The VSG's business empire faces an unfavorable climate as the brand becomes more tarnished by the hour

 Josh Dawsey, David A. Farenthold and Jonathan O'Connell of The Washington Post have a piece today that portrays a Trump brand in serious decline. From banks to social-media platforms to vendors for hotels to golf organizations, the VSG and his family are looking at a bone-dry landscape when they depart Washington.

In the past week, it has lost a bank, an e-commerce platform and the privilege of hosting a world-famous golf tournament, and its hopes of hosting another have been dashed. In the future, the Trump Organization also could lose its District of Columbia hotel and even its children's carousel in Central Park, if government landlords in Washington and New York reevaluate their contracts with Trump.

By refusing to acknowledge that he would be returning to private life, Trump appears to have sabotaged what could have been his best chance at success in that realm - a rebound of the battered Trump brand.

The VSG was nobody's idea of a great business partner beforehand, but his antics of late have really fouled the nest:

"Most financial institutions and investors avoided doing business with him before he ran for president, and the situation now has only gotten worse," said Kathryn Wylde, the leader of the Partnership for New York City, an influential group that includes the leaders of banks and Fortune 500 companies.

Wylde secured support for an open letter against Trump's efforts to overturn the election from almost 200 major companies - including most of the major banks and real estate firms in New York - within 36 hours, a sign of how angry many are with his actions. That was before Wednesday's riot

"If he remains a visible player, no one will want to be associated with him in any kind of public way, because he is going to symbolize the destabilization of the American political system," Wylde said.

Apparently the PGA pulling out of Bedminster particularly set him off. I'd read elsewhere that, for a while, he was more preoccupied with that than with the losing-the-election stuff - and certainly stuff like the pandemic and the ongoing cyberattack. You know, the stuff that a president would be deeply focused on if he had any interest in leading. 

He'd been increasingly behind the eight ball for some time:

Four Trump-branded hotels had closed. The company's plans for new hotel chains had fizzled. The remaining hotels had been hit by political backlash, and then by the pandemic, which has devastated the hospitality industry: At Trump's Chicago hotel in the fall, the managing director told investors, "It's going to be very, very tough to keep the boat afloat."

The D.C. hotel's BLT Prime restaurant had quietly lost its decorated chef, David Burke, who told The Washington Post on Tuesday that he left in the fall after ESquared Hospitality, the New York-based company that operates the upscale steakhouse, ended his contract. Burke said it was probably because of the economics of the pandemic.

Trump has at times railed about business losses resulting from his being president, a senior administration official said, complaining in the Oval Office that the scrutiny and bad publicity were costing him "billions."

Trump also is facing state-level investigations into his financial practices in New York, and more than $400 million in loans will come due in the next few years.

But in the last week, the momentum has gathered:

The first backlash fell upon, of all things, the Trump website that sells candles and T-shirts.

Trumpstore.com had been hosted by the e-commerce website Shopify until last week.

"Shopify does not tolerate actions that incite violence," the company said. As of Tuesday evening, the site was still down.

Then Trump lost the real estate broker working to sell his D.C. hotel. He lost the PGA Championship, one of golf's four majors, which was scheduled to be played at his Bedminster, N.J., club in 2022. The event would have given him a massive spotlight in a sport he loves.

In Britain, Trump's hopes of landing another major golf tournament - the British Open - were dashed when the organizers said they would not use Trump's Turnberry club in Scotland for "the foreseeable future."

This week, Trump lost his accounts at New York's Signature Bank, which gave back the money and put out a statement telling him to resign. New York City said it was "reviewing whether legal grounds exist" to terminate Trump's contracts for ice rinks, the carousel and the city-owned golf course.

Also on Tuesday, Professional Bank - a Florida entity that lent Trump's company $11.2 million in 2018 to buy the president's sister's home near Mar-a-Lago - said it would no longer do business with Trump.

"Professional Bank has decided not to engage in any further business with the Trump Organization and its affiliates, and will be winding down the relationship effective immediately," the bank said in a statement. Trump also has a money market account at the bank worth at least $5 million, according to his most recent financial disclosure. The bank's decision was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

To all actual conservatives - those of us who didn't vote for the VSG either time, and who have pointed out examples of his unfitness as they came along over the last five years - I say: We've been vindicated. And we can take a moment to bask in the knowledge that we don't own any of this. 

Rebuilding a viable conservative movement is going to be a Herculean task, but I don't think having Trumpism as competition is going to be one of our major challenges.

Now, if we can just get him out of the White House in the next six days.  

 

 

 

The Very Stable Genius considers it "sport" to weasel out of financial obligations

I'll just quote extensively from this Quinn Hilyer piece at the Washington Examiner, because it pretty much says it all:

Donald Trump’s callous disregard for others is evident yet again in his series of Tweets on the morning of May 8 responding to the release of ten years of his embarrassing tax returns.

In particular, the most problematic Tweet was one saying this: “You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes....almost all real estate developers did - and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport.”

No, Mr. Trump, it is decidedly not “sport” to leave others holding the bag for your own profligacy, recklessness, and gaming of the system. And “renegotiating” with banks to ask them to eat many of your own losses is understandable as a last resort, but not in the slightest bit excusable as a deliberate strategy.

Has the VSG considered the ripple effect of this "sport"?

The banks, if publicly held, involve the investments of perhaps tens of thousands of Americans, many of them small investors, many of them pensioners. The share prices of those banks drop when the banks write off big losses. The effective savings of those small investors are depleted.

Worse, when an entire cohort of real estate speculators like Trump act as if they are “entitled” to take “massive write offs and depreciation,” it causes systemic crises. Indeed, it was precisely the radical gaming of the system that Trump and others engaged in during the late 1980s period covered by his leaked tax returns that caused the massive savings and loan crisis, which roiled the entire American economy.

While silver-spoon speculators like Trump were engaged in “sport,” millions of Americans lost jobs and tens of millions experienced wages lower than they previously had expected. 

It's a near-certainty that he's the only 2020 alternative to what the post below deals with, but let's harbor no illusions about what he is as we draw closer to that time.

AOC makes an ass of herself - today's edition

In her zeal to tie together an array of mostly imagined occurrences and pin them on a supposedly greedy capitalist who happened to be a captive audience, she got in way over her head. All the guy on the receiving end of her incoherent attempt at a pillory job had to do was - well, what he did.

She sits on the House Financial Services Committee. It's now headed by Maxine Waters, who has long had it in for the banking industry, even though she has some questionable connections with it herself. 

Waters had arranged a hearing the point of which was to skewer the head of Wells Fargo. One wonders whether committee chairwoman Waters feels that her protege made the best use of her grilling time as this exchange unfolded:

As the Daily Wire pointed out, AOC began by accusing Wells Fargo of caging children, an accusation to which Sloan was awfully confused about.

“Why was the bank involved in the caging of children and financing the caging of children to begin with?” Ocasio-Cortez asked.

“I don’t know how to answer that question because we weren’t,” Sloan said simply.

“Uh, so in finan–, you’ve, you were financing, involved in debt financing in CoreCivic and GEO group, correct?” Ocasio-Cortez responded.

“For a period of time, we were involved in financing one of the firms, we are not anymore,” [Wells Fargo CEO Timothy] Sloan said. “I’m not familiar with the specific assertion you are making, we were not involved in that.”

Our favorite democratic socialist then moved on to trying to nail Wells Fargo with environmental damages from oil pipelines. This also confused Sloan, seeing as how there have been no damages due to leaks from pipelines. This forced Ocasio-Cortez to ask him if Wells Fargo should be responsible if it happened “hypothetically.”

“Should Wells Fargo be held responsible for the damages incurred by Climate Change due to the financing of fossil fuels and these projects?” Ocasio-Cortez asked.
“I don’t know how’d you calculate that, Congresswoman,” Sloan responded.

“Say from spills, or when we have to reinvest in infrastructure building sea walls from the erosion of, um, from the erosion of infrastructure or cleanups, wildfires, etc…,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“Related to that pipeline?” Sloan replied. “I’m not aware that there’s been any of what you’ve described that’s occurred that’s related to that pipeline.”

“How about, uh, the cleans up from the leaks of the Dakota Access pipeline?” said Ocasio-Cortez.

“I’m not aware of the leaks associated with the Dakota Access pipeline that you’re describing,” Sloan responded.

“So, hypothetically, if there was a leak from the Dakota Access pipeline, why shouldn’t Wells Fargo pay for the clean up of it since it paid for the construction of the pipeline itself?”

Sloan, once again, had a simple answer.

“Because we don’t operate the pipeline, we provide financing to the company that’s operating the pipeline,” he said. 

What if pigs could fly, Sandy?

The exit question here is whether grilling someone about how he would respond to a hypothetical situation dependent upon all kinds of contingencies is seen by most people as a ridiculous polemical approach, or whether a critical mass sees it as a valid way to take someone down.

The brilliance of the Constitution: it's the way to keep the lid on the inherent tensions in a freedom-based nation

Jay Cost has a great piece at NRO today entitled "The Price of Greatness: Hamilton, Madison and America's Paradox." It's an excerpt from his new book on the subject.

He outlines the three great strains that informed the Founding and the early days of our country:

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton belonged to a political movement in the 1780s that generally cohered around three basic principles. The first was a commitment to liberal government, which emphasized the protection of individual rights. As Thomas Jefferson argued in the Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted among men” to secure certain “unalienable rights,” including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Mason, added the protection of property to the list. This view of the ends of government was heavily influenced by the writings of English philosopher John Locke.

Second, they were part of the tradition of republicanism, or self-government. As Cicero put it, “res publica, res populi” (the commonwealth is the concern of a people), who are “associated with one another through agreement on law and community of interest.” Liberty, in the republican conception, has less to do with protecting property and more to do with the proper construction of the state. Citizens in a republic are free because they are governed by laws that they themselves have a hand in making and not by the whims of an arbitrary sovereign. Typically, republics were thought to be unstable — easily corrupted from their proper form in a tyranny (misrule by a king), oligarchy (misrule by the rich), or ochlocracy (misrule by the mob). Philosophers had concluded that a secure government required mixing the republican principle of majority rule with some other form, like monarchy, to create a balance between factions of society as a bulwark against decay. Montesquieu, a French philosopher and historian who was widely read in the United States at the time, had argued in The Spirit of the Laws that Great Britain’s — which balanced the democratically elected House of Commons against the aristocratic House of Lords and a hereditary sovereign — was the one system in the modern world founded on the spirit of liberty. The Founders, however, had rejected the mixing of classes or estates in government and sought to found a stable republic solely on the principle of majority rule.

Third, they were nationalists, arguing that the 13 states had to bind themselves more firmly together if the ideals of liberalism and republicanism were to be secured. This view was more practical than moral, as it involved a question of how to achieve the shared principles of liberalism and republicanism. It was also much more controversial. Though most Federalists and Anti-Federalists agreed in general on liberalism and republicanism, they disagreed on the nature of the union. The Anti-Federalists, having just thrown off the shackles of a distant government in the Revolution, were not too keen on sanctioning another one. Plus, the Federalists were arguing against the conventional view of republicanism, which held that a smaller republic was preferable, because the citizenry would be more homogeneous and better able to keep an eye on their representatives. Nevertheless, the miserable experiences of the 1780s — an impotent national Congress combined with selfish and often illiberal states — had convinced most Americans that a firmer union was necessary. 

Various figures of the day espoused their own particular blends of these strains, reflecting their individual points of emphasis. It made for areas of touchiness in several friendships and even turned some people into bitter enemies.

What he has to say about the distinctions between Madison's views and those of Hamilton are worth noting:

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Hamilton's program emphasized what I call national vigor. He thought it was necessary to develop the country’s commercial strength to bind the country together and strengthen its ability to rival foreign powers. In Federalist No. 11, he described this vision as “one great American system” that “would baffle all the combinations of European jealousy to restrain our growth.” This meant establishing a reliable currency, encouraging the expansion of credit, and promoting economic diversification. These policies admittedly rewarded the wealthy, but he had a bigger purpose in mind. He wished to turn the wealthy into mediators of the general welfare — dispensing benefits to them in the short run but ultimately reorienting their self-interests to the national interest. Hamilton’s vision of government was not “of, by, and for rich people,” as some critics have said, but rather a public–private partnership between the wealthy and the state, for the benefit of all Americans. The quintessential example of Hamilton’s approach was the Bank of the United States — mostly owned by private investors but holding federal tax revenues and serving as a lender for the government. Yes, the wealthy would profit from their ownership of the stock, but a well-run bank promised benefits that would flow throughout the whole economy.

Madison’s views, on the other hand, emphasized what I call republican balance. He believed that the government had to behave like a neutral judge, fairly dispensing policy benefits and burdens according to the merits of each case. As such, he thought Hamilton’s policies were too one-sided in their favoritism to the wealthy. The rest of the nation should derive some immediate benefits too. He also worried about the potential for Hamiltonian mediation to corrupt republican government. He perceived a dangerous dynamism inherent in the secretary’s use of the moneyed class to promote the general welfare. Institutions such as the Bank of the United States are not a one-way street: The government can employ it for the public good, but the bank’s directors and stockholders can leverage themselves at the public’s expense or even to take control of economic policy. In the parlance of classical republicanism, this is corruption, as the government begins to look like an oligarchy — rule by and for the rich at the expense of the national interest. Madison looked warily at the experience of Great Britain, which had empowered private corporations like the East India and South Sea Companies to execute national economic policy, only to see those private corporations come to wield political influence in Parliament and wreak economic havoc when their schemes failed. He feared the same dangers from Hamilton’s system.

Notice anything with a contemporary flavor to it about the dynamic among these strains?

The key lesson from the Madison–Hamilton battle is not that one was right and the other wrong, but that their feud represents a clash of fundamental American values. The Constitution was premised on liberalism, republicanism, and nationalism — on the supposition that only a stronger, more prosperous union of the states would protect individual rights and secure self-government. But after the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the principles of republicanism and nationalism came into conflict. It seemed as though the country could become a strong and mighty nation, or it could remain a true republic, but it could not be both. Hamilton was the advocate of vigorous nationalism, while Madison defended the principles of republicanism — and the tension inherent in these principles turned the old friends into bitter enemies.

Cost goes on to talk about the period in which the Second Bank of the United States was established as Madisonians and Hamiltonians tried to meld their positions. What it led to was blurred lines between the private sector and government, and to the concept of industrial policy.

. . . the Second Bank of the United States would have branches dispersed across the country rather than concentrated in the northeast. Industrial protection would take the form of tariffs that benefited whole sectors of the economy rather than bounties or cash payments to a handful of firms. And an ambitious program of internal improvement would benefit many locales by directly connecting the country together via a network of roads and canals. In sum, the postwar Republican program was an effort to finally reconcile Hamiltonian nationalism with Madisonian republicanism.

Yet this hybrid of Hamiltonian economics and Madisonian civics was just as dangerous to republicanism as the Hamiltonian original. Once again, oligarchy began to creep into the republic, as the directors and stockholders of the Second Bank of the United States misused their public authority to line their own pockets and influence the course of public policy. Even more dangerous, this Hamiltonian–Madisonian synthesis gave rise to a new kind of mob rule, or what Madison called majoritarian factionalism, via federal tax policy. A diverse array of small economic factions eventually realized that they could combine into a legislative majority to manipulate the tariff rates for their own benefit, at the expense of the good of the nation. This produced the first great constitutional crisis of the young republic in 1832–1833, when South Carolina declared the Tariff of 1828 null and void. 

What those guys needed was a Frederic Hayek to step into their midst. I guess it was going to take a few more years for folks to start seriously looking at the folly of tariffs and central banks.

But let's state clearly that their brilliance lay in acknowledging that societal organization is fraught with tension, all the more so if a nation is going to establish itself with liberty as its primary value.

Me, I come down on the side of republicanism having a greater role than nationalism, for reasons I start to get into in the post below. Yes, I realize that a nation striving to be good and free needs to be strong and unified, but, left unchecked, this impulse can lead to collectivist undertakings to make it more "competitive" and such, when, in reality, only private, for-profit organizations can do any competing.

History is replete with the echoes of its thunderous events, isn't it?