Last week Donald Trump took a supposedly massive blow tohis reputation when a New York judge said he had been overstating the value of his real estate empire to secure loans from banks.
Judge Arthur Engoron ordered penalties of $355 million andbarred the would-be President from running any New York company for three years.
It has become necessary when saying anything in defence of Trump to point out that he is otherwise completely awful. So there you go – he’sawful, on his worst days looking like a menace to nearly all of us.
A balanced look at what he is supposed to have done on this occasion however provokes laughter.
He exaggerated the value of his assets in order to get a property loan, a mortgage basically.
Since he was borrowing from large Wall Street banks, andsince they all got repaid, it is very hard to see who the victim is here.
I suppose you could say it is the otherwise entirely honest member of the New York construction trade who might now be owner of what is called Trump Tower.
But that assumes this person even exists in an industry known for producing massive bullshitters of which Trump is merely the most visiblysuccessful.
As if the rest of the property and construction industries are clean as a whistle. No sign of dodgy anything in either sector.
Same with banks. They’ve never been caught turning a blind eye to wrongdoing of any kind. It just never happens.
Also, if presenting the most optimistic view of your financial circumstances in order to get a property loan is a criminal offence,well quite a few folk in both New York and London should be feeling nervous.
I’d never have scrapped it on to the London property market 25 years ago otherwise.
The lender asked me, among other things -- was there any danger of my losing my job? No siree. A journalist? With job insecurity? The very idea.
Ok, sign here…
It looks to me that the court decided that they had to get Trump for something, and if this was the something, fine.
But that’s vengeance, not justice.
The judge said Trump’s “complete lack of contrition” for his sins bordered on the pathological. Ok. Mine too. How about you?
This conviction doesn’t even do what the Democrat officials who pursued it want.
A Trump voting farmer in Texas surveying the details of this case, shortly after gently fibbing to his bank just to buy himself a few months in the hope his business turns around, looks at this case and thinks, as much of America does about its own government: Jees, if they can do that to him, what could they do to me?
The case reminds me of that against Conrad Black when he was convicted of defrauding the Telegraph Group and sent to prison.
I covered that trial closely, while working for the Telegraph. Yes, it was awkward. But the paper’s position was that we should never be seen to be leaning his way, so our reporting was as straight/as vindictive as everyone else’s.
Black treated Hollinger, then the Telegraph holding company, like his personal piggy bank, without doubt, and in plain sight.
But the trial was to decide not whether he was a great guy, but whether he committed fraud.
It didn’t look to me like he had. The original shareholderswho pursued the case didn’t really think so either (I spoke to them, a lot).They wanted him to show contrition and pay some money back.
His arrogance, his ego, wouldn’t allow him this, so he ended up in prison.
Black, like Trump, was convicted of being a self-regarding ass. This still isn’t officially a criminal offence.
If Trump did lie to big Wall Street banks and got away with, well, frankly, so what?They knew who they were doing business with.
