All human hubris must eventually find its resting place. We look out across the vast, rolling expanse of this American republic, a landscape littered with the quiet bones of empires and the forgotten ledgers of bankrupt kings, only to find our gaze narrowing down to a single, gilded tower on Fifth Avenue and the stubborn mortality of the mortal man who built it. They say a man can outrun his creditors, outtalk his prosecutors, and outvote his executioners, but he cannot outlive the two grim constants that govern this mortal coil. It was an old maxim of mine, polished by years of watching the human comedy unfold from the Mississippi to the Potomac, that there are only two things in this life which are absolutely certain, and those are Death and Taxes.
The Ledger Always Balance, and for well over a decade, the machinery of the state has been grinding away at the gates of Mar-a-Lago trying to prove it. For sixteen long years, a small army of green-visored clerks and relentless auditors and federal sleuths have been tunneling through mountains of write-offs from Atlantic City to the windy shores of Lake Michigan. They chased the ghost of a seventy-two million dollar refund from the casinos of yesteryear, and they spent a generation untangling the mysterious, disappearing millions of a Chicago tower that was declared worthless on paper while standing perfectly tall in the sun. It is a spectacle that would make a Mississippi riverboat gambler blush, a game of high-stakes hide-and-seek where the seeker is the United States Treasury and the hiding place is a labyrinth of corporate shells.
When the man ascended to the highest office in the land, the machinery did not stop, though it certainly dragged its feet with a bureaucratic laziness that would do an old mule proud. The mandatory scrutiny that is supposed to follow a president like a shadow did not even wake up until the spring of nineteen and nineteen, arriving late to the ball only when Congress started banging on the door. For years, the returns of fifteen and sixteen sat on the desks of Washington like unexploded shells, neither defused nor detonated, while the public watched and wondered if the ancient law of the ledger would finally meet its match in the art of the deal.
The fuel that feeds this engine of American celebrity is the sheer, unadulterated spectacle of the escape, the intoxicating joy of watching a man slip the noose of accountability time and time again until the public begins to believe he might just be immortal. We feed on the drama of the chase, and we mistake the complexity of the tax code for a stroke of divine genius, and we celebrate the audacities that would land a common chicken thief in the county jail. Yet just this May, the grand theater took its final, absurd turn when the lawyers and the bureaucrats and the high ministers of justice signed a piece of parchment that did the impossible. They struck a bargain that forever closed the book, barring the taxman from ever sniffing around those old returns again, giving the man a secular absolution that no pope could ever promise.
In the gutter of this long and noisy history, we are left to realize that while the lawyers may have permanently banished the taxes, they have left the other half of the old equation completely untouched. The state has agreed to look away, and the auditors have packed their bags, and the great ledger has been sealed with a ribbon of red tape, but the ultimate auditor still waits at the end of the line. A sovereign settlement can cheat the treasury of its due, but it cannot buy a single extra hour from the grim reaper, who remains the only collector in the universe who refuses to negotiate a compromise.