In defending himself against allegations of committing systematic fraud over the span of decades, former President Donald Trump has made the case that he couldn't have committed fraud because the banks who lent him money were sophisticated investors and not victims.
However, legal analyst Liz Dye makes the case over at the Public Notice blog that Trump's fraud is anything but victimless given the way that it distorts the financial system for his personal benefit.
In fact, she makes the case that "we are all victims" of Trump's decades of deceit.
"Put simply, lying about your creditworthiness makes it more difficult for lenders to price risk, and so they have to charge a higher premium to everybody," she explained. "For years, Trump argued that the state of New York... had no interest in preserving the integrity of the market itself in the absence of a lender complaining of injury. But as Justice Engoron points out, that’s simply a defense of the right to steal a little bit from everyone 'stupid' enough to tell the truth on their loan applications."
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Added to this, Dye argues that the banks who did lend Trump money were victims of fraud even if they never publicly raised a stink about it.
"Whether Deutsche Bank and the other lenders are complaining about it or not, that is money that Trump got from them by committing fraud," she adds. "So if the question is, 'Who was harmed here?' the answer is very clearly the lenders, who missed out on tens of millions of dollars they would have collected had Trump paid an interest rate commensurate with the actual level of risk the banks took when they loaned money to him."
