“You have to take the threat of Trump becoming president seriously, but you shouldn’t treat him as a serious person,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, recently told The New York Times.
Get it? You don’t have to squint to see a bit of Ronald Reagan in his rise and it would be easy to do what Republicans did and underestimate to extent of his appeal to several different voting constituencies.
But this isn’t 1980. The general electorate isn’t the GOP base. And Trump’s nuclear tantrum at the press who hounded him about donations he was supposed to make to veterans revealed a man who is unprepared for the scrutiny of a presidential campaign despite his wealth of questionable interests and ethical lapses that demand such scrutiny.
With his alleged wealth built inherited privileged, confidence schemes, tax avoidance, all in service of cultivating “his brand,” he’s the personification everything that’s wrong with our economy, which has been engineered to make life easy for the few born “winners” who take all while leaving the rest of us on the constant hunt for a gig.
I have a simple wish for this crucially important election, which must be won because it could decide the Supreme Court for generations: The same way the press forced him to make good on his promises to veterans charities, I want the tax dodges that rich “developers” like Trump use to get us to subsidize their lifestyle exposed and fixed.
Just as Mitt Romney’s loss personally cost him because the president ended many of the Bush tax breaks for the rich, Trump’s loss should end up personally costing him — possibly forcing him to pay his first federal taxes in decades.
Let’s not just beat Trump. Let’s end his free ride.
[CC image credit: Gage Skidmore | Flickr]
