THE DAILY BEAST
For all of Donald Trump’s sound and fury and conspiratorial nonsense about his New York criminal trial, in the end his greed was the driving force behind his conviction.
In a historic trial focused on exactly what the real-estate tycoon turned president did to ensure a porn star wouldn’t dish about what she said was their extramarital sexual affair, the irony is that the road to conviction was paved with Trump’s miserly reluctance to pay.
In the reality-bending Trump era, it should come as no surprise that this tale reads like a Charles Dickens novel. In act two, there’s even a Scrooge-like reduction of a man’s Christmas bonus.
Trump refused to pay women with claims about infidelities that could have toppled his 2016 presidential campaign. He refused to repay the watchful media executive who guarded his reputation. He refused to pay a business vendor that would have had nothing to do with this fraud scandal were it not for a peculiar sequence of events. And he repeatedly refused to pay his own lawyer, allowing resentment to build until it blew up in his face.
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