We’ll have to see if the IRS investigates the self-dealing Fahrenthold has identified and what kinds of fines might result. But one of the many striking details in this story is the shock experts in nonprofit and foundation law express when they hear about how Trump uses the Trump Foundation. “I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” one lawyer told Fahrenthold. “If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in a while.”

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I’m not a historian, but I’m beginning to think that Trump may be a singular figure not only in the history of American politics but in the history of American commerce as well. There seems to be no area of his extremely complex financial life that is not infected by double-dealing, public lies, broken promises, or outright fraud.

His foundation seems to be nothing more than a scam. He hires contractors to work on his buildings, then refuses to pay them, knowing they don’t have the resources to fight him and will probably accept pennies on the dollar, sometimes destroying small businesses in the process. He creates one swindle after another, like Trump University, the Trump Institute, and the Trump Network, suckering struggling people with promises of instant wealth. He sues people who criticize him, knowing that he has no case but just hoping to punish them with legal fees. He goes on The Apprentice and claims over and over that he’s giving charitable donations “out of my own wallet,” then arranges to have either the production company or the Trump Foundation pay instead — or sometimes, just never pays at all. He fails at the casino business, then declares bankruptcy and manages to stiff his investors while skating away with a profit, as though the whole thing were an Atlantic City version of “The Producers.” .

And incredibly, the man who has done all this refuses to show his tax returns, like every presidential nominee for the last 40 years has done, despite the fact that he has business partnerships in dozens of countries which could potentially create shocking conflicts of interest between his own bank account and the best interests of United States foreign policy. He’s not going to tell us what they are — we just have to trust him that everything’s kosher, despite the fact that we know with 99.999 percent certainty that there are troubling things in the returns that the public ought to know about before we make him the most powerful human being on Earth. Because everything we’ve learned about him up to now is so reassuring.

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It can get tiring to repeat “Imagine if this were Hillary Clinton…” every time we learn of some new kind of malfeasance Trump has engaged in, but it’s hard to avoid the comparison. Republicans and many journalists practically lost their minds when we discovered that an executive at the Clinton Foundation had encouraged Clinton to meet with major donors to the foundation when she was secretary of state — even though those donors were people like a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the Crown Prince of Bahrain, a critical U.S. ally. Say what you will about that, but there’s never been even a hint that the Clintons used their foundation, which has done a tremendous amount of good work around the world, for personal gain. Now think what the reaction would be if we discovered that Clinton used her foundation’s money to pay off personal lawsuits. It would take about twelve seconds for outraged Republicans to demand an indictment and nervous Democrats to start calling for her to pull out of the race.