How do I say what I’m about to say without getting all my Trump-hating readers good and pissed off at me? Don’t worry, I’m not about to turn around and start saying how wrong I was to spend the last six years saying that Trump’s the biggest POS to ever sit in the Oval Office or anywhere else.
Actually, in the New York neighborhood I come from, the more accurate acronym would be PAS, as in ‘piece a sh*t,’ but either way you get what I mean, right?
I just finished reading People vs. Donald Trump – An Inside Account, by the guy who spearheaded the investigation of Trump by Cy Vance, the Manhattan DA, and then quit after Vance left, Alvin Bragg took over and the whole Trump megillah (read: big deal) was shut down.
The case against Trump is obviously up and running again, but (and here’s where my Trump-hating audience won’t like what I’m going to say) if anything, and certainly not the intention of the book’s author, Mark Pomerantz, this book actually substantiates the idea that Trump has been the victim of a witch hunt and may end up being prosecuted for doing business the way it’s always been done.
Here is how Pomerantz describes his feelings about Trump: “I saw him as a malignant narcissist, and perhaps even a megalomaniac, who posed a real danger to the country and to the ideals that mattered to me.” [p. 177]
If that comment wouldn’t be a reversal for any legal action that might have been taken against Trump based on an investigation led by Pomerantz, I don’t know what does. And worse, the rationale advanced by Pomerantz for going after Trump reeks of nothing more than the cops arresting the slowest guy running away from the scene of a crime while the other criminals run faster and get away.
The whole Trump thing got started as an offshoot of the arrest, indictment and conviction of Michael Cohen who was Trump’s legal bag man after Roy Cohn left the scene. Cohen arranged for the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, whom Pomerantz describes as an ‘adult actress’ which is a polite way of saying that between her gigs as a hooker, she appeared in some porno films.
In fact, Daniels made no attempt to hide her efforts to score off Trump. She was represented by an attorney who made a practice of shopping his clients around to the highest bidder with whatever salacious story could be cooked up.
It should be added, and Pomerantz makes no mention of this at all, that Michael Cohen first came to the attention of law enforcement not for anything having to do with Trump, but for how he and a partner attempted to evade taxes they owed for profits from a taxicab company they owned.
Cohen was a Queens kid who wanted to move into the Manhattan scene. With the money he scammed from the cab business, he bought an apartment in a Trump condo on the Upper East Side, and eventually got himself noticed by Trump.
What did the Manhattan DA have on Trump? They had what they could have had on just about any New York real estate developer beginning in the 1980’s when Trump stopped working for his father and went out on his own – the overvaluation of real estate and other assets which made it possible to secure bank loans.
Trump got interested in the Manhattan real estate market when there was no market because the city had gone bankrupt, more than a million residents had moved away, and even the country’s most storied professional sports franchise - the New York Yankees – were for sale without a single buyer willing to put up any dough.
Nobody predicted that ‘da city’ would recover as quickly as it did. Nobody was willing to do any kind of real estate development in Manhattan without getting all kinds of tax breaks. Nobody could get any lender to put money on the table unless the guy looking for financing could spin the kind of bullshit stories that Trump was able to spin.
And how does Pomerantz justify going after Trump when everyone else in the real estate industry was inflating the value of their properties to make a deal with a bank? Here’s his rationale: “What attracted me to the job was not politics but the opportunity to work on a case that was more exciting, meaningful, and interesting than virtually any case one could imagine.” [p. 23.]
Meanwhile, if you read through the whole book, you will discover that for all the crimes allegedly committed by Trump, in not one single instance did anyone else get hurt. Nobody was killed, nobody was injured, nobody lost their life’s savings. So Trump inflated the value of his assets to qualify for various investments and loans. Did anyone who invested with him end up suing him because they didn’t get paid back?
Trump isn’t the victim of a witch hunt because a witch is someone who uses magic powers to achieve some kind of evil ends. But if he hadn’t been President, and then challenged the 2020 election results by telling several thousand assholes to invade the Capitol on January 6th, he could have kept inflating his assets for the rest of his life and nobody would have given his behavior a rat’s damn.
What we really learn from the inside account by Mark Pomerantz is if you want to commit a victimless crime, keep your mouth shut, particularly if you’re a Republican in a Democrat(ic) town.
Pomerantz has the absolute nerve to tell us that during the whole course of the investigation, there was never “any conversation about politics, about the 2020 election, the ‘stop the steal’ shenanigans, or whether Trump needed to be prosecuted because his behavior as president was repugnant to us or to other.” [p. 129.]
What planet was Pomerantz living on while he was investigating Trump?
‘