Trump?

He is riding something else: The strongest and most subversive ideology in America today. Donald Trump is the living, walking personification of the Gospel of Success.

Donald Trump’s casinos, Trump Entertainment Resorts, emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday, July 16. This followed two previous bankruptcies by the Trump casinos. First in 1991 and again in 2004 – 2005.

(Trump’s other big business failure was Trump Airlines , which never made a profit.)

This newest bankruptcy eliminated $1.3 billion in debt. The Reuters news article reporting all this, called Trump a “celebrity developer.”

Apparently Donald Trump can stay a celebrity developer while wiping out over a billion dollars in the bankruptcy court. (All 12,000 bankruptcies I’ve handled, eliminated about half that, total.)

So far, Trump has avoided personal bankruptcy. He makes better use of corporations than most people. Also, he’s benefited because the hundreds of millions in business bankruptcy losses are enormous! The massive size of the debts encouraged the creditors to “restructure his debt to avoid the risk of losing more money in court.”

I pass this on, because I talk to dozens of people every month who are mortified at having to file bankruptcy. People can feel like their lives are over. People say, “I wasn’t raised this way.” (As if the way people are raised can pay the credit cards when you lose your job. Or get sick.)

Last I checked, Donald Trump still has his TV show. And, while other stockholders were wiped out. Trump is still 10% owner of the casinos.

Donald Trump filed bankruptcy on ten thousand times more debt than my highest dollar clients. I doubt he’s ten thousand times as embarrassed.

On the other hand, Trump can console himself with something he has in common with most people who file bankruptcy. He had nothing to do with causing the recession that brought him (and maybe you) down.

The recession was caused by people whose greed and stupidity, mostly, was covered by a bailout, rather than bankruptcy. With potential losses in the trillions of dollars, bankruptcy didn’t seem to be an option. Instead, the government stepped in.

Don't know if it will silence the barking carnival.

There's a new PPP poll out today. He's not exactly winning hearts and minds...

This is far broader than the subsection cited by Sullivan, and restricts the circumstances under which not only the Hawaiian agency, but literally any person, without exception, may permit others to inspect, disclose, copy or issue a copy of that record. Obviously, a prerequisite for doing any of those activities is having access to the record in the first place, but no one has ever suggested that Obama did not himself have access to his original birth certificate. The issue was that without a properly handled waiver executed in accordance with the Hawaiian agency’s rules, it is actually illegal for one having access to those records to do anything in the way of permitting others to have access to those records. Placing those records in the public domain is of course the most extreme form of permitting others access imaginable, yet that is precisely what Obama had to get a waiver to do.

Quite literally, in order to release this document, the President had to ask to be treated as being above the law, even if it is a relatively trivial law in the grand scheme of things. Quite understandably, the State of Hawaii decided that this was a wise idea. That so many are prepared to insist that the President had an obligation to ask that he be treated as above the law from a very early date is far more troubling.