It remains to be seen to what extent New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron put a stake in the heart of the once-great, now-beleaguered, city of New York, but he certainly didn’t help when he issued his draconian judgment against Donald J. Trump, ruling that the former president and his family must pay a staggering $350 million-plus in penalties and forbidding them from doing business in the state for several years.
Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for President George W. Bush, was the first I heard to acknowledge the disastrous protentional economic repercussions on cable news, but I imagine that businessmen across the city and state had anticipated this and have been making plans to exit New York for some time.
That state already has the biggest population outflow, outnumbering even California’s.
The mind-blowing size of Justice Engoron’s decision was just rancid icing on an already unpalatable cake.
But it was enough to inspire the ire of truckers across the United States who, like their peers in Canada and farmers in Europe, had had enough nonsense from the Engorons of the world.
We can only wish them well because they are the allies of freedom.
Meanwhile, what businessperson—high or low—wants to incorporate in a state where a wanton judge can suddenly decree his or her estimates of their real estate valuations to obtain a loan to be inflated, impose ridiculous fines, and then shut them down—possibly forever?
In President Trump’s case, as those same businesspersons surely noted, not a soul had been damaged by the former president’s estimates, inflated or not. All the loans had been repaid and the banks involved, of course, made money. There were no victims.
As the late Los Angeles Lakers broadcaster Chick Hearn would say, “No harm. No foul.”
Except to the likes of Justice Engoron and New York Attorney General Letitia James, for whom Trump Derangement Syndrome is an illness more irreversible than pancreatic cancer.
Whether President Trump succeeds in overturning the absurd decision is in some senses irrelevant because the damage is already done.
