The Debates & the Debtor

The first of the Biden-Trump presidential debates will air tomorrow night. Our expectations could not be lower.

For all the hype, candidate encounters like this can be mind-numbing affairs. They can sometimes be fun to watch, but this time around I can’t imagine there are five voters left in America – from sea to shining sea – who don’t know exactly how they are voting at this point.

For one thing, President Trump has so lowered any expectations for Biden’s own performance – unfairly calling him decrepit and easily addled – that the former Vice President could hardly do anything to disappoint his own supporters.

At the same time, Trump blames Biden for most of the wreckage that’s happened on his own watch – from pandemic deaths to stock market troubles. (“Beware,” Trump and his surrogates warn, “the Democrats are coming for your women and your suburbs!”) Never mind that Trump’s statements are seldom truthful.

Anyway, forget all that. The really big story this week has already broken, on Sunday evening, in that New YorkTimes blockbuster on Trump’s record of tax dodges. It seems the key to his financial success (if you can call it that) has been a careful mix of canny lawyers, creative accountants, and shameless impunity.

Of course, Trump dismisses these revelations (as he always does) as so much “fake news.” That blanket sneer covers a large category of news for him these days.

Two technical terms come to mind for this kind of tax-avoiding behavior: “Shell Game” and “House of Cards.” Let’s add one more – “National Security Risk.” That worry seems to echo loudly between the lines, considering President Trump’s revealed mountain of leveraged debt. 

Two years from now, when the Times says the big tab comes due on these obligations, who exactly will cover these debts? On that day, who will Trump’s new banker be? Excellent question.

It’s the kind of potential vulnerability to manipulation that intelligence officials are trained to watch for with a suspect official in the bureaucracy. We just don’t tend to think of a U.S. President as being in that predicament himself.

Come to think of it, all Trump’s attacks against the credibility of objective news media (his calculated “enemies of the people” smears, and all that) may have been designed in the first place for this precise moment. Some hard tax data was bound to surface one day, and there would come a point – this point – when the chips would be down. His ultimate dodge would have to be, “Don’t trust them. Only trust me.”

Even so, this debate may be fun to watch, at least as pure entertainment.

Joe could bring along a stack of his own tax returns, then smile across the debate stage at Don, and calmly say:

“There’s mine, Mr. President. Where’s yours?”

© Keel Hunt, 2020