Compounding all this, the judge noted, is a “complete lack of contrition and remorse [that] borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Defendants did not commit murder or arson. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ posture that the evidence belies. This Court is not constituted to judge morality; it is constituted to find facts and apply the law.”
Protecting “the integrity of the financial marketplace and, thus, the public as a whole,” the judge wrote, is compounded by the Trump team’s “refusal to admit error—indeed, to continue it.” This shows that Team Trump will engage in fraud “going forward unless judicially restrained. Indeed, Donald Trump testified that, even today, he does not believe the Trump Organization needed to make any changes based on the facts that came out during this trial.”
The message from Engoron’s opinion should carry over into whether to entrust Donald Trump once again with the presidency’s powers. People who want a man in the White House who thumbs his nose at the law, has no remorse for cheating others, and lies as easily as he breathes should vote for him. But now that a judge has laid bare Trump’s unrelenting dishonesty, hopefully the American public will realize that Donald Trump is nothing but a remorseless con artist who would steal our democracy and then brag about what a great job he did preserving it.