Of Many Spin Experiments, Biden s Is the Worst – WSJ
It was an interesting week in spin, and I don t use the term lightly since spin and reality can become intertwined to create new realities.
Take Donald Trump. He is famous for being unbounded in his spinning about his wealth. It was Forbes magazine not a New York Supreme Court judge last week trying to strip Mr. Trump of his property rights that pointed out to Mr. Trump and its readers that what he consistently claimed was a 30,000-square-foot triplex apartment in Trump Tower was 11,000 square feet.
Mr. Trump, in the case brought by New York s highly partisan attorney general Letitia James, testified that everybody knew the valuation method employed was worthless (his word). He pointed to the standard disclaimer that such claims shouldn t be relied upon. He might have added: No counterparty with which he dealt bank, insurance company, independent appraiser could have been in any doubt that Donald Trump is Donald Trump, notorious purveyor of bombast and, early in his career, of banner-headline bankruptcies.
So informed, his counterparties didn t fail to write contracts that were realistic, even conservative, as testified by Mr. Trump s never defaulting on an obligation or missing a payment. Even the judge admits as much: Defendants correctly assert that the record is devoid of any evidence of default, breach, late payment, or any complaint of harm.
Judge Arthur F. Engoron engages in some spin and labored breathing of his own, nevertheless finding in Mr. Trump s hyperbolic real-estate puffery the crime of the century. The judge calls for Mr. Trump to be relieved of personal control of his assets, including his namesake Fifth Avenue tower, for the sin of overpraising them.
Happily, not everyone in the press was buying. As the
s laudable Peter Coy points out, such an outcome would seem to bump up against the layperson s standard of no harm, no foul.
via www.wsj.com
Peter Coy, quoted above, was Editor in Chief of the Cornell Daily Sun back when I was at Cornell (Go Class of ’79). He was a great guy and great journalist in the making as well.