How New York Can Help

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

New York made Donald Trump. Both the city and the state made him what he is today. The “anything goes” culture of the city’s financiers and real-estate developers let him inherit and make whatever riches he actually has. The city’s and state’s courts and regulatory agencies looked the other way while his dad reportedly discriminated against minorities, and while Trump himself reportedly stiffed contractors, defrauded students, built his own media empire on fantasy, and generally acted like a minor Mafia capo.

It’s hard to imagine any other major American city but Chicago letting such a low-life rise so far so fast.

Now Trump has turned his back on New York, moving to Mar-a-Lago. No doubt he did so to escape taxes and whatever weak scrutiny the sleepy New-York watchdogs deigned to give him.

So Trump has turned his back on city that made him. Just so, he’s turned his back on Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, James Comey, Jeff Sessions, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Michael Flynn, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, and many, many lesser-known figures, whose names and photos you can find here. His administration has set an all-time record for turnover, including four officials whose tenures were the shortest ever in their respective offices.

New York has a lot to answer for. Its greedy and corrupt banking culture gave us the Crash of 2008, which added rocket fuel to Trump’s anti-establishment campaign. It gave us Donald Trump. And it has given us Rudy Giuliani, who finessed his way to becoming “America’s mayor” after a failing that helped kill many first responders on 9/11, and now has become, in Bolton’s words, “a hand grenade who's going to blow everybody up.”

But New York can begin to redeem itself. It can do so in two ways. First, it can use its state courts, subject to loose federal supervision, to pull Trump’s tax returns from his tight fist and make them public. Second, it can begin proceedings to disbar Rudy Giuliani, as well as try him for his various serious probable offenses against the rule of law.

Of all of Trump’s offenses against the Constitution, public order, morality, and decency, his compulsive and relentless falsification of basic facts may be the worst. But this offense has a handmaiden: his deliberate and relentless effort to conceal the truth.

Trump has taken extraordinary measures to conceal his college grades and test scores, as well as the details of his business dealings. Why do you think that is? Could it really be that his academic records portray him as a “very stable genius,” or that his tax returns—filed under penalty of perjury and designed to minimize his taxes—would paint him as an honest billionaire who never cuts corners or deals with shady foreign banks?

If so, then why doesn’t he make these records public voluntarily, as presidents after Nixon have done with their own tax returns? Could it be that his business affairs, if known in detail, would reveal him to be as much of a low-life as the rest of his public record does?

As the state of his domicile until recently, New York at least has control of his state tax records. True, there are federal financial privacy laws and laws that protect taxpayers. But Trump’s is a special case. There has probably never been, and there is unlikely ever to be again, a case in which the First Amendment so cries out for truth and accuracy in portraying a man—a president, no less—whose life and career is such a matter of public interest and subject to such spirited dispute.

Trump has built his house of cards on a foundation of falsehoods, deceit, and burying the truth. That house is starting to fall already, under the impact of investigating a single (albeit extended) incident: his apparent attempt to coerce Ukraine’s president to aid Trump’s political campaign. Maybe New York can make his tax returns public and reveal the full extent of his falsehoods, deceit and truth burial regarding his corrupt business career.

Then Trump’s house of cards and lies will collapse at last, and we Americans can get on with our damaged but still promising lives. However high the legal barriers may seem, it’s a project worth pursuing, in both criminal and civil courts.

The case against Rudy Giuliani is much easier. If there ever were a once-professional lawyer who’s gone rogue, it is he. He made his reputation prosecuting Mafiosi, including those who share his Italian heritage. Yet in “Ukrainegate” he has reportedly acted like a Mafioso himself, conveying and pushing threats to a foreign leader that have nothing to do with our national security and everything to do with domestic politics.

It’s immaterial whether Giuliani violated campaign-finance laws by seeking something of value (investigation of the Bidens) from a foreign country (Ukraine) to aid a political campaign (Trump’s). It’s also immaterial whether he violated the spirit and/or the letter of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.

For lawyers are held to a higher standard than the rest of us. At least they used to be. The ethical canons of the legal profession require lawyers to do more than just refrain from committing crimes. They require the highest standards of ethics, probity, candor and decency, as befits what we used to call “officers of the court.”

Occasionally lawyers and other well-connected people serve as informal emissaries in aid of our foreign policy. But that’s not what Giuliani reportedly did. He reportedly served as Trump’s Mafia capo, took charge of the effort to bully Ukraine’s president into helping Trump’s campaign, intimidated duly appointed foreign-policy officers and staff (over whom he had no legal authority), and even secured an ambassador’s firing. And all for the purposes of advancing a president’s personal and private political goals.

It would be hard to find a more extreme case of choosing wrong over right and trampling over proper and lawful procedure. That’s not what lawyers are supposed to do, or what their ethical canons require. If lawyers can be disbarred for stealing a few thousand dollars from their clients, how about helping a rogue president violate campaign finance laws, subvert our Constitution and undermine our foreign policy and the agencies and officers duly charged to carry it out?

New York City and State made Donald Trump. They have given us the worst and most patently corrupt president in our history, one who makes Warren G. Harding look like a saint. The least New York can do, now that its monster spawn has repudiated it, is to help the winds of truth, right and change blow his house of cards and lies down.

Permalink to this post