This Is So Much Bigger Than Paul Manafort
On the eve of the Paul Manafort trial, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin casually announced that Donald Trump’s administration was considering a fresh $100 billion tax cut for the wealthy. The two events—the trial and the tax cut—should be considered plot points in the same narrative. Manafort had grown very rich by looting public monies, and Mnuchin was proposing an arguably legal version of the same.
Unlike past Trump tax cuts, this proposed cut would be implemented by executive fiat, without a congressional vote—a highly unusual and highly undemocratic act of plunder that would redirect money from the state to further enrich the American elite, not to mention Mnuchin himself.
The trial of Paul Manafort is not merely an episode in a larger scandal that will unfold over many chapters. It is a
