JimK
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Trump does apparently have business connections in Russia: https://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/donald-trump-foreign-business-deals-national-security-498081.html
The tax issue is a bit more complicated than just following the rules or not. Taxes depend on accounting, and accounting is always a matter of judgment and interpretation, e.g. whether an expense is personal or business-related. How close to the line does a person play in order to reduce their taxes? How flagrant a violation is required before the IRS decides the evidence is enough to convince a jury? Beyond that, people often structure their business activities in order to enable the kind of accounting that reduces taxes, along with protecting assets from bankruptcy proceedings etc.
Trump has no political track record and bases a lot of his campaign on his business acumen. So it is important to establish that for Trump, business = greed. This is the Ayn Rand philosophy that has infected so much of the power elite in recent decades and destroyed the country.
Money = debt, so money cannot disappear and debt remain. But wealth is not just money. Actually wealth is not money at all. Wealth disappearing while debt remains, that’s what happened when house prices collapsed. The value of the asset declined, but the mortgage debt doesn’t change. As banks fold, their assets get sold cheaply to the remaining banks. Money gets concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Plus a fixed amount of money controls a larger amount of wealth. So the concentration of wealth is doubly amplified.
Of course money is just paper and debt is just paper, but then all property ownership is just paper. If all the paper is just shredded, that is the end of the rule of law. Which, after all, is a normal phase in the general trajectory of such things.
