"Well, I lay my head on the railroad track. Waiting on the Double E. But the train don't run by here no more. Poor, poor, pitiful me." – Warren Zevon
That would, in Donald Trump's case, be the money train. His pose as Midas now summons up an image of a rusty muffler rather than a fabulously wealthy king.
The Hollywood-phony pose that Mr. Trump has tended as carefully as a rare orchid withered last week when he admitted that there was no way he could come up with a $464 million bond to cover the judgment in a fraud case brought by the state of New York while the King of Appeals appeals.
Cynics might speculate that it was just another ploy to get out of paying money that he owed. Trump is a past master at doing that, but the poor, pitiful me spiel deals an awful blow to what he calls the "Trump brand."
I am tempted to write that there will be no more crowing about how he must be worth at least $10 billion, but we are talking Trump here, the man to whom the truth has no relevance. The boast was an incredibly stupid thing to say publicly because it supports the evidence that he has consistently lied to lending institutions about his net worth. Not that it really needed any supporting.
Fox News pundit Mark Levin, who has played Renfield to Trump's Count Dracula for years, was "outraged" by the lack of enthusiasm from "multi-billionaires" to rush and support the former president. If I might be excused for using the vampire analogy again, the daylight is creeping across the floor towards Mr. Trump and there are just so many corners left in which he can hide.
Levin, a millionaire many times over for his laughably hysterical defense of his crooked hero, has kept his own checkbook safely locked in his desk drawer. He must be following the cardinal rule in the Trump playbook: Let somebody else pay for it. Being outraged is just talk; being a damn fool can be expensive.
His indignant plea did not fall on deaf ears, however. The aroma of apathy that so bewildered Levin seemed to emanate from the fact that, if a person is smart enough or fortunate enough to amass billions of dollars, they are probably smart enough not to dump it down the black hole of Trump's never-ending neediness.
Let's face it, Mark, your boy doesn't have a great track record for either gratitude or financial remuneration. Ask the recently deflated Mr. Pillow. Honest Don has gotten to where he is with that fat check from Daddy and convincing other people to invest their money in his various belly-up business ventures by sporting a mystical aura of unbridled success that has about as much foundation in reality as the Easter Bunny.
It hardly needs restating at this point that Donald Trump is an extremely dangerous man. His staggering ineptitude during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic cost thousands of Americans their lives while he calculated the virus's impact solely upon his own ambitions. He actually praised a mob of white supremacists in Charlottesville in 2017 (the infamous "fine people on both sides" speech) in which a young woman was killed by one of the deranged fine people.
No one with half a brain has any doubt what his exhortation to the assembled mob on Jan. 6, 2021 was meant to do.
Beyond the incoherence, the megalomania, the bigotry, the creepy affection for tyrants, monsters, and his daughter, and the onset of what appears to be dementia (it's hard to tell with this guy), a new peril has emerged in this ongoing national horror show. I was tempted to call it another kind of show, but this is a family newspaper.
I have no doubt at all that Mr. Trump would willingly, even happily, accept money from any entity willing to bail him out of his latest financial imbroglio. This entity might be a country that does not have interests that align with those of the United States.
If someone enters into a financial deal with Trump, they would have to be recently returned from Pluto to expect to ever be paid back, so their interest in handing him the money would have to lie elsewhere. Vladimir Putin, as vile a human being as he seems to be, would not shovel millions of dollars into the pockets of a man he probably has nothing but contempt for out of sympathy for a soul mate.
He would expect something in return. They all would.
If I may divert for just a paragraph. This is an issue that also applies to the confidential documents Trump absconded with when he slinked out of Washington after losing the 2020 election. The overriding question should not simply be what he intended to do with them, but what he may be planning to do (or may have already done) with the ones he still has?
When asked whether her on again off again client might turn to foreign money to get himself extracted from another fine mess, C-list lawyer and Fox News hopeful Alina Hubba told an interviewer that he hadn't said he wouldn't. Hey, it worked for Jared, the Not-So-Prince Charming of this decrepit Camelot.
In a masterpiece of verbal obfuscation, Habba said, "There's rules and regulations that are public. I can't speak about strategy, that requires certain things, and we have to follow those rules."
I know you must be asking yourself what a lawyer concerned with rules and regulations is doing working for Donald Trump, but, like I stated earlier, words are cheap.
On March 22, everything was suddenly coming up roses. Mr. Trump claimed to have almost $500 million in cash on hand. He said the money was the result of "hard work, talent, and luck," and we certainly can take the latter component as a rare instance of truth if, indeed, any of it is true.
But every silver lining has a dark cloud. It seems that the money originally was intended to allow him to personally bankroll his presidential bid, like he did in 2016 and 2020.
Reporters demonstrated an almost superhuman amount of self-control when they managed to stifle the urge to laugh at the utter contempt this guy must have for peoples' intelligence!
