After 20,000 lies, 209,000 COVID-19 deaths and umpty-ump scandals de jure, one has to wonder if there is anything the president can do or say that would fracture his hard-core support from his base?

I dunno. After more than three years of his tenure in the White House, I have repeatedly had my hopes rise that he would be hurt by something outrageous he’s done, only to see his base stay pretty much intact.

Independents and white suburban women are a different story. There’s lots of slippage in Trump’s support out there, comparing 2016 to 2020 polls. And that gives me hope, that the non-cultists are becoming disenchanted or outraged by individual incidents or just the overall tone and tenor of his administration and Twitter antics.

---

---

And now, we see The New York Times come out with an investigation into Trump’s taxes, profits and losses and overall track record as a businessman. Trump called it fake news, of course, but this investigation is a direct assault on his core brand message: that Trump is a successful businessman who can work his business magic on all the intractable problems facing our nation.

“Only I can solve this,” he has repeatedly said about this, that and the other crisis.

---

---

You can read about The New York Times investigation in lots of places, even Fox News. The key takeaways are that Trump has made and lost lots of money from 2000 to 2015, so much so that in 10 of those 15 years, he paid no income taxes at all. For the year of his inauguration and the next year, NYT reports he paid $750 in taxes each year.

Further, Trump may owe as much as $1 billion in back taxes.

I think there’s a larger picture here. When you factor in all the failed businesses Trump has had, I think he became radioactive to the New York banks and financial community. No one wanted to loan any money to this chronic loser who claims to be such a winner.

I suspect that as more tax and financial data emerge, a tipping point will emerge, and this is where Putin and Saudi princes and kleptocrats got their collective claws into Trump.

Brodie Farquhar
Hayden