Last week the New York Times released a full and detailed report outlining crimes committed by a man now elevated to the United States presidency. It explained how Donald Trump's father orchestrated various schemes to evade taxes, thus building his fortune further; it explained how Donald Trump, in particular, assisted those crimes and crafted new ones.
That the sitting president of the United States is, by all evidence, a criminal went almost unnoticed in the din of the Kavanaugh hearings. The speaker of the House said nothing. The Senate majority leader said nothing. Senators were in the midst of a pitched battle to determine whether past and present wrongdoing by one of the nation's elites—a sexual assault and an assortment of misleading and evasive statements, respectively—deserved even a credible investigation of the charges; they chose to demur, and did so giddily.
But the background news, the bit about a sitting president being a lifelong tax cheat on a scale barely imaginable to most of the rest of us, is not going away. And the voices of elite conservatism are, already, ticking off all the various reasons why this president, their president, is allowed to do those things. Last week the Wall Street Journal editorial page cleared space for Brett Kavanaugh to declare that he would be an impartial and dignified American Elite despite all those things that he said out loud in front of all of us, none of which he recanted or apologized for. This week it falls to Journal columnist Holman Jenkins, voice of the American Business World, by byline, to explain that there is nothing to see here. Yes, the sitting president is a tax cheat, he allows as he mocks the New York Times for tediously pointing it out. Of course he is. That is the way of the world.
In one way excruciatingly detailed by the Times, however, Mr. Trump and his sire are nothing new under the sun. Nobody in their right mind from the compulsive accumulator class pays the punitive federal estate tax. From an early age, such people make sure their lifetime achievements are not sucked up and splattered away in 15 seconds of federal spending.
Everybody commits these crimes, the business world columnist of the Wall Street Journal insists. It is all a game. Come, let us laugh at how it doesn't count if you don't get caught.
