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The past couple of weeks has had a mountain of news that have exploded into the news cycle and were overtaken just as quickly by equally shocking events.

Trump's Taxes

The first event I'd care to address is a New York Times (NYT) article published last Tuesday with the headline, Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance.

The heading below the title read, "The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due."

The highlights:

• Mr. Trump is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years. Included in this number is a $125 million mortgage on the Doral country club in Florida, coming due in 3 years, and a $100 million mortgage he took out on commercial spaces in Trump Tower, coming due in 2022.
  
  
• The IRS is auditing a $72.9 million tax refund Mr. Trump received in 2010 as a function of declaring over $1.4 billion in business losses for the preceding two years — most notably, abandoning his stake in the Trump Atlantic City casino. He has used this enormous refund to not pay taxes for ten of the last fifteen years. At issue is the casino abandonment: If the IRS discovers that Mr. Trump received anything of value after Trump Atlantic City emerged from bankruptcy (like, say, 5% ownership of the new business), his entire 2010 refund must be repaid, with interest — a sum over $100 million.
  
  
• NYT analysis also revealed a pattern of writing off "consulting fees" matching 20% of the value of new properties the Trump Organization acquired, and that some of these values appear to equate to income on financial disclosures from Ivanka Trump. In other words, he's giving money to his kids and writing the payments off on his taxes, presumably to avoid paying gift taxes.
  
  
• UPDATE: October 9th reporting from The Washington Post concerns an additional tax matter, this regarding the Trump family's 212-acre Seven Springs estate in New York. Court documents show that Trump received a tax break of $21.1 million in exchange for a promise to preserve more than 150 acres of woodlands on the property, based on an appraised value of $56.5 million. The property reaches into three cities in Westchester County, none of which agree with the $56.5 million figure. New York AG is investigating whether the Trump Organization improperly inflated Seven Springs' value as part of the conservation easement. ¹
  
  
• Finally, the article explores how business has been booming at Trump properties since he entered office. Business at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., nearly doubled from December, 2016 to May, 2018; at the Doral golf resort, credit card receipts nearly doubled in the quarter ending August, 2015 (after he announced his candidacy) as compared to the year before; profits at Mar-a-Lago soared tenfold from 2014 to 2016 (he then doubled the initiation fees in 2017).

This article got everybody talking. In my social circles, there was much made of the $70,000 spent on his hair, and of the $750 he paid in taxes for two years while in office.

That was until Mr. Trump announced over Twitter that he and the First Lady tested positive for COVID-19.

Trump's Coronavirus

At one o'clock in the morning last Friday, Trump tweeted news of his infection. The media scrambles to cover the story. By about midday, the nation has learned that the announcement of Amy Barrett's nomination to fill the late Justice Ginsberg's seat was perhaps a "superspreader" event. The annoucement in the Rose Garden at the White House, and the reception that followed, was well-documented by photographers; each photo shows that masks were not worn, and none of the guests were socially distanced. Plausible, in terms of conditions under which the disease may have been spread — and I chose my words carefully.

As of Monday, known infected now include: ²

• President Trump
• Melania Trump
• Hope Hicks
• Kayleigh McEnany
• Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah)
• Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.)
• Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)
• Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel
• Rev. John I. Jenkins, University of Notre Dame president
• Kellyanne Conway
• Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien
• Trump debate adviser Chris Christie

The COVID story spreads like a California wildfire, just racing to chew up more on-air time until all control is gone. The tax story is buried, overtaken by news of Trump's diagnosis and treatment, of others who claim to be positive, and other minutae that quite frankly should not be public knowledge, IMHO.

But instead of simply denying the press any information, citing national security concerns — which I think most reasonable people would understand, the Administration has turned it into yet another laughable, three-ring shitshow. Quoting NYT:

The episode continued what has been a days-long torrent of falsehoods, obfuscation, evasion, misdirection and imprecision from those surrounding Trump as he faces the greatest threat to a president’s health in decades. From the chief White House doctor to the president’s chief of staff, the inability to provide clear, direct and consistent information about Trump’s condition has been widespread since the coronavirus began rapidly circulating in the West Wing.

Trump, his doctors and White House aides sought to portray him as improving and largely unencumbered by the virus that has killed more than 209,000 Americans. White House aides emphasized that Trump was continuing to work while at Walter Reed, casting him as a triumphant warrior.

Highlights:

• President Trump was seen on Sunday being driven around by Secret Service agents in a black SUV. The president was waving to people as a show of his strength. There is much hay being made by the news corps' medical consultants about how the act seriously risked the lives of those agents.
  
  
• In a video the president released on twitter, Trump remarked that he'd been "visiting wounded warriors and first responders" inside the hospital. ³

My Conclusion

On Taxes: Spend a weekend reading Michael Cohen's DISLOYAL. Cohen discusses how Trump would inflate the values of his properties to boast about his wealth, then turn around and devalue them drastically at tax time. Taking deductions and recording losses is one thing; playing very fast and loose with the regulations is perhaps another. What Cohen described was very solidly on the shady end of the spectrum. It seems likely to me that the president is in some very hot water over his Atlantic City casino, and that right now he's counting on his Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchkin and bully Bill Barr to get and to stay in front of that mess (recall the FBI under the Department of Treasury, same as the IRS). I think it's also very likely that when he's no longer a sitting president, a Biden Administration Treasury will go after Trump for tax evasion. I think it's equally likely Mr. Trump knows it.

On COVID: I don't yet believe the president has COVID-19. I am highly suspicious of the events being reported in the media.

1. First and foremost, after lie after lie after lie, I don't believe a damn thing Trump says.
   
   
2. Second, the timing was perfect for squashing the tax story. It seems just too convenient that Trump and a bunch of his cronies all catch the COVID-19 disease two days after NYT broke a huge story about Trump's taxes.
   
   
3. Trump is transported to the hospital the moment he pops positive. The SCOTUS Nomination Ceremony was held on September 26; Trump tests positive on October 1, only 5 days later. Yet in all the outbreaks we saw earlier in the year — particularly over holiday weekends — the COVID numbers all spiked about 10 days after these events. Ten, not five. (To be fair, I don't know details on the testing, including whether it offers some advantage of detection within five days.)
   
   
4. In his initial report, Trump's physician wrote that the president was "well." Not "responding well", not "showing very mild symptoms." He said "well." Was this a very subtle indication that the president does not actually have the disease?
   
   
5. The notion that our president, who has tested positive for COVID-19 and has been admitted to Walter Reed Memorial Hospital, is allowed to walk around and press the flesh with service members and first responders is COMPLETELY PREPOSTEROUS. Quoting NYT:

   In the Twitter video, Trump said he has spent part of his time at Walter Reed visiting wounded warriors and first responders but did not provide details about how those patients were protected against him infecting them with the coronavirus. He also implied he understood the virus better than medical experts after having contracted it.

There's no way in Hell that man has COVID-19. Or, the medical staff at Walter Reed, up to and including the President's personal physician, are GROSSLY INCOMPETENT that they're letting a patient infected with a deadly disease wander around their hospital greeting other patients. It's patently absurd on its face.

So What's His Plan?

In my estimation, the price for using this COVID-19 ruse is not being able to visit voters in battleground states for the next couple of weeks, although he may just take a week off and get back to it. His idiots will still go see him.

So either he plays the whole thing up like he's currently doing, to paint himself as some sort of superman to wow his voters, then be done with the whole thing,

or

He plays the whole thing down to get voters' pity. Seems unlikely, BUT — suppose he plays it down so far that he fakes his own death?

Say he fakes his death. By "death," he saves face in a way, because he technically wouldn't lose the election, because he "wasn't alive." He has a funeral on the National Mall and the whole bit — prior to the election. Being "deceased," the Treasury department can't take $100 million of his fortune, so they don't go after him. Meanwhile, he's alive and well and has disappeared just like he said he would, continuing to run his empire through his beard — his children — just as he does now, from within some country where he'll live comfortably without worry of extradition to the United States should he ever be found.

But to do that, he'll have to deny himself the lust for power he's become so drunk on. And that might be too tall an order, even when weighed against losing $100 million and possible prison time.

Of course the scenario I just outlined is far-fetched. It sounds like a mid-60's episode of Mission Impossible. The problem is, he's proven time and again that he's capable of such fantastic hyperbole through connected others.