https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mar-a-lago-neighbors-legal-action/
Worshiper at Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) (1966–present)How will Trump’s Mar-a-Lago-neighbors enforce the 1993 covenant that he cannot stay more than 21 days a year and 7 consecutive days when he has spent 130 days during his presidency and it is registered as his permanent Florida address?The Mar-a-Lago Club; 1100 South Ocean Boulevard, Palm Beach, Florida 33480
Mar-a-Lago was supposed to be Mr. Trump’s protected place from creditors. The theory that Mr. Trump is following is that Florida has some real cool laws on the books that prevent people from chasing you to this state to pay your debts. This also has two sides to it. Mr. Trump sees himself as a public person – the rich and shameless come to his door because literally, no matter what shit you have on your soul, it is not worse than Trump.
Trump likes all those people visiting him but he has made a scam out of it. Instead of being a host and opening a home to people – I can name dozens of millionaires who have opened a bedroom and fed me a dinner in the last five years alone – Trump makes you pay for the pleasure. Locals pay for the club, people from out of town pay a per-diem.
By the way, here is how this whole dodge works. This “house” that looks like a hotel for gaudy drug lords is actually Trump’s one and only residence. Or so he “legally” claims. Everything else is just a front. As his one and only residence, Mar-a-Lago is thus subject to being protected under the Homestead act as exempt. Under the Florida Constitution, homestead exemption accomplishes three types of exemptions:
- Exemption from forced sale before and at death – all those people he owes money to cannot come and get Mar-a-Lago.
- Restrictions on devise and alienation. What is this? Devise occurs when property passes to the next generation through a will, and alienation by occurs when there is no will. The Florida law prevents huge amounts of taxes from being paid on the first homesteaded house.
- Exemption from taxation per Article VII, Section 6, which says, “Every person who has the legal or equitable title to real estate and maintains thereon the permanent residence of the owner, or another legally or naturally dependent upon the owner, shall be exempt from taxation thereon, except assessments for special benefits, up to the assessed valuation of twenty-five thousand dollars and, for all levies other than school district levies, on the assessed valuation greater than fifty thousand dollars and up to seventy-five thousand dollars, upon establishment of right thereto in the manner prescribed by law…” Which means he pays next to nothing in tax on the property.
The problem for Trump is he is taking two different legal ideals and jamming them together illegally.
Mar-a-Lago is a house, in which case he owes education and property taxes and cannot run a business there.
Mar-a-Lago is a business, in which case he cannot live there or protect it through homestead.
To make sure Trump understood this, they had him sign a contract which says, I won’t live there and run it as a hotel except when I am president and have the power to tell you to fuck yourself.
The power to tell people to fuck themselves is ticking away. So the end game for Trump-
#1 Shut the hotel down, pay your taxes of what I personally figure is 1.8 million per year, and you are OJ Simpson safe from losing the property.
#2 Run the hotel and pay business taxes, but stay out of the residence two days in three through audits. And someone can come and sue you for it.
He cannot do both.
By the way, there are a lot of minor errors in some posts. I want to put them right without implying they are outlandish.
- The status of the club is a significant issue and was under threat of adjudication before Mr. Trump won the presidency. With his change of residence from New York to protect him from a last minute NYS records request as he was running for president, he agreed that in exchange for forbearance on the issue of Mar-a-Lago, he would return to the agreed upon 130 day residence per year – in essence matching the yearly residence process that a few shared properties, where family members exchange the property each month with other family members, and thus being a legal clear zone for removing litigation.
- The issue is affecting the value of some even more expensive property, and thus is not simply a poor little city fighting a big behemoth. Right now the “Marion Sims Wyeth” house – one of the most beautiful I have ever seen anywhere – and the Maurice Fatio Residence are coming on the market or are now being shown, plus four new constructions, and the Trump circus is not making selling easy. The Kushners are already finding out that just a hint they may be buying property in New York City is causing real-world loss of property value. My friend in Satellite says the Trump name is on par with Sirhan Sirhan in terms of popularity. A lot of movers and shakers are saying the Trump circus just needs to go buy acreage in Glendale California and make friends with the Kardashians. All of this means there is great pressure to see Trump et. al. follow their contract, with an eye to seeing him off.
- Then there is the money. Everyone I know in the industry says no one will lend Trump 50 cents unless he spends the money making a raft to take it to Cuba. The idea that Trump has the money to maintain a 30-million dollars property that he has listed as worth ten times that is a joke. The word is – he owes 500 million on paper, 500 million on tax dodges, and has no property worth a cent, even Mar-a-Lago is leveraged, and his only income not coming from cheating the Government is something called Trump Ice, which may allow them to have a comfy split level in Snell island. To make Mar-a-Lago work he needs all the scams to stay in place.
Donald Trump’s money faucet is getting turned off
His money troubles have started. If he is filthy rich these small loses should not matter.
The Trump coverup no one is talking about: The emperor has no money
But Trump’s theatrics were also very convenient because they disguised the fact that he cannot now, or ever, deliver on his signature promise to create a “great” infrastructure program. This is why Trump “infrastructure weeks” have become a standing joke in Washington. LaTourette was right: The Republican Party is no longer interested in spending public money to solve big problems if doing so gets in the way of cutting taxes.
LaTourette explained this in his rough-and-ready way back in 2011 when he called the 2010 tea party class of Republicans “knuckledraggers that came in in the last election that hate taxes.”
One of those newcomers was Mick Mulvaney, now Trump’s acting chief of staff and budget director. From the moment Trump, Pelosi and Schumer announced their convergence on a $2 trillion infrastructure plan last month, Mulvaney began sabotaging it. “Is it difficult to pass any infrastructure bill in this environment, let alone a $2 trillion one, in this environment? Absolutely,” Mulvaney said.
He was far from alone because the entire Republican leadership in Congress is now part of the Knuckledraggers Caucus. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly signaled that he had absolutely no interest in a big infrastructure plan if it required rolling back any part of the GOP’s 2017 corporate tax cut.
Democrats argue that because business is clamoring for infrastructure, it would make sense to ask business to foot part of the bill. They have suggested raising the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from the 21 percent enshrined in the 2017 law and pulling back on some of its other provisions.
No way, say the Republicans. A “nonstarter,” declared McConnell. Faced with the choice of bridges collapsing in a heap or reining in the tax giveaways, the bridges don’t have much of a chance.
Note that the meeting Trump sabotaged was about how to finance the plan. He had no way of coming up with anything constructive because, for all of his bravado, he is totally under the thumb of Congress’s conservative ideologues. His tantrum was part of the coverup no one is talking about: The emperor has no money.
This fact underscores a widespread misunderstanding about our politics. “Normal” Republicans are regularly described as privately horrified with Trump. Trump is said to have engaged in “a hostile takeover” of the GOP.
In fact, it’s Trump who has been taken over. He campaigned as a different kind of Republican, and his infrastructure promise was a major component of his antiideological image. But on all the things the ideologues and right-wing business interests care about —
Trump caves in.
We know the president’s boast that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any votes.” Perhaps Republicans in Congress wouldn’t go that far. Otherwise, they’ll keep standing with him as long as he prostrates himself before their tax-cutting god, even if this means showing he is too weak and powerless to fix the roads.
Rush Limbaugh: Mueller Wants to Nullify Trump’s $900M Tax Deduction — from 1995 — to ‘Ruin Him’
Limbaugh accused Mueller of seeking to “nullify” Trump’s 1995 IRS claim of approximately $900 million in operational losses in order to pursue a reclamation of the money with added penalties and accrued interest:
And these requests, the subpoena for documents from the Trump Organization, I ask you again, what has that to do with the campaign and with collusion and with the Russians? They’ve already been looking into Trump business in Russia with the Miss, what is it, USA, whatever his pageant is.
Do you all remember during the early days of the campaign there was news that Trump, in a tax return something like 20 years ago, took a $900 million deduction that was granted and survived an audit by the IRS? Now, I forget the details. It had to do with losses that he had incurred in that year in building things. It was around 900 or $920 million deduction. I’ll never forget when it was reported because most people will never come close to ever having that in a lifetime, and to have a guy personally write that much off?
… Anyway, I think Mueller wants that $920 million back. I think Mueller wants to prove that that was a faulty deduction. I think that they want to go back, they want to get Trump’s tax returns because they want to nullify that $900 million deduction, and then they want to collect 20 years of interest and penalties and wipe Trump out.
Limbaugh also challenged the pervasive framing of Mueller as an honorable man across the joint news media and political landscape:
We’ve been told as long as I have been aware of the name Robert Mueller, we are told that Mr. Mueller is a man of impeccable character, a man of refined tastes, a man of immense sophistication and qualification. The man was a judge, he ran the FBI, he is a fair person. He’s an all-round good guy. And in terms of people in Washington when it comes to the integrity, there are none with any more integrity than Robert Mueller.
Well, I’m sorry, but that doesn’t fit with what we see this man doing. And what I ask myself is, does Mueller ever get up and ask himself, “What the hell am I doing? I don’t have a crime here. I don’t have any evidence of a crime.” Does Mueller ever get up or does anybody on his team, do they get up in the morning and they ever ask themselves, are we really doing the right thing here in seeking to destroy an American citizen whose only audacious behavior is winning the presidency?
.. A man of honor and integrity, suggested Limbaugh, would not accept a limitless role to pursue the political destruction of President Donald Trump: “There aren’t any limits on this guy! There is no crime that he has been charged with investigating. He’s been given a free rein to go find a crime anywhere he wants!”
“We’re told this guy’s the best of the best,” said Limbaugh. “We’re told this guy, nobody could hold a candle to him in terms of honesty and integrity and character. Well, then how does somebody with all of those fine traits even participate in a sham like this?”
Mueller’s mandate to “investigate Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election and related matters” — issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — lists no financial or temporal limitations. In addition to a nebulous scope, no specific crimes are listed within the mandate.