The quiet part out loud

I’ve come to believe that Trump will never spend a day in jail and that he’ll never have to pay what he owes to lenders and the IRS. That’s just me being cynical, but someone calling themselves “Mitch Guthman” on a comment thread at jabberwocking.com explains why this is likely to be true:

“ . . . lenders have no real desire to call his loans. With [Deutsche Bank], there’s undoubtedly pressure from the German government to avoid an embarrassing situation and, apparently, the bank may not be able to call his loans even if he defaults because what seems to be massive irregularities (even illegalities) in the granting of the loans.

“The other lenders probably won’t want to be in the middle of a MAGA firestorm or suffer reprisals from Republicans in Congress and probably from Trump loyalists in the executive branch whom Biden has failed to purge.

“Similarly, even though the democrats in congress have written a letter to the GSA, there’s strong institutional pressures to let Trump [sell] the property, make his profit, and then let the questions about how he got the lease and was able to keep it during his presidency just fade away.

“It looks like the IRS has been giving Trump a free ride for decades. His returns have supposedly been under audit for decades and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was actually true. Based on what’s been coming out from the NYT and these different investigations, it’s almost certain that his tax returns are a cesspool of lies and fraud. But nobody wants to be on the hook for affirmatively giving Trump a pass, just as nobody was to be responsible for igniting a career ending MAGA firestorm.

"And, as is probably the case with Trump’s lenders, previous timidity has developed over time into outright complicity. If you remember from the 2016 election, it’s very likely that Trump’s current fortune is built on a combination of massive money laundering and the biggest tax fraud in history. Both of which the IRS gave him a pass even though the fraud should’ve been easily caught (or, worse, he has been able to walk away from massive tax fraud because someone in the IRS sold him a get out of jail free card). Either way, it seems likely that the IRS has no desire to open the can of worms, so they’re not going to ever go after him.

“ . . . it’s extremely unlikely that the IRS would go after Donald Trump because it would mean airing its own dirty laundry. No matter how or when it started, at this point I think the IRS is as interested in keeping anything bad in Trump’s tax returns hidden as he is.”