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Comment by digitaltrees | Hacker News Reader

How can anyone seriously support him being in a position of power if this is true. The opportunity to buy that debt and call it as leverage to extract political gain is so easy and obvious. Does any of this debt trade on any market? If so a hedge fund could basically have puppet strings on the federal government.

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Simple: it is not “true” to those who support him. They are told a completely different story - one of a successful businessman with unbending will, unfairly persecuted by the media, here to manifest God’s plan.

Yes, including that last one. Talk to any fundamental Christian on why.

I am absolutely positive that they will vote for him even if he publicly endorses Biden himself.

You are down-voted though absolutely 100% right

> The opportunity to buy that debt and call it as leverage to extract political gain is so easy and obvious

If this happened, you don't think he'd be able to get another institution (or GOP constituent) to re-finance/backstop his debt for him?

2-300m in debt is a lot but his businesses pull in 4-500m in annual revenue. It's not a crazy debt-to-income ratio.

First of all, as president he shouldn't have any private business interests. Second, under all standard policies, he wouldn't get the most basic security clearance with this fact pattern. Third, saying some other institution or GOP constituent could backstop is PART OF THE PROBLEM, then he is beholden to them, how is that a solution. Fourth, he deliberately withheld this information as part of a years long cover up, contrary to all prior norms, and we now know why, that alone should disqualify him from office. How much tribal blindness are we willing to accept in politics at this point?

You bring up many good points, none of which I strongly disagree with.

My only point was that it's not "easy and obvious" to "buy his debt and use it as leverage to extract political gain". There are many "outs" he can take if such an event occurred.

I started my career as a lawyer in 2008. I specialized on corporate bankruptcies and worked on many of the high profile cases we all read about. I can tell you I saw this first hand. I saw a hedge fund by a loan from a small community bank for $150k and use it to gum up the works and extract $50M. I guarantee Trump is at high risk of danger here. The legal system can absolutely be weaponized and with over $1B of debt there’s no way to know who owns every dollar. The thing is what if money isn’t what they demand? You’re assuming that they will accept payment of their debt. But with leverage comes opportunities for other demands. It’s actually terrifying to think of all of the things one could demand from a president or government under these circumstances. Absolutely insane.

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