The really big story about Trump came out Friday and hardly anyone noticed the news. It was an announcement from Carolyn Maloney, who heads the House Oversight Committee, that Trump’s accounting firm has handed over a trove of documents covering their work for Trump until the firm, Mazars, cut ties with Trump earlier this year.
The accounting firm said they would no longer work for Trump because they couldn’t ‘stand behind’ the reports they had issued about the Trump Organization’s net worth. Which basically means that there were doubts about the numbers that Trump’s company gave the accountants which were then used to create the financial reports that were submitted when the Trump Organization went out shopping for loans.
So, the question is this: Who’s ox will get gored now? Will Mazars be in trouble because they prepared financial documents based on numbers they knew weren’t right? Will the Trump Organization get in trouble because they gave Mazars numbers to use that they knew were off the mark?
We’ll see what we see. But either way, you may recall that Trump was the first Presidential candidate who refused to release his tax returns, so his claims about being worth ‘billions’ were maybe just another example of him blowing more hot air through Twitter and Facebook and every other internet venue for the transfer of hot air.
Not that I would mind Trump being shown to be a liar once again, but I’m not sure that such disclosures would really change anything at all in the current political scene. The reason I say that is because I never thought that Trump’s primary appeal to his so-called ‘base’ had much to do with whether he was a really rich guy or not.
Trump is hardly the first demagogue to make his mark in politics, although he may be the first demagogue to actually get elected President based on a continuous spewing of demagogic remarks. I attended one of his 2016 rallies, and he got his biggest cheers when he made the most offensively demagogic statements I heard any politician ever make, most of those comments aimed at non-White people who were ‘sneaking’ over the border to assault honest, decent Americans, or collect welfare checks.
Was Trump’s rhetoric any different or any more divisive and hurtful than speeches made by Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, Father Coughlin, and other right-wing noisemakers over the years? Do you think this woman at Trump’s Ohio rally this past weekend really cares about anything Trump actually says? Meanwhile, for all his claims about how the Youngstown rally was going to be a ‘juggernaut’ and was completely ‘sold out,’ the picture in the header of this column shows what the crowd really looked like a half hour before Trump was due to speak.
And who is now traipsing around after Trump and warming up the crowd at all his Save America events? None other than Marjorie Taylor Greene, who claims she will ‘defund’ the Department of Education because it’s nothing more than a Deep State public relations effort promoting lesbians and gays.
Meanwhile, it’s now just 7 weeks until the midterms and the blue team is slightly behind in the Senate but even-steven in the House. And I suspect what these polls really show is that increasingly nobody cares what Trump says or Trump does.
Trump’s real problem is that if he doesn’t announce a run for 2024, he’ll become the latter-day version of the Headless Horseman, galloping around the world, putting down from time to time for one of his Save America rallies and then flitting off again.
On the other hand, if Trump does announce that he’s running again in 2024, the most he’ll accomplish is to upend the GOP even further without helping the Party to make any real gains. Here was Trump’s response to some alt-right wind bag who asked him what would happen if he were indicted for taking classified documents home: “I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.”
He thinks? That’s the best he can come up with?
I’m afraid the Age of Trump is really coming to a close.
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