I’ll check what the Trump’s admitted to later but the full story in the original case against him was that the Trump Organization ran a special event at their golf course, with a $1 million prize if anyone hit a hole in one. Someone did.
Trump refused to pay out, was sued by the winner, lost the case, and was ordered to give his personal money to charity since the winner didn’t want Trump’s money anymore, he was so disgusted by the man (or something).
Rather than pay, he took money from his own charity and rather than give money, he spent the money at a charity auction to buy the painting of himself.
The self-dealing is the part where he uses money that people granted to his charity to pay off the legal suit that he lost. Traditionally, that’s what we would call theft. If you’re sharing an apartment with four other people, and you all have a thing where you donate money to a jar to help pay for groceries for the group, but you never do, and you take the money to finance buying food for yourself and your girlfriend, the fact that you are buying food and the money was intended for buying food doesn’t stop what you are doing from being theft. Your roomies could send you to jail.
Trump did that at a scale of a million dollars. At those prices, thievery becomes self-dealing, embezzlement, etc. because the sorts of people who do it have good enough lawyers and look sufficiently presentable in court that it’s nearly impossible to get a jury to send them to jail. If the government tried to charge them with criminal theft, they’d all go free. In cases like that, the government creates lesser crimes and penalties, forgiving you if you pay the money back, close your charity and agree to never run one again, etc. But, at the end of the day, embezzlement is just the same crime as an employee taking some cash out of a cash register. Maybe not in the court system. But it is all just plain robbery.
Thievery, though, is just the crime in the matter.
We should also note that Trump didn’t or couldn’t pay the $1 million to begin with. Was he actually desperate for money? In our apartment example, what is the likelihood that the thief is flush with cash? More likely, he’s in a hole. But we can bet that that’s not what he’s telling the girls that he dates.
Trump campaigned on the idea that he was a capable, organized, successful leader of large organizations. As it is, he might just be a person that steals a little bit of money from here, a little bit there, and refuses to pay his bills - forcing those who expected to earn a living from working with him to go off and starve after many hard months of work. And while, yes, it would be true that his businesses do continue to exist and operate thanks to all of that, I wouldn’t classify that as successful operation any more than I would the USSR, because it was able to squeak by for a few decades.
He campaigned as having an eye to reducing the amount of corruption in Washington DC. But he hired people who were all corrupt, broke all of Obama’s anti-corruption policies to keep lobbyists out of the White House, hasn’t (to my knowledge) suggested any policies nor laws to reduce corruption in DC, and as we note from the story he seems to be a simple thief - the sort of person who would love and encourage corruption, not fight it.
From an impeachment standpoint, if the President lied his way all the way through the campaign, telling the people that he was the exact opposite sort of person as he actually is and had the exact opposite policy as he days he does, it would be fair to say that that is criminal fraud. If you tell me you’re a doctor and then you prove to have been a pump worker at a sewage plant, and you were putting your fingers in my wife’s orifices, I would report you to the police and you would be charged with fraud and assault and battery.
The case of the painting isn’t definitive on Trump being strapped for cash. He may have just hated the guy who won the prize.
But even when he was forced to pay, he used Vince McMahon’s money to do so. And we see him doing things like not paying contractors, allowing his personal lawyer to rat him out to the Feds rather than help pay his legal fees, etc. There’s enough circumstantial evidence floating around that it would be reasonable to guess that the man’s businesses are running in the red. Certainly, the a White House hasn’t become more fiscally responsible, and the citizens are paying through the nose to finance all of Trump’s lawyers, to handle the large swathes of cases against him and his government.
If you campaign as wanting to save the rain forest and, getting in office, the first thing you do is send planes out to start fire bombing Brazil, and going on TV, cackling that “You all believed me! What a bunch of rubes!” Again, that would be criminal fraud, and an impeachable offense.
