Monkey Business

There's no better gravy for the soul than delusion. -- A.R. Moxon, The Revisionaries

Just when you're ready to write off the Times, they go and surprise you by doing something useful. Obviously, there's nothing new here, no surprises to be found. If you're the sort of credulous sap who ever thought Donald Trump paid his fair share, or has ever even made a truly honest buck, I have several bridges of various sizes to sell you.

Nor will the article change any minds; anyone still claiming to be "undecided" is either a true booger-eating, window-licking dipshit, or is cynically pretending for some reason to not just flat-out confess that they will be voting for the nazi grifter.

But the article is still an interesting read, and it does have use as far as confirming what everyone already knew or at least assumed. Perhaps the only thing mildly surprising is the confirmation of just how singularly bad at "business" Trump really is.

I mean, think about it:  he inherited a portfolio of trust funds and Manhattan real estate worth over $400 million; screwed his siblings out of their cut of the old man's money; made somewhere in the neighborhood of another $400 million from his stupid reality teevee bullshit; chiseled contractors and business partners in every venture he ever undertook; laundered bratva money for years; and after all that he's still broke.

That is truly an epic level of incompetence, folks. That's a Michael Jackson level of incompetence. Trump may not have had to pay off his side pieces as much as Jacko had to pay the kids he fondled, but still -- if you're paying $130k for a piece of ass, you're paying too much, I don't care if sparks shoot out of that ass.

But to blow through nearly a billion dollars of essentially found money, it's just staggering to comprehend, moreso for someone who at the very least could have paid many times over for investment advisors who could have easily helped him cover his nut and still live like a concussed rapper.

Forbes' Dan Alexander has done some terrific writing on Trump's various financial chicanery, and here he does a deep-dive thread into Trump's debt and assets. Fun stuff. It is hard to believe that anyone with real money would get involved with a huckster like Trump.

Certainly Trump is exactly the sort of dickhead Dorothy Parker had in mind when she said, "if you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people He gives it to." Even by that standard, though, Trump is a special case. Even a dimbulb like Paris Hilton seems to be able to live the life she wants and still remain solvent.

As difficult as it is to get to that "net worth" level for people who aren't born to it, it's very simple to keep it and increase it, frequently by doing absolutely nothing at all. It was shown several years ago how, if Trump had done nothing more than invest his inheritance in a standard money-market fund indexed to the S&P 500, he'd be worth over $10 billion.

But you can't put a number on his pathological need to work on his weird, tragic daddy issues in public.