It’s wildly undesirable to even post this on social media because of all the verbal abuse you would receive. Centrist, MSNBC “liberals” have a bubble at least as impermeable as Fox News addicts’. Having said that, Matt is doing important work. Thanks for that
Same here, also mom, who watches MSNBC at home all day. My sister and I had to basically have an intervention with her, taking the approach of “you’re not actually fighting Trump with this behavior, you’re just making yourself (and sometimes the people around you) miserable. Obsessing over every Trump tweet just is just taking his bait.” She seems to be doing better, but it’s possible that she just knows we don’t want to hear it. 5-10 minutes of Trump, then we move on to other topics
I kind of consider that "losing people to politics" or to "political religion". I've had perfectly fine relationships all my life with people who I disagreed with politically (including my mother). The people who can't tolerate any dissent from family are friends--that's almost it's own thing. I've known it from people on the right, but I see it much more these days from the left. At the same time, my mother is very left wing, hates Trump (I don't hate Trump, nor did I hate Obama, it's just not how I approach politics) and we get along fine. We have a Black Lives Matter sign out in our yard (my wife's idea, not mine, as I don't care for the organization's politics) but so far no grief from anybody, one way or the other.
I feel like emotionally healthy people can disagree about politics and still get along as human beings. Emotionally unhealthy people cannot.
The last paragraph hit hard. Of all the Orwellian labeling that's gone on in the Trump era, to me the one which is most apt is the deliberate forgetfulness within the endless swirl of information (and the status of most of that information as false, misleading, or unimportant). We've been in many ways an amnesiac state for a long time, but it's ratcheted up to terrifying places. We have the collective cultural memory of children. And when it comes to people whose integrity used to be subject to some level of popular policing (journalists, pundits, politicians), they have no need to correct themselves or admit to falsehood, because everything marches on at a furious, whirlwind pace and no one knows where they are anymore. Information and interpretation enter into the world and then seem to vanish as we immediately go forth to the next thing.
I’m not sure you should use the first person pronoun, “we,” in your comment. After all, you me, and everyone else here on this blog have arrived in resistance to the very things you reference.
The straight in the eye bald faced lie is now considered a proper remedy for a pulitzer prize winning "journalist" to utilize when defending their award winning "work". How about those apples?
I remember hearing media icons during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal admitting that the news had become entertainment rather than factual. Trump is also entertainment. Many of your commentators claim to be free market capitalists. Well ...surprise..surprise..media companies like making money. My only problem with your analysis is that you don’t include the right wing media. Aren’t Limbaugh,Breitbart,Fox,Glen Beck,Alex Jones etc. also the media? What do you think about the accuracy of their reporting?
As for Trump and the Russian story. I agree with you that Trump and family were probably not involved. Trump is too reckless and stupid to have been clued in by the Russians. The only problem is Manafort. I will never understand why he admits to giving internal polling info. to the Russians.Maybe you can explain this to me.Given how Facebook posts can be targeted to specific voters...maybe that’s it.
I ,and I guess you ,suspected all along that Trump resisted releasing his tax returns because they would show him to be insolvent. Truly wealthy people never brag about how much they’re worth. But a narcissist like a Trump would rather risk jail than admit he was broke. In my view “Uncle Donald” couldn’t run a hot dog stand on his own. Until he blew it with 6 bankruptcies,his daddy’s money kept him alive. And then came the Apprentice...Trump could only succeed as an entertainer. And..the beat goes on.
"My only problem with your analysis is that you don’t include the right wing media. Aren’t Limbaugh,Breitbart,Fox,Glen Beck,Alex Jones etc. also the media? What do you think about the accuracy of their reporting?"
With the possible exception of Breitbart, none of those you mentioned has either pretensions to, or past reputation of, being journalists, reporters, or objective. Alex Jones may claim to have the secret real truths, but this is not and has not been a credible claim.
Limbaugh has said explicitly that he is neither objective nor a journalist, though he does insist he is always revealing real truths. Glen Beck is much the same--these are opinion-pundits, not journalists, and they are basically (and should be understood to be) evangelists for a particular slice of right-wing ideology, and do not shy from being so described. Limbaugh touts his conservative bonafides. Brietbart claims to be more journalistic, and they are, but they are clearly biased in their reporting. So they would be the closest thing I can think of on the right to NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, etc.
Matt wants a more objective and rational press, and is looking for it at places where he once new objective and reasonable journalists, like WaPo and the NYT and is especially concerned that these institutions have shifted more to narrative-shaping than reporting.
Which I get. But even if you treat Brietbart and Fox and even Beck (The Blaze) as reportage like the NYT and WaPo, for me it's all just "things to think about". I feel like all reportage should be viewed with massive grains of salt. Does the reporter or institution have a bias towards a particular narrative? Will they leave out or manufacture context in order to support that narrative? Is the reporter likely to assume a confidence or expertise they don't actually have? Etc., etc.
My experience is that even in less fraught areas, stories where I have personal knowledge have frequently been reported inverted or backwards. Quotes have been "reshaped" for clarity. Explanations have been interpreted (and thus misinterpreted) by the journalist or journalists. Expertise has been asserted that doesn't exist, and facts from complicate source materials have been gotten complete wrong.
Perhaps journalists used to be better at updating or modifying or fact checking or confirming sources? Probably. Possibly. But I always treat all journalism as an interpretation, like to be skewed and distorted by biases and unknown knowledge defecits.
At the same time--and I completely get Matt's frustration--caveat emptor. I am a consumer of news, and I consider it my job to flag everything as "possible, not definite"--unless I know enough to immediately dismiss it. There was lots of technical reporting on the Russian collusion story that was just wrong (from terminology to journalistic ignorance of what portscans are and how IP addresses work). Where I don't have any expertise (most areas of life) I just have to consume news as "might have some accuracy or relevance, but journalists, like all humans, are biased and flawed so it's probably not gospel".
«suspected all along that Trump resisted releasing his tax returns because they would show him to be insolvent. [...] Until he blew it with 6 bankruptcies,his daddy’s money kept him alive.»
Commercial real estate is a [euphemism] "magical kingdom", with different rules (mostly very special tax and bank rules), and [euphemism] "well-managed" bankruptcies can be cash-gushers, and [euphemism] "being nice" to bank loan officers can be also very profitable. Two relevant quotes, one from A de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" of 1834, the second from a speech by "historian" N Gingrich:
“Consequently, in the United States the law favors those classes that elsewhere are most interested in evading it. It may therefore be supposed that an offensive law of which the majority should not see the immediate utility would either not be enacted or not be obeyed.
In America there is no law against fraudulent bankruptcies, not because they are few, but because they are many. The dread of being prosecuted as a bankrupt is greater in the minds of the majority than the fear of being ruined by the bankruptcy of others; and a sort of guilty tolerance is extended by the public conscience to an offense which everyone condemns in his individual capacity.”
“If you have a society where almost every middle class person routinely fudges the law, that's telling us something. We have laws that matter-murder, rape, and we have laws that don't matter. Speed limits are an example. Why would you think that a regulatory, process-oriented bureaucratic model would work?
The first thing that every good American says each morning is "What's the angle?" "How can I get around it?" "What does my lawyer think?" "There must be a loophole!" Then he proceeds to work the angle, and the bureaucracy spends its time chasing that and writing new regs to stop him.”
Yes but then what. What is the end game here to loophole your way to fill in the blank. This most certainly wont make you a happier person and for sure what the hell kind of meaning is this.
I am very dubious, but I think it's possible. What I do believe is the election polling this year is, if anything, more fact-free that previous years. If Biden wins it will be utter coincidence that the polling predicted it. And if he loses, by small margins or large, it won't surprise me at all that the polls gave us no useful information.
Pollsters bother people. You are under no obligation to tell them anything. They don't give a choice for 3rd parties so they miss a lot in the way they create the polls. Many are "push" polls telling you terrible things about the candidate who opposes the one they are pushing.
I am not commenting on the main thesis of this post because there is nothing more to say. It is indisputably correct. I do want to comment on an aside in this story:
"Like many 'bombshells,' the Times tax story contains real information, including potentially real outrages, like bank fraud or deducting consulting fees paid to his daughter. The headline revelation is Trump as metaphor for American finance generally, showing the appearance of wealth resting atop absurd fictions, with monster debts rolled into the next ice age..."
First, I don't understand what the outrage would be from paying his daughter or anyone else consulting fees - whether for work they actually did or didn't. When you pay consulting fees and deduct them from corporate taxes, you 1099 the consultant who then pays taxes on the fees received. Given Ivanka's tax rate, this maneuver is highly likely to have resulted in more total taxes being paid. Second, please don't credit the NY Times with revealing a damn thing about Trump's debts. That has been publicly available information every single year of his presidency. This gets filed every year:
His debts are listed in full on Form 278e. It begins on page 35. Are his debts "monstrous"? Hardly. His principal lenders are completely ordinary and mundane commercial mortgage and CMBS mezz lenders. Any first year RE analyst would take one look at these credit facilities and tell you from the interest rates alone, these are mid-tier leveraged assets, in no way indicative of monstrous debt. I have yet to see a reporter even compare these loans to the tax-assessed property value. I wonder if that's because it wouldn't further the narrative.
For a minute, put yourself in Trumps shoes (hear me out). So, you own a very large business that’s worth billions is assets (a balance sheet) mostly real estate. Would you not do everything under your power to limit your tax liability? Would you not higher a battery of tax accountants to find loopholes in the Tax Code to achieve this? Why? More profit for your business allows you to expand by plowing money back into the business perhaps even higher more people. We all do this to a certain extent but we don’t necessarily have the asset base of a billionaire. But let’s say you have children. Would you not use the credit to offset your AGI? I mean, there’s nothing in the 1040 form that says you need to accept the credit but you do. And the same can be said for other credits and deductions all with the purpose of lowering you tax liability. Again, I don’t understand why many are so frustrated with this. Change the god damn law and stop blaming the people who legally use the code for maximum benefit. I will concede that Trump and other billionaires are in some way influencing the code and the same IRS agents that once were auditing them one year are hired as part of their Tax teams. Nothing against this. All you have to look at are the 100 Senators and 438 Representatives and look at their total wealth. Many millionaires here that are lobbied incessantly for the kinds of write offs that Trump benefits from today. Again I ask, take out your anger on them and force them to change the law if you think it’s unfair. I don’t get the complaining.
"The headline revelation is Trump as metaphor for American finance generally, showing the appearance of wealth resting atop absurd fictions, with monster debts rolled into the next ice age..."
Matt got to the point more quickly than you, without prefacing it with a lot of sympathy pleas for people who make more from one week of interest paid on the money in their safest investments than the annual earnings of the people who empty the wastebaskets in their offices.
When is he going to drain the swamp - wasn't that his main campaign promise? Wouldn't changing the crooked tax codes, rather than tax cuts, be part of that program?
To pay a consulting fee is unusual when it's to an employee, isn't it? If the fee is 1099 income, there is no social security tax paid. Do you think Ivanka may take full advantage of tax avoidance shelters? This apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. I'm also wondering if you find it curious that a bank who was not only stiffed but also sued by one of its clients to try to wriggle out of paying a loan would then turn around and lend that client a couple hundred million dollars?
First, the criticism isn't that Ivanka was paid as a consultant versus an employee. It's that Trump deducted the expenses of paying here. Either form of compensation would be deductible by Trump. Second, there is a multi-factor test for whether a person is acting as an employee or contractor and neither you nor I know the facts necessary to perform that analysis. In fact, it isn't even accurate to say the consulting fees were paid to Ivanka. They were paid to an entity owned by Ivanka that is taxed on a pass-through basis. We can't even say the consulting services were personally performed by Ivanka. This is pure speculation on my part, but my guess is that Ivanka has a girlfriend that provides design or marketing or PR services, Ivanka formed a company, hired her and caused her dad to engage her services. Just a guess, but I doubt this has anything to do with tax avoidance strategies at all. Finding a way to pay someone that gets taxed as personal income rather than carried interest or cap gains is just not a feature of tax structuring.
What existing lender was stiffed and then sued by Trump? Did the loan they currently have with Trump pre-exist this lawsuit or was it made after? I'm not saying it hasn't happened, I just want to understand the allegation, because when it comes to Trump, there is an awful lot of sloppy analysis.
Sorry this took so long, I didn't realize you responded. You're right, it doesn't matter for the deduction whether it's employee pay or as an independent contractor; but if it's the latter, the company pays no social security tax. That's significant with these kinds of figures. I was audited twice in the early 90s (came out owing no money) because the IRS was targeting travel businesses as they were infamous for listing their employees as independent contractors rather than employees to avoid paying the tax. The lender is Deutsche Bank - Trump sued to get out of paying a 300million+ loan for his building in Chicago. The bank countersued and settled in 2010, long before his current situation. I agree that LOTS of information is twisted in the mainstream media but this report was in multiple media outlets including Rueters, WSJ, business insider.
I don't believe avoiding employer-side social security taxes is why he paid consulting fees to his daughter's company. First of all, social security taxes are capped at like $8,600. Once the employee makes more than something around $130,000, there are no further social security taxes payable. As an executive officer of the Trump Organization, I'm sure she maxed out the social security taxes already.
I don't know the details well, but roughly it looks like he had a $40MM personal guarantee on the building which amortized on certain milestones. Deutsche, post-Lehman, wasn't going to extend the maturity when condo sales slowed. Ultimately, it was settled when Deutsche Bank extended the maturity on the personal guarantee. It's worth noting that the suit seems to have been relatively amicable because Deutsche Bank made loans under the senior revolver for the building throughout the suit and the loan was repaid in full when refinanced by Ladder in 2016. One obvious thing to point out for all these conspiracy theorists about Deutsche Bank/Trump - they haven't made a loan to him since 2015. Let's be candid, absolutely no one thought Trump would be president before 2016.
While you're probably right about the SS issue, I simply don't agree that the president and his companies didn't/don't do whatever they can to avoid paying taxes. Not that they're any different, just that the president said he was going to drain the swamp that he wallows in. Nor do I agree that no one thought he could be president before 2016. I, for one, did. The presidency is not a chance event, going to the highest number of voters; it goes to the highest bidders, and just like Trump, the bases are covered in both directions, right and left.
For the better part of a century, most journalists understood there’s no such thing as objectivity. It was accepted that every decision, from the size and placement of headlines to the order of quotes to whether or not to cover a thing at all, reflects editorial opinion. That didn’t mean trying to get things right wasn’t a worthy aspirational goal, but it did mean we knew papers like the Times were mostly being silly when they marketed themselves as incorruptible arbiters of The One Truth.
Now the business has reversed course, acting like a gang of college freshmen who’ve just read Beyond Good and Evil for the first time. Objectivity is dead! There’s no truth! Everything is permitted! The cardinalate has gone from pompous overconfidence in its factual rectitude to a bizarre postmodernist pose where nothing matters, man, and truth is whatever we can get away with saying.
«Now the business has reversed course, acting like a gang of college freshmen who’ve just read Beyond Good and Evil for the first time. Objectivity is dead! There’s no truth! Everything is permitted!»
I think this is a great underestimating of the professional work of some very clever people, because they are using simple but effective Bernays-style approaches.
In particular there is a well-known cognitive bias where most people believe "gossip" (that is hearsay stories) if it repeated and from several apparently independent sources.
This cognitive bias used to work well in a village: if one person gossiped "I saw Bill kiss Betty!" one could be skeptical, but if 5-10 different people said it, it was likely to be true. In latin it was called the "vox populi vox dei" principle, and it critically relies on the repeated sources being independent of each other.
Modern propaganda operations often rely on mailing lists/chat groups to spread "talking point memo" lists of "stories" to many sources, which then repeat the stories as if they were independently discovered, but of course they are not.
Often there are no mailing lists/chat groups, stories get repeated by one side's propagandists if they look like benefiting their side, an "emergent" form of collusion.
In the end all we have to combat this bullshit is our reason and skepticism. Simply put, people are willing to believe anything to confirm their bias without truly asking themselves why? Hey, what information would you need to know that would change your opinion. Tribalism is a monster created by the very people who are trying to defend us from such a thing. I feel like like we are in a back to the future kind of society where people pay homage to their favorite Social Media fill the blank. In the end, reason is all we have and somehow someway we need to get the average person to start using it.
A problem lies in the idea that most people (and by most I mean a heavy majority) either believe that the news is unbiased or it feeds the bias that has been established by years of biased news reporting - a confirmation bias of sorts. Someone wrote about how they take it all with a grain of salt. I think that is a wise choice, however, I think a lot of folks out there think if a traditional news outlet says or writes it, then it must be true.
I'd wager than if the census included the following question more than 70% of people would get it wrong: Is the United States of America a democracy governed by the votes of majority? My point isn't that people get it wrong, but that people have either been told or allowed to believe that we live in a country governed by the will of the majority. This isn't the case and many people are both surprised and angered when they realize this fact. Often the comment I hear when I bring this up are "well it should be!" or something similar.
Tying this together many people don't understand their form of government and/or have been taught that we operate as a true democracy. How has this come to pass? Who is telling or teaching them this? Last, if something this essential and basic isn't understood or is being manipulated how much easier is it to manipulate opinion on more complex issues?
Punch in the zip code and you’ll know exactly who doing the telling and teaching. It’s quite disturbing to say the least. Even in my family, college graduated and with advanced degrees, there is little concern for the truth.
Who Cares right? Its exactly the point. No matter what the MSM says these days about Trump, most of his voters//fanboys won't believe it. He spoke of fake news, the MSM followed through and, well, posted fake news. The paper of record, how laughable it is now. How far the NY times has fallen. I would be disgusted if I met anyone from the NY times, where a decade ago, I would of been impressed. Even the skater punk turned YouTube reporter, Tim Pool, has more credibility then the NY times these days.
This is a terrific analysis. I really wish you would do an abreviated version and make that public because there are so many people I'd like to forward it to.
Matt has been wrestling with this the better part of his journalistic career. We are in the eye-ball and click bait era where the social media giants have gutted the ideal of a free press. The creators are now at the mercy of the curator and the massive advertising apparatus. That’s why Matt going direct to his audience is the best thing he’s done. Listen to his conversation with Sam Harris or Joe Rogan about this. I’m willing to support Matt because he’s not beholden to current media business model. Trump is right about alone thing—at least the Mew York Times is failing one this area.
The Congress, of which Joe Biden was a member for 35+ years, writes the tax laws which we are compelled to follow. They have accommodated the lobbyists with thousands of tax avoidance measures and thus it is not surprising that Trump took advantage of those like 99.99% of the rest of the tax paying population.
As infuriating, disturbing, and ethically absent as Trump often appears to be, he’s sustained by his opposition being as unashamed to lie as he is, and being humorless, hectoring bores besides (witness Hannah-Jones, in the middle of the “true founding” double-down, insisting with a straight face that “truth is the goal” and “transparency and accountability are essential to a functioning democracy”). It’s the only possible thing that could give him legitimacy, which is starting to feel intentional. Either that, or the core of this is turf war: having snuck past the usual gatekeepers to the White House, Trump appropriated the reality-distorting power the political establishment reserved for itself. You don’t get to lie to the public, that’s our job! Hence the venom, which feels too intimate to be anything but close professional jealousy.
To me it looks like that when you want to update a post you are using something like a "repost" command instead of an "update" command, because the "-d20" (and similar) suffix above for the newer post looks like being added by the posting software to have a unique URL for two articles with the same title.
Not your problem- I went back and forth with substack- basically, if I follow a direct link to it, i'm fine. If I look at your main page, there's two copies of the story- the first one has a URL ending in "d20" and only takes me to non-subscriber link.
I'm having the exact same issue. Both links take me to duplicate stories but both are locked saying open to subscribers only. I am a subscriber. What is going on?
As someone who was 100% on board with the Dossier and Russian collusion I was sure Trump's taxes would have shown that - he was hiding that. So to me that was the bombshell of the Times report. If it's there - they haven't released it yet. Although I will admit I did not read it. I have tuned it all out because wasn't it just seconds ago we were on "losers and suckers"? None of it has moved Trump's approval ratings in the least bit. The "Trump is bad" messages is only taking us so far.
It’s wildly undesirable to even post this on social media because of all the verbal abuse you would receive. Centrist, MSNBC “liberals” have a bubble at least as impermeable as Fox News addicts’. Having said that, Matt is doing important work. Thanks for that
Remember when adults would talk about losing their parents to Rush Limbaugh? Any mention of anything close to politics would cause rage and vitriol?
That has happened to my Mom from watching MSNBC each night for her 3 hours of hate session.
Same here, also mom, who watches MSNBC at home all day. My sister and I had to basically have an intervention with her, taking the approach of “you’re not actually fighting Trump with this behavior, you’re just making yourself (and sometimes the people around you) miserable. Obsessing over every Trump tweet just is just taking his bait.” She seems to be doing better, but it’s possible that she just knows we don’t want to hear it. 5-10 minutes of Trump, then we move on to other topics
I kind of consider that "losing people to politics" or to "political religion". I've had perfectly fine relationships all my life with people who I disagreed with politically (including my mother). The people who can't tolerate any dissent from family are friends--that's almost it's own thing. I've known it from people on the right, but I see it much more these days from the left. At the same time, my mother is very left wing, hates Trump (I don't hate Trump, nor did I hate Obama, it's just not how I approach politics) and we get along fine. We have a Black Lives Matter sign out in our yard (my wife's idea, not mine, as I don't care for the organization's politics) but so far no grief from anybody, one way or the other.
I feel like emotionally healthy people can disagree about politics and still get along as human beings. Emotionally unhealthy people cannot.
Well said. Unfortunately, at the moment there are many many emotionally unhealthy people out there.
As some including Taibbi have pointed out, the business model used by the left leaning media today is the same as Fox in the 90's.
The last paragraph hit hard. Of all the Orwellian labeling that's gone on in the Trump era, to me the one which is most apt is the deliberate forgetfulness within the endless swirl of information (and the status of most of that information as false, misleading, or unimportant). We've been in many ways an amnesiac state for a long time, but it's ratcheted up to terrifying places. We have the collective cultural memory of children. And when it comes to people whose integrity used to be subject to some level of popular policing (journalists, pundits, politicians), they have no need to correct themselves or admit to falsehood, because everything marches on at a furious, whirlwind pace and no one knows where they are anymore. Information and interpretation enter into the world and then seem to vanish as we immediately go forth to the next thing.
I’m not sure you should use the first person pronoun, “we,” in your comment. After all, you me, and everyone else here on this blog have arrived in resistance to the very things you reference.
The straight in the eye bald faced lie is now considered a proper remedy for a pulitzer prize winning "journalist" to utilize when defending their award winning "work". How about those apples?
I remember hearing media icons during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal admitting that the news had become entertainment rather than factual. Trump is also entertainment. Many of your commentators claim to be free market capitalists. Well ...surprise..surprise..media companies like making money. My only problem with your analysis is that you don’t include the right wing media. Aren’t Limbaugh,Breitbart,Fox,Glen Beck,Alex Jones etc. also the media? What do you think about the accuracy of their reporting?
As for Trump and the Russian story. I agree with you that Trump and family were probably not involved. Trump is too reckless and stupid to have been clued in by the Russians. The only problem is Manafort. I will never understand why he admits to giving internal polling info. to the Russians.Maybe you can explain this to me.Given how Facebook posts can be targeted to specific voters...maybe that’s it.
I ,and I guess you ,suspected all along that Trump resisted releasing his tax returns because they would show him to be insolvent. Truly wealthy people never brag about how much they’re worth. But a narcissist like a Trump would rather risk jail than admit he was broke. In my view “Uncle Donald” couldn’t run a hot dog stand on his own. Until he blew it with 6 bankruptcies,his daddy’s money kept him alive. And then came the Apprentice...Trump could only succeed as an entertainer. And..the beat goes on.
"My only problem with your analysis is that you don’t include the right wing media. Aren’t Limbaugh,Breitbart,Fox,Glen Beck,Alex Jones etc. also the media? What do you think about the accuracy of their reporting?"
With the possible exception of Breitbart, none of those you mentioned has either pretensions to, or past reputation of, being journalists, reporters, or objective. Alex Jones may claim to have the secret real truths, but this is not and has not been a credible claim.
Limbaugh has said explicitly that he is neither objective nor a journalist, though he does insist he is always revealing real truths. Glen Beck is much the same--these are opinion-pundits, not journalists, and they are basically (and should be understood to be) evangelists for a particular slice of right-wing ideology, and do not shy from being so described. Limbaugh touts his conservative bonafides. Brietbart claims to be more journalistic, and they are, but they are clearly biased in their reporting. So they would be the closest thing I can think of on the right to NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, etc.
Matt wants a more objective and rational press, and is looking for it at places where he once new objective and reasonable journalists, like WaPo and the NYT and is especially concerned that these institutions have shifted more to narrative-shaping than reporting.
Which I get. But even if you treat Brietbart and Fox and even Beck (The Blaze) as reportage like the NYT and WaPo, for me it's all just "things to think about". I feel like all reportage should be viewed with massive grains of salt. Does the reporter or institution have a bias towards a particular narrative? Will they leave out or manufacture context in order to support that narrative? Is the reporter likely to assume a confidence or expertise they don't actually have? Etc., etc.
My experience is that even in less fraught areas, stories where I have personal knowledge have frequently been reported inverted or backwards. Quotes have been "reshaped" for clarity. Explanations have been interpreted (and thus misinterpreted) by the journalist or journalists. Expertise has been asserted that doesn't exist, and facts from complicate source materials have been gotten complete wrong.
Perhaps journalists used to be better at updating or modifying or fact checking or confirming sources? Probably. Possibly. But I always treat all journalism as an interpretation, like to be skewed and distorted by biases and unknown knowledge defecits.
At the same time--and I completely get Matt's frustration--caveat emptor. I am a consumer of news, and I consider it my job to flag everything as "possible, not definite"--unless I know enough to immediately dismiss it. There was lots of technical reporting on the Russian collusion story that was just wrong (from terminology to journalistic ignorance of what portscans are and how IP addresses work). Where I don't have any expertise (most areas of life) I just have to consume news as "might have some accuracy or relevance, but journalists, like all humans, are biased and flawed so it's probably not gospel".
«suspected all along that Trump resisted releasing his tax returns because they would show him to be insolvent. [...] Until he blew it with 6 bankruptcies,his daddy’s money kept him alive.»
Commercial real estate is a [euphemism] "magical kingdom", with different rules (mostly very special tax and bank rules), and [euphemism] "well-managed" bankruptcies can be cash-gushers, and [euphemism] "being nice" to bank loan officers can be also very profitable. Two relevant quotes, one from A de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" of 1834, the second from a speech by "historian" N Gingrich:
“Consequently, in the United States the law favors those classes that elsewhere are most interested in evading it. It may therefore be supposed that an offensive law of which the majority should not see the immediate utility would either not be enacted or not be obeyed.
In America there is no law against fraudulent bankruptcies, not because they are few, but because they are many. The dread of being prosecuted as a bankrupt is greater in the minds of the majority than the fear of being ruined by the bankruptcy of others; and a sort of guilty tolerance is extended by the public conscience to an offense which everyone condemns in his individual capacity.”
“If you have a society where almost every middle class person routinely fudges the law, that's telling us something. We have laws that matter-murder, rape, and we have laws that don't matter. Speed limits are an example. Why would you think that a regulatory, process-oriented bureaucratic model would work?
The first thing that every good American says each morning is "What's the angle?" "How can I get around it?" "What does my lawyer think?" "There must be a loophole!" Then he proceeds to work the angle, and the bureaucracy spends its time chasing that and writing new regs to stop him.”
Yes but then what. What is the end game here to loophole your way to fill in the blank. This most certainly wont make you a happier person and for sure what the hell kind of meaning is this.
45 Landslide
I am very dubious, but I think it's possible. What I do believe is the election polling this year is, if anything, more fact-free that previous years. If Biden wins it will be utter coincidence that the polling predicted it. And if he loses, by small margins or large, it won't surprise me at all that the polls gave us no useful information.
Pollsters bother people. You are under no obligation to tell them anything. They don't give a choice for 3rd parties so they miss a lot in the way they create the polls. Many are "push" polls telling you terrible things about the candidate who opposes the one they are pushing.
Not a persuasive argument. Kind of like 45’s arguments for getting re-elected.
I am not commenting on the main thesis of this post because there is nothing more to say. It is indisputably correct. I do want to comment on an aside in this story:
"Like many 'bombshells,' the Times tax story contains real information, including potentially real outrages, like bank fraud or deducting consulting fees paid to his daughter. The headline revelation is Trump as metaphor for American finance generally, showing the appearance of wealth resting atop absurd fictions, with monster debts rolled into the next ice age..."
First, I don't understand what the outrage would be from paying his daughter or anyone else consulting fees - whether for work they actually did or didn't. When you pay consulting fees and deduct them from corporate taxes, you 1099 the consultant who then pays taxes on the fees received. Given Ivanka's tax rate, this maneuver is highly likely to have resulted in more total taxes being paid. Second, please don't credit the NY Times with revealing a damn thing about Trump's debts. That has been publicly available information every single year of his presidency. This gets filed every year:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/storage.citizensforethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/31221516/Trump-Donald-J.-2020Annual-278-1.pdf
His debts are listed in full on Form 278e. It begins on page 35. Are his debts "monstrous"? Hardly. His principal lenders are completely ordinary and mundane commercial mortgage and CMBS mezz lenders. Any first year RE analyst would take one look at these credit facilities and tell you from the interest rates alone, these are mid-tier leveraged assets, in no way indicative of monstrous debt. I have yet to see a reporter even compare these loans to the tax-assessed property value. I wonder if that's because it wouldn't further the narrative.
For a minute, put yourself in Trumps shoes (hear me out). So, you own a very large business that’s worth billions is assets (a balance sheet) mostly real estate. Would you not do everything under your power to limit your tax liability? Would you not higher a battery of tax accountants to find loopholes in the Tax Code to achieve this? Why? More profit for your business allows you to expand by plowing money back into the business perhaps even higher more people. We all do this to a certain extent but we don’t necessarily have the asset base of a billionaire. But let’s say you have children. Would you not use the credit to offset your AGI? I mean, there’s nothing in the 1040 form that says you need to accept the credit but you do. And the same can be said for other credits and deductions all with the purpose of lowering you tax liability. Again, I don’t understand why many are so frustrated with this. Change the god damn law and stop blaming the people who legally use the code for maximum benefit. I will concede that Trump and other billionaires are in some way influencing the code and the same IRS agents that once were auditing them one year are hired as part of their Tax teams. Nothing against this. All you have to look at are the 100 Senators and 438 Representatives and look at their total wealth. Many millionaires here that are lobbied incessantly for the kinds of write offs that Trump benefits from today. Again I ask, take out your anger on them and force them to change the law if you think it’s unfair. I don’t get the complaining.
"The headline revelation is Trump as metaphor for American finance generally, showing the appearance of wealth resting atop absurd fictions, with monster debts rolled into the next ice age..."
Matt got to the point more quickly than you, without prefacing it with a lot of sympathy pleas for people who make more from one week of interest paid on the money in their safest investments than the annual earnings of the people who empty the wastebaskets in their offices.
When is he going to drain the swamp - wasn't that his main campaign promise? Wouldn't changing the crooked tax codes, rather than tax cuts, be part of that program?
To pay a consulting fee is unusual when it's to an employee, isn't it? If the fee is 1099 income, there is no social security tax paid. Do you think Ivanka may take full advantage of tax avoidance shelters? This apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. I'm also wondering if you find it curious that a bank who was not only stiffed but also sued by one of its clients to try to wriggle out of paying a loan would then turn around and lend that client a couple hundred million dollars?
First, the criticism isn't that Ivanka was paid as a consultant versus an employee. It's that Trump deducted the expenses of paying here. Either form of compensation would be deductible by Trump. Second, there is a multi-factor test for whether a person is acting as an employee or contractor and neither you nor I know the facts necessary to perform that analysis. In fact, it isn't even accurate to say the consulting fees were paid to Ivanka. They were paid to an entity owned by Ivanka that is taxed on a pass-through basis. We can't even say the consulting services were personally performed by Ivanka. This is pure speculation on my part, but my guess is that Ivanka has a girlfriend that provides design or marketing or PR services, Ivanka formed a company, hired her and caused her dad to engage her services. Just a guess, but I doubt this has anything to do with tax avoidance strategies at all. Finding a way to pay someone that gets taxed as personal income rather than carried interest or cap gains is just not a feature of tax structuring.
What existing lender was stiffed and then sued by Trump? Did the loan they currently have with Trump pre-exist this lawsuit or was it made after? I'm not saying it hasn't happened, I just want to understand the allegation, because when it comes to Trump, there is an awful lot of sloppy analysis.
Sorry this took so long, I didn't realize you responded. You're right, it doesn't matter for the deduction whether it's employee pay or as an independent contractor; but if it's the latter, the company pays no social security tax. That's significant with these kinds of figures. I was audited twice in the early 90s (came out owing no money) because the IRS was targeting travel businesses as they were infamous for listing their employees as independent contractors rather than employees to avoid paying the tax. The lender is Deutsche Bank - Trump sued to get out of paying a 300million+ loan for his building in Chicago. The bank countersued and settled in 2010, long before his current situation. I agree that LOTS of information is twisted in the mainstream media but this report was in multiple media outlets including Rueters, WSJ, business insider.
I don't believe avoiding employer-side social security taxes is why he paid consulting fees to his daughter's company. First of all, social security taxes are capped at like $8,600. Once the employee makes more than something around $130,000, there are no further social security taxes payable. As an executive officer of the Trump Organization, I'm sure she maxed out the social security taxes already.
I don't know the details well, but roughly it looks like he had a $40MM personal guarantee on the building which amortized on certain milestones. Deutsche, post-Lehman, wasn't going to extend the maturity when condo sales slowed. Ultimately, it was settled when Deutsche Bank extended the maturity on the personal guarantee. It's worth noting that the suit seems to have been relatively amicable because Deutsche Bank made loans under the senior revolver for the building throughout the suit and the loan was repaid in full when refinanced by Ladder in 2016. One obvious thing to point out for all these conspiracy theorists about Deutsche Bank/Trump - they haven't made a loan to him since 2015. Let's be candid, absolutely no one thought Trump would be president before 2016.
While you're probably right about the SS issue, I simply don't agree that the president and his companies didn't/don't do whatever they can to avoid paying taxes. Not that they're any different, just that the president said he was going to drain the swamp that he wallows in. Nor do I agree that no one thought he could be president before 2016. I, for one, did. The presidency is not a chance event, going to the highest number of voters; it goes to the highest bidders, and just like Trump, the bases are covered in both directions, right and left.
This one too
For the better part of a century, most journalists understood there’s no such thing as objectivity. It was accepted that every decision, from the size and placement of headlines to the order of quotes to whether or not to cover a thing at all, reflects editorial opinion. That didn’t mean trying to get things right wasn’t a worthy aspirational goal, but it did mean we knew papers like the Times were mostly being silly when they marketed themselves as incorruptible arbiters of The One Truth.
Now the business has reversed course, acting like a gang of college freshmen who’ve just read Beyond Good and Evil for the first time. Objectivity is dead! There’s no truth! Everything is permitted! The cardinalate has gone from pompous overconfidence in its factual rectitude to a bizarre postmodernist pose where nothing matters, man, and truth is whatever we can get away with saying.
«Now the business has reversed course, acting like a gang of college freshmen who’ve just read Beyond Good and Evil for the first time. Objectivity is dead! There’s no truth! Everything is permitted!»
I think this is a great underestimating of the professional work of some very clever people, because they are using simple but effective Bernays-style approaches.
In particular there is a well-known cognitive bias where most people believe "gossip" (that is hearsay stories) if it repeated and from several apparently independent sources.
This cognitive bias used to work well in a village: if one person gossiped "I saw Bill kiss Betty!" one could be skeptical, but if 5-10 different people said it, it was likely to be true. In latin it was called the "vox populi vox dei" principle, and it critically relies on the repeated sources being independent of each other.
Modern propaganda operations often rely on mailing lists/chat groups to spread "talking point memo" lists of "stories" to many sources, which then repeat the stories as if they were independently discovered, but of course they are not.
Often there are no mailing lists/chat groups, stories get repeated by one side's propagandists if they look like benefiting their side, an "emergent" form of collusion.
In the end all we have to combat this bullshit is our reason and skepticism. Simply put, people are willing to believe anything to confirm their bias without truly asking themselves why? Hey, what information would you need to know that would change your opinion. Tribalism is a monster created by the very people who are trying to defend us from such a thing. I feel like like we are in a back to the future kind of society where people pay homage to their favorite Social Media fill the blank. In the end, reason is all we have and somehow someway we need to get the average person to start using it.
A problem lies in the idea that most people (and by most I mean a heavy majority) either believe that the news is unbiased or it feeds the bias that has been established by years of biased news reporting - a confirmation bias of sorts. Someone wrote about how they take it all with a grain of salt. I think that is a wise choice, however, I think a lot of folks out there think if a traditional news outlet says or writes it, then it must be true.
I'd wager than if the census included the following question more than 70% of people would get it wrong: Is the United States of America a democracy governed by the votes of majority? My point isn't that people get it wrong, but that people have either been told or allowed to believe that we live in a country governed by the will of the majority. This isn't the case and many people are both surprised and angered when they realize this fact. Often the comment I hear when I bring this up are "well it should be!" or something similar.
Tying this together many people don't understand their form of government and/or have been taught that we operate as a true democracy. How has this come to pass? Who is telling or teaching them this? Last, if something this essential and basic isn't understood or is being manipulated how much easier is it to manipulate opinion on more complex issues?
Punch in the zip code and you’ll know exactly who doing the telling and teaching. It’s quite disturbing to say the least. Even in my family, college graduated and with advanced degrees, there is little concern for the truth.
Matt is a truth-teller!
Who Cares right? Its exactly the point. No matter what the MSM says these days about Trump, most of his voters//fanboys won't believe it. He spoke of fake news, the MSM followed through and, well, posted fake news. The paper of record, how laughable it is now. How far the NY times has fallen. I would be disgusted if I met anyone from the NY times, where a decade ago, I would of been impressed. Even the skater punk turned YouTube reporter, Tim Pool, has more credibility then the NY times these days.
This is a terrific analysis. I really wish you would do an abreviated version and make that public because there are so many people I'd like to forward it to.
Matt has been wrestling with this the better part of his journalistic career. We are in the eye-ball and click bait era where the social media giants have gutted the ideal of a free press. The creators are now at the mercy of the curator and the massive advertising apparatus. That’s why Matt going direct to his audience is the best thing he’s done. Listen to his conversation with Sam Harris or Joe Rogan about this. I’m willing to support Matt because he’s not beholden to current media business model. Trump is right about alone thing—at least the Mew York Times is failing one this area.
The Congress, of which Joe Biden was a member for 35+ years, writes the tax laws which we are compelled to follow. They have accommodated the lobbyists with thousands of tax avoidance measures and thus it is not surprising that Trump took advantage of those like 99.99% of the rest of the tax paying population.
Here's the money shot of this piece..
As infuriating, disturbing, and ethically absent as Trump often appears to be, he’s sustained by his opposition being as unashamed to lie as he is, and being humorless, hectoring bores besides (witness Hannah-Jones, in the middle of the “true founding” double-down, insisting with a straight face that “truth is the goal” and “transparency and accountability are essential to a functioning democracy”). It’s the only possible thing that could give him legitimacy, which is starting to feel intentional. Either that, or the core of this is turf war: having snuck past the usual gatekeepers to the White House, Trump appropriated the reality-distorting power the political establishment reserved for itself. You don’t get to lie to the public, that’s our job! Hence the venom, which feels too intimate to be anything but close professional jealousy.
Hey Matt-
Technical question-
I can't see the post, even thought it says subscribed. When I go to cancel my subscription, it says I have benefits through the end of the year.
I'm currently at a $40 subscription- could it be I need to do the $50 subscription plan to see it? (I also can't upgrade to that one for some reason.)
I know I'm not the only one with this issue, let us know what we need to do.
Thomas, are you sure it’s not in your email box?
My apologies. I’ll ask. It seems like there are a handful of these episodes each time I publish.
Dear author, you have once again published your piece twice, in two distinct posts, with different comment lists:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole-d20
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombshell-memory-hole
To me it looks like that when you want to update a post you are using something like a "repost" command instead of an "update" command, because the "-d20" (and similar) suffix above for the newer post looks like being added by the posting software to have a unique URL for two articles with the same title.
Not your problem- I went back and forth with substack- basically, if I follow a direct link to it, i'm fine. If I look at your main page, there's two copies of the story- the first one has a URL ending in "d20" and only takes me to non-subscriber link.
Hope this helps you sort it out.
I'm having the exact same issue. Both links take me to duplicate stories but both are locked saying open to subscribers only. I am a subscriber. What is going on?
Same problem with me, Matt. But another great article. I read it in my email link.
Same here. Thanks for checking Matt
For what it is worth me too!
As someone who was 100% on board with the Dossier and Russian collusion I was sure Trump's taxes would have shown that - he was hiding that. So to me that was the bombshell of the Times report. If it's there - they haven't released it yet. Although I will admit I did not read it. I have tuned it all out because wasn't it just seconds ago we were on "losers and suckers"? None of it has moved Trump's approval ratings in the least bit. The "Trump is bad" messages is only taking us so far.
Trump has turned the media into an image of himself. I have to go outside the mainstream media to get honest reporting.
He has also made a portion of the left and media elite turn a blind eye to abuses on their side.