. That stops the page from loading, but the text will already be there; you just won't see any of the pictures or graphics.

Right now, Trump's response is "fake news, fake news"--he says he's paid lots of taxes.

If he's ever forced to move past that--he may not be--I expect his response will be the same one he had in the one Republican debate in 2016: no one knows how to game the system better than I do, and that's the guy you want in charge. It was, truthfully, probably his best debate moment: when he said (paraphrase) "I gave money to that guy, and I gave money to that guy too, and I could call them up and get them to do whatever I wanted."

I have to agree with YMP: not sure any of this will mean anything.

Obviously it’s gonna mean very little for the election but I’m starting to get very curious what’s going to happen to Trump once he becomes a civilian. He has to repay nearly half a billion in the next four years!!

I will let more detail oriented folks suss out the, well, details, but remarkably, Trump seems to be such a terrible businessman that even as a crook, despite being rife with corruption and conflicts of interest, despite being the goddamn president of the United States, his incompetence still puts him unfathomably deep in the red.

it will definitely mean nothing, i am just interested in taxes tbh

Well, I think it depends on if and how much he broke the law doesn't it? And if he is indeed 300 million in debt, that won't go away when he's no longer president, in a couple of months or in 4 years.

But, Josh, it's strategic redness. He's smartly understating his income so as to reduce his taxes! Which is what any smart, winning businessman can and should do.

Anybody who doesn't game the system in this way is just not smart.

Yeah it’s abundantly clear now how this dude managed to not only lose money in the casino business but also in real estate during the 90s, when practically everyone was making bank. Hilarious that the guy who ran on his business acumen turned out to be arguably the worst businessman who ever lived

lol If he's such a bad businessman, then how has he lost hundreds of millions of dollars? You have to be a great businessman to make hundreds of millions of dollars to lose!

heh, I missed the detail that supposedly he reported $70,000 in hair care as an expense.

tbf Trump writing his hair care off as a loss makes perfect sense.

Ha that would be a good prepared debate zing

I am still skeptical that this will matter but this seems weird

President Trump convened a news conference at the White House on Sunday afternoon, minutes after The New York Times published a major new investigation into his tax returns.

For reasons unclear, Mr. Trump was accompanied by his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, and New Jersey’s former governor, Chris Christie.

We have known since the 2016 debates that this will be the inevitable Trumpian spin: he declares loses that are convenient for him, and continues to buy golden toilets. So, and I am trying to say this nicley, why the fuck did we howl so hard for tHe TaX reTuRns?

Sorry, I am a little bitter about this. What is the point of spending four years nailing Jello to a wall? It will just squish away in every direction. Perhaps we could point to the evasiveness itself as the problem, rather than hope the content of the returns miraculously shows evidence of some incontrovertible crime?

News flash: no one with a competent accountant and/or attorney reveals blatant crimes in their tax return. Perhaps there are areas of ambiguity that a very skilled forensic accountant could uncover, given unlimited access and a broad scope of prosecutorial power.

What the fuck were you hoping for, a line item like "payments from Putin for being a Russian stooge, $6M/annum payable in monthly installments"?

That he shows losses and bankruptcies is, from the point of view of his supporters, strategic and smart and indicative of someone with skills at the game. Because these people don't respect or recognize the legitimacy of the tax code (or the existence of the government), then Trump's ability to evade it is a sign of strength, not weakness.

so he's gonna get indicted if he loses

I think the tax returns were just the first “you said you were gonna do this and you didn’t” thing in his campaign

“It’s fake news,” he says. “It’s totally fake news. Made up, fake. We went through the same stories, you could have asked me the same questions four years ago, I had to litigate this and had to talk about it. Totally fake news. Actually, I paid tax. And you’ll see that as soon as my tax returns – it’s under audit, they’ve been under audit for a long time, the IRS does not treat me well, they treat me like the Tea Party, like they treated the Tea Party, and they don’t treat me well. They treat me very badly. You have people in the IRS that treat me very, very badly. But they’re under audit. And when they’re not, I would be proud to show you. But that’s just fake news.”

Oh, ok.

“First of all, I’ve paid a lot and I’ve paid a lot of state income taxes, too. ... It’ll all be revealed. It’s going to come out, but after after the audit. They’re doing their assessment. We’ve been negotiating for a long time. Things get settled, like in the IRS. But right now when you’re under audit, you don’t do it. You don’t do that. So we’re under audit. But the story is a total fake.”

Crisis averted!

But yeah I’m starting to get the impression that this election is gonna mean more to Trump than just staying President for another 4 years. I still think about that should’ve-been-a-bombshell report about how the Trump organization is literally just fraud from the ground up

If I read the Times right, they said this is just the first of many articles. The problem for him is, there might not be a line item for crimes committed, but when it comes to funny tax business, once you start moving around hundreds of millions of dollars you become a pretty big target.

He's like the low-level mafia thug who buys a fancy car after the big heist rather than laying low. He's been asking for it for years.

"so he's gonna get indicted if he loses" will he? how much of this shit is illegal tax avoidance and how much is legal loopholes that the rich use to get out of paying their fair share?

News flash: no one with a competent accountant and/or attorney reveals blatant crimes in their tax return.

Also I think $750 is a worse headline than zero too btw