Trump Has Nothing Else up His Sleeve

When voters say they want politicians to run the government like a business, they should stipulate which business. Surely not the Trump Organization. A blockbuster New York Times report yesterday suggested that either the president’s real-estate empire is a boondoggle that’s losing millions of dollars a year, or it’s a massive tax-avoidance scheme. (Or perhaps it’s some of both.)

Trump is not the first president to encounter difficulty in his personal finances, though none has premised his political appeal so narrowly on business acumen. But the Times revelations are important not only because they raise the question of whether the president is fleecing the federal government on taxes, but because they illustrate his failures as a leader.

Trump has only a few tricks: postponing all reckonings, bluffing his way through his current mess without concern for the next