The Art of the Shakedown

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Jonathan Chait, making fun of Donald Trump's Art this morning:

I’ve been working up a brilliant moneymaking scheme. My plan is to throw a bunch of wild accusations at my neighbors. I’ll comb city regulations to find rules they’re breaking, and if I can’t come up with anything, I’ll just make stuff up. After I’ve bombarded them with accusations of unfair treatment, I can threaten them with lawsuits. Eventually they’ll give me some money, maybe a few hundred dollars, to drop the matter.

The plan I’m describing would probably work. But as you’re probably intuiting, it’s an extremely stupid plan. It only seems like a way to extract concessions. In reality, I’d be paying a heavy cost. The goodwill of my neighbors is a valuable long-term asset. It’s pleasant to get along with them, but also practical. We rely on each other for all sorts of arrangements, from borrowing that ingredient you suddenly realize you’re missing in the middle of cooking dinner to calling 911 if there’s an emergency. Whatever payoff I could jack out of them with crazy threats would simply be a short-term monetization with long-term costs.

Donald Trump on CNBC this morning (via Raw Story), confirming that Chait has his number:

“I’ll tell you this: The European Union, which is a fantastic group of negotiators, they actually, a very, very prominent person who you know well, who’s on your show a lot, said the person at the European Union that is in charge of taxation hates the United States more than any person anywhere in the world,” Trump began. “But I really believe that’s true! Every week you see them going after Facebook and Apple and all of these companies that are great companies. There’s something going on.”

“When they give European Union $7 billion and $5 billion and $2 billion, you know, Apple gets sued for $10 billion, and you know, right now it’s going on and they’ll end up settling, they get all this money,” he said. “Well, we should be doing that! They’re our companies, so they’re actually attacking our companies. But we should be doing what they’re doing! They think there’s a monopoly, but I’m not sure that they think that, they just figure this is easy money, we’ll sue Apple for $7 billion and we’ll either settle or win the case. So I think it’s a bad situation but obviously there is something going on in terms of monopoly.”

What's going on in terms of monopoly being, apparently, that European companies unfairly don't want US companies to have one?

But it's clear that when Trump said he was going to bring his business skills to the White House what he meant was The Art of the Shakedown.