Thread by @AlexandraErin

You know, I keep seeing people talking about Trump expensing his hair care with the idea that it's a phony deduction, but here's the thing that I think we should be looking at: what other obviously personal-use goods and services were expensed?

I ask *not* on a tax angle.

As I've said many times, both before and since the NYT story dropped, Trump's MO is to live off the streams of other people's money that pass through his hands. Salaries he pays himself as manager or consultant on a project. His casinos lost money but he got paid to run them.

Here's the thing about Donald Trump constantly eating at his own restaurants. It not only appeals to his paranoia and his love of consistency, but part of the story is that he does it out of a sense of perfectionism. He's constantly testing them.

So for instance, has he been counting all of his meals as business expenses? The IRS has rules for when you can deduct a meal but apart from that has he been passing off eating in his own restaurants as part of the expense of running one?

I honestly would not be surprised to learn that he doesn't ever pay a bill for eating in his restaurants, has the cost of the meal counted as an expense for the restaurant biz, and also "expenses" the meal on his end (despite not having paid for it).

Basically... and this would honestly probably be small potatoes in terms of high finance dollars and cents... but if I were an investigative reporter going over his taxes I would be looking for evidence that his "billionaire" lifestyle is the equivalent of showering at work.

How many of his properties include posh living quarters for him? How many of the properties that he stays in have catering and personal services? These things are not weird or bad or illegal in and of themselves (but how does he pay for them, and how does he write them off)...

...but, for instance, the entire time his fabled casinos were famously losing money, he still held court there and lived like a goshdang king, didn't he?

Which is not necessarily a crime, though it may have included crimes.

It's small, small potatoes compared to being in hock to foreign oligarchs and mobsters, but a pattern of dubiously expensing personal services and goods supports the view of Donald Trump as a con artist playing a tycoon.

That $70,000 that Donald Trump deducted for hair care while he was on the Apprentice?

Who would be surprised to learn that NBC was paying for some of his hair care?

I mean, this would be classic Trump: get the network to pick up the tab for his grooming and wardrobe, then inflate the price, and claim it as a personal expense. He gets the perks and the write-off, and whatever money he can pocket along the way.

And the thing is it would take a forensic accountant cross-referencing among the literally hundreds of paper companies and shell corporations he has created, to say nothing of outside entities like TV networks and his own licensees, to catch how much double-dipping he's doing.

But it would be against Trump's nature to *not* double dip. "That makes me smart." People who don't do it are "suckers".

I mean, I say double dip, but I guarantee -- I GUARANTEE -- that he's been charging the same expenses to multiple of his companies, that he's been attributing the same losses to multiple entities, so he can count them multiple times.

Donald Trump doesn't make money. He takes money. And he doesn't particularly care if he holds onto it, so long as he gets some use out of it.

Money is an illusion, a shared dream, a way of keeping score. And just like "norms" or lines on a floor or a sign on a bowl of free candy that says "limit one per customer", he understands that other people care about it in a way that he actually doesn't.

Donald Trump was still rich when his personal net worth was negative, when his liabilities were something like negative nine hundred and eighty million dollars and his assets were so tenuous and ephemeral and obfuscated no one could say what he actually owned.

He'd like to be a billionaire but he understands in a way that few people do how little it actually matters if a person has a billion dollars if they can get a billion dollars of value out of life.

To Donald Trump, money (other peopl's money) is fuel that he burns in order to propel himself forward and keep himself warm and illuminate himself.

His casinos weren't a failure to him, they kept his lifestyle going for years and propelled him to the next big thing after them.

Other people who view money as an illusion probably laundered a lot of it through his casinos; people trying to run businesses in partnership with him were soaked and then left holding the bag.

(And his dad spent a lot of his siblings' inheritance propping the illusion up.)

As per usual, Sarah Kendzior is lightyears ahead on this.

https://twitter.com/sarahkendzior/status/1310338745984581633

If the invoices show he bought $200,000 worth of grand pianos, he'll definitely report that he spent $200,000 on grand pianos.

https://twitter.com/Philosopher_Dad/status/1310573683279360000

The first sentence of this tweet is paraphrasing the writing of Sir Terry Pratchett, who had Trump's number long before Trump reinvented himself as a political figure. The main villains of his first two Moist von Lipwig books are basically facets of Trump

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1310572455648428034

Pinned down under oath, Donald Trump said that he didn't know his net worth because to him his net worth is just a feeling. We could say that was to avoid revealing a number without perjuring himself, but it's true.

He hated being almost a billion dollars in debt, in his post-casino, pre-Apprentice years because it limited his options. He would grumble about it because he couldn't clearly see the next solid enough place to leap to and start digging when the ground crumbled.

But he also loved it, would brag about it. Who else could have managed to get enough suckers to foolishly trust him with their money?

Trump has owned stock but he doesn't invest in the market the way that most rich people do. He doesn't and has never had a diversified portfolio of stock he owns just to profit by their appreciation, spread out over enough sectors to insulate him from risk.

When people talk about if he had just put his father's money in a hedge fund he'd be richer today, this is what they mean. Take that money and spread it out over a bunch of companies which are all basically good bets. Some will go down, sometimes. Enough of them will go up.

You pay somebody to identify the good bets and to move the money around when what's a good bet changes, and a package of currently identified safe bets is a "fund", basically.

But Trump isn't interested in that!

When Trump buys stock, he's looking to acquire a controlling interest (enough of the stock to call some shots, or at least to talk about the company as his property), and not because he's interested in acquisition per se.

Donald Trump doesn't have an investment portfolio for the same reason he finds it embarrassing to have a trade deficit: investors are *buyers*. Buyers spend their own money. He sees them as suckers. He wants people investing in him.

His version of investing is, you get people to put money in you. You use that money to buy a stake in another company that looks enough like it could be a going concern that you can turn around and say, "This is the Trump Org's latest venture. You can get in on it."

He doesn't need to actually hold onto money. He just needs money flowing around him that he can dip his beak into whenever he wants and use to give the impression of a rich and successful businessman, which helps him keep the money flowing around him.

To me... yes, it's crucial that we have a so-called president who is saddled with shady obligations to shady people. But to me the big picture in Trump's taxes and the reason he has fought tooth and nail to hide them is they expose his fraud. Not his tax fraud. His whole being.

It would be great if we could get the image of him as a failure to stick because his con and his whole life hinge on portraying himself as the opposite.

But he hasn't been trying to succeed in that sense.

How to succeed in business without really trying? Amateur hour. Donald Trump's life goal has been to succeed in business without really succeeding. To completely insulate himself from the concept of failure.

Here's a thread that goes into some of the specifics of the kind of shell game Trump plays to live a life of EXcess without the hard work of SUCcess.

https://twitter.com/davidfickling/status/1310380939600510978

This part is key. Delay, delay, stall, stall, drag it out, make it a huge hassle for anyone to come after him for money, and try to keep that quiet enough that his trappings allow him to attract money from more suckers.

https://twitter.com/davidfickling/status/1310551338284015617

He dined out for years on slack from the banks that he owed money to, on the basis that if he failed they would be hurt more tan he would be.

When he ran out of marks to con in one pasture, he moved onto another, but he's been running out of pastures.

https://twitter.com/davidfickling/status/1310552242290712576

When I say that no one has ever needed the presidency as much as he has... people say he ran as a marketing exercise, to reinvigorate his brand. I say that was his fallback if he lost, and a fringe benefit if he won.

Being president has let him slow down the chicken-roosting.

His brand is bigger than ever and he has amazing and unique tools to prevent discovery, collections, lawsuits, investigations, etc. And fresh rhetorical excuses for damaging things that come to light. Globalists! Deep State! Sour grapes!

And of course, fake news. He tweeted -- not for the first time -- just those two words last night. Just those words, nothing more. That was his first act of damage control in protecting his image, his only real asset, from this story. FAKE NEWS!