Donald Trump exposed as shockingly dangerous threat to national security
It’s FBI policy to routinely reject applicants with excessive debt. The reason is economic pressures can render employees vulnerable to bribes and blackmail from foreign intelligence agents. Such people (like convicted former FBI agent and spy for the Soviet Union Robert Philip Hanssen) can too easily become national security threats.
The New York Times revelation of Donald Trump’s tax returns has put numeric clothing on what we have long suspected, that Trump’s returns prove he’s deeply in debt and that he’s not just a bad businessman, he’s an appallingly bad businessman, possibly one of history’s worst. As shocking and disturbing as his tax returns are, few are surprised.
But Trump’s returns also demonstrate just how much at risk the United States is with a deeply compromised president. If Trump were to be re-elected, 421 million dollars in loans would come due during his second term. That is an amount he almost certainly will default on, because he lacks the capital reserves to pay those loans back. It also appears Trump took a 72.9 million dollar tax refund he was not entitled to and is currently under audit for that. These revelations make Trump a security threat, and wholly unqualified to be president of the United States.
It’s little wonder, therefore, that Trump has consistently hidden his taxes from us. When Trump is seen through the lens of a malignant narcissist, it’s inevitable. Trump is a braggart. If his taxes made him look good he would have rushed to show them to us, just as would have rushed to give a sample of his DNA to E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer if he really didn’t rape her. But just as surely as he raped Ms. Carroll, Trump’s tax returns prove he’s a tax cheat and a criminal. In Trumpworld there are no mysteries. He always does things for reasons that are obvious and almost always pathetic. Everything, with Trump, is transactional.
So let’s have no more talk of Trump the “great businessman.” We always understood why Trump kowtowed at Helsinki to Vladimir Putin, and now we have proof. Putin, who really is a billionaire and may in fact be the richest man in the world, is the one thing Trump admires: he’s super rich.
From the beginning Trump used his campaign for president as a cheap publicity stunt to promote his TV show, the Apprentice. Since he won (to his surprise and everyone else’s) he’s been trying to exploit the presidency to amass a fortune. It is a tribute to his incompetence that, despite his endless emoluments violations and corrupt deals and stock market manipulations, Trump remains in staggering debt. Any fool with Trump’s power could make money. Trump simply lacks the knack for it.
But money is the only thing Trump loves and believes in, and it’s a feature of his complete absence of talent that he has so little of it. But it’s also a shockingly dangerous security threat to the United States. Trump is deeply compromised by both his debt and his monomaniacal love of money. His greed and his complete lack of a conscience or morals puts him at continuous risk to dictators like Putin who can help him financially and extort him economically.
There are a million reasons why Donald Trump is unfit to be president of the United States, this has been another one. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.