Mr. Pence can expect to be challenged on Mr. Trump’s denigrating comments about Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe; on Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mrs. Clinton’s marriage; and on the prospect that Mr. Trump may have gone nearly two decades without paying federal income taxes. And those are just the hits from last week. Up to this point, Mr. Pence has proved adept at deflecting questions about Mr. Trump’s incendiary comments, redirecting interviews to rote talking points about shaking up Washington. But a debate is an entirely different format; and as Senator Marco Rubio of Florida found, using the same dodge over and over again can have catastrophic consequences.
After thinking over the Times revelation, I wonder whether there's a much, much bigger story here that the Times didn't put together or more likely did see but couldn't prove. In any case, here's what I'm thinking. We've known for years that the collapse of Trump's debt ridden casino empire in Atlantic City almost destroyed him more than two decades ago. He was able to wriggle through by a number of angles and connivances. But one of the biggest was that he was able to convince his lenders that they'd be even worse off if he was cleaned out and removed from the picture entirely. Convincing them that he was in essence too big or too important to fail, they took major 'haircuts' (losses) that allowed him to survive. He got others to absorb the impact of the losses, repackaged other parts and put them through bankruptcy, etc. The key question is how much of the Atlantic City losses did Trump absorb in real terms? How much of those losses were forgiven or written off formally? And perhaps most importantly, how much of those losses were squirreled away or 'parked' in places which effectively put them in a sort of limbo or suspended animation - neither truly absorbed nor forgiven? Here's where the Times revelation comes into play. If you sustain real capital losses, you can apply those losses to cancel out future income/profits and reduce your tax liability. But if your losses are canceled out by debt forgiveness, the debt forgiveness is counted as income. That cancels out the losses that would provide you with the tax benefit. In other words, you can't have your cake and eat it too.At the end of this campaign, more likely than not, Donald Trump will be arrested for tax evasion on hundreds of millions of dollars of income. And then he will be locked up.
