Indeed, you can’t “both sides” this; there’s no such popular support of CTs on the American left, or anywhere on the political spectrum in most countries of the developed world.
A large contingent of Republican voters right now are basically immune to facts; they only trust people who are telling them what they want to hear.
And they think politics is essentially a fight; the idea that both parties should want to help people, and should generally agree on most trivial things is completely absent.
“Meanwhile, Bloomburg’s latest valuation comes in even lower at $3bn. Analysts looked at a range of information when compiling their estimates, including Trump’s financial disclosure to the Federal Election Commission last year, mortgage filings, property records, annual reports, hotel reports and interviews with people familiar with his assets.”
Well, it’s no “better” in the sense of not having any more certainty about what are ultimately just estimates based largely on whatever Trump feels like telling people. Trump has always described a lot of his net worth as being in the value of his “brand”, for which there’s no objective metric.
But presumably the subject of Trump’s quantifiable wealth is going to become more transparent as various investigations continue to move through the courts.
Did you read this part?
“property records, annual reports, hotel reports and interviews with people familiar with his assets”
Those things are not something Trump said.
Would it pain you too much to accept reality and agree that Trump is a billionaire?
Did you read the part that occurred just before your carefully-excerpted quote?
Uh, yeah, that does mean that their estimate is based largely on whatever Trump felt like telling the FEC.
Not in the least: the more money Trump has, the more likely it is that his various creditors can actually get paid what he owes them, once the courts force him to.
But I’m not about to jump to the conclusion that Trump necessarily is a billionaire until and unless it’s verifiably confirmed. Trump has spent most of his career shamelessly lying and bullshitting about himself and everything else, and consequently any evaluation of his status that’s significantly dependent on his own reporting should not be implicitly relied on.
There are lots of ways to control assets without owning them, live off lending based on them, and have no income from them. So they don’t appear at all.
To be sure, some tax return data is more informative than no return data.
But until the prosecution gets every return from every Trumply enterprise & foundation & shell company, and then gets the “books” of all of them, and then assembles a complete picture, we’ll be left looking at individual pixels trying to guess what it’s a picture of.