Credit: Dangerous Minds / Book Cover

Cope is a hell of a thing, right? When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I’ll never forget a number of the libs in my life burying their heads in the sand, ignoring all the times he basically said “I’m going to be a dictator” and saying words that, to this day, still make me angry.

“Well, y’know, maybe this could be a good thing! After all, he’ll run the country like a business, maybe that’s what the country needs!”

Ten years later, he’s spent the last six of them running the country exactly like he promised to. Like a dictatorship standing for nothing more than his own ego and whatever the last person he talked to told him to do, whether that’s the Kremlin, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon. In a way, the question I’m interested in is what these cowards actually meant when they said he’d “run the country like a business”? After all, Trump is a lot of things, but a smart businessman isn’t one of them.

This is a man who has more bankruptcies than most people, even in the depressingly corrupt world of politics, could ever get away with. What’s more, a number of those bankruptcies came from running casinos. Let that sink in for a moment. The idea of “the house always wins” is one so ingrained in casino culture that you’re basically allowed to stack the deck so far in your favour that you never lose any money. Trump went bankrupt.

So, I ask again, when you turn away from the fire currently engulfing your kitchen, inching closer to your queer and immigrant friends and say “he’ll run the country like a business!!” what does that actually mean? The truth is, it means something that came up in summer 2016. Something that would have kneecapped the campaign of anyone who wasn’t a white, male celebrity. However, as the Epstein files show, white, male celebrities really can just do whatever they want, can they?

“Running the country like a business” essentially means committing tax fraud. For years.

….so, is Donald Trump is a tax fraud?

I know what you’re all thinking. A man who fundamentally believes that everyone in the world is scum that deserves to serve at his feet doesn’t make a habit of doing his federal duty as an American citizen and paying his taxes. Shocking, I know. I mean, you don’t get to the status of billionaire without a fleet of people scamming the tax office on your behalf, but for everyone else, we only see the vibes. We only get a feel for it based on the way they are in public. We know for damn sure when it comes to Trump.

In October 2016, The New York Times published a bombshell article about how, in 1995, tax reports filed by the Trump Organization posted a loss of $916 million, cancelling out any taxable income until 2013. This leaves us with two options. Either the so-called “business genius” lost nearly a billion dollars in a single year in the mid-1990s, a sum worth nearly two billion dollars today. Or he’d been cheating the taxman for the past 20 years. This is after he’s spent the previous five years before 2016 rallying for Barack Obama to enforce stronger tax laws for the sake of the American middle class.

We know all this to be true because Trump admitted to it. He tweeted after the news broke, saying, “I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them.” Surprise, surprise, his toadies fell in line.

Forgetting every line they’d ever spouted about supporting the blue-collar American in favour of sucking Trump’s shit-coated diaper. Marvelling at his business genius and shouting down anyone who (accurately) called him a tax fraud by saying “he broke no laws”.

All that in mind, maybe Trump has done as those swill-minded libs said he would. He’s run the country like one of his businesses, and will do so for eight years in total.

He just runs his businesses like a nakedly corrupt dictatorship.