For rather obvious reasons, my phone has been pinging with texts and emails from readers suggesting that Donald Trump is having a very bad week. There’s the fact that the Trump Org was convicted of tax fraud. Then there’s the fact that his chosen Senatorial candidate, Herschel Walker, was beaten in the Georgia run-off by Sen. Raphael Warnock. And then there’s the news broken by the Washington Post that an outside team hired by Trump discovered items with classified markings in storage that they’ve passed on to the FBI to add to the pile found at Mar-a-Lago.
So, yes, the former president has probably had better weeks, but I am not sure that the consequences for his future are as disastrous as some of the alarmist headlines imply.
First: his business. I phoned around to my sources in real estate, who include people who run funds that have lent to Trump, and asked, Does the conviction change anything? Would you lend to him again?
The answer was yes.
Let me repeat that. Yes.
As long as you are not a bank, where the underwriting committee probably would not let you lend to a business with a conviction against it, lending to Trump is actually now more enticing for the aggressive investment funds.
Why?