Trump's Money and National Security
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 September 2020
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Sunday, September 27, the New York Times dropped bombshell new reporting on nearly two decades of Donald Trump's tax return data. The story has attracted enormous attention and paints a dismal picture. Donald Trump paid no personal income taxes for 11 of the past 18 years, he uses tax deductions aggressively, and last year he paid only $750 in federal income tax. So, is this a story of a president merely in massive debt, or is there something more sinister at play? To whom does the president owe all this money? And what are the national security risks of the president being in this sort of financial position? To try to break it all down, Susan Hennessey sat down with Margaret Taylor, a fellow at Brookings and senior editor at Lawfare; Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and the author of "The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency"; and Adam Davidson, a contributing writer to The New Yorker who has written extensively on Trump's financial entanglements.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
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| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:32.6 | The most interesting tell going forward if Trump loses in November is going to be the way |
| 0:40.2 | in which he views his sort of getting out of presidency sale. |
| 0:44.2 | You know, does he look at the last three months of his administration as the opportunity |
| 0:49.7 | to really go pull hog on him audience? |
| 0:52.2 | And it would strike me that that's really the danger. |
| 0:54.0 | Danger isn't so much the national security threat right now. |
| 0:56.4 | Danger is the national security threat once he knows he's going to be leaving. |
| 1:00.4 | Because then he won't care. |
| 1:01.4 | It doesn't matter if he violates the Constitution. |
| 1:03.1 | It doesn't matter if he commits and teaches offenses. |
| 1:04.9 | A, he's committed and teaches offenses before and B, he does during the lame duck session |
| 1:08.7 | so what? |
| 1:09.7 | He's out, you know, on January 20th, 2021 anyway. |
| 1:13.9 | I'm Susan Hennessy and this is the LawFair podcast September 30th, 2020. |
| 1:19.1 | On Sunday, September 27th, the New York Times dropped bombshell new reporting on nearly |
| 1:23.6 | two decades of Donald Trump's tax return data. |
| 1:27.0 | The story has attracted enormous attention and paints a dismal picture. |
... |
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