The POTUS is well known for screwing over contractors and lenders. It clearly didn't damage his reputation enough.

The most insane part of that is all the generally "normal" businesses who signed contracts with him despite this well publicized history. People like law firms with long histories.

Trump has always preferred dragging out a court battle to actually signing a small check for services rendered, and outright brags about it. He explicitly believes stiffing your contractors is what "Good business" means. Because he is a selfish child and getting stuff for free is his worldview.

But utter morons still line up to get shafted. I just don't understand.

I couldn't get a car loan because I have no credit history even though I had enough cash in the bank to buy the car yet people will still line up to suck the toe of someone with a known history of successfully screwing all their business partners.

Same with how his administration is full of people who don't recognize he will happily throw them under the bus for any reason even though that's all he has done for the past decade.

There is just a shocking inability for the common person to connect people to their history in the USA. The guy who started a trade war and caused prices to increase was voted in because prices were too high.

The math don't math.

I think it must be some form of "I'm special/better/smarter than that other person who got ripped off, I won't get taken advantage of!"

arguably is the reason why his business kept failing. you can only screw over suppliers a couple of times before the word gets out and no one wants to do business with you.

now they want the cash up front, and with sizable markups to CYA.

a reasonable person would try to unfuck that perception; instead Trump double-down on the grift

At one of my previous jobs, we were acquired by a company whose CEO had been caught for something involving bank fraud and was under a gag order not to talk about it. As far as I know they're still in business.

I never have thought about it but I guess if the gag order applies to everyone in the case it's kind of convenient.

In your mind should people with criminal record be barred from holding jobs forever? At that point why not just exile them?

I knew this response would come up. Would you be okay to give Sam Bankman-Fried a leadership position? How about Martin Shkreli? Elizabeth Holmes? It's one thing to give someone that made a few minor mistakes a 2nd chance. It's another let a convicted child molester work at a kindergarden. Executives that committed fraud shouldn't be executives again.

I don’t agree because I’m somewhat left leaning and believe in reform (except for violent crime).

I sympathize, and also tend to the left, but please, I beg of you, redefine violence to include long term, intentional creation and operation of fraudulent or harmful enterprise. It takes energy to keep doing things wrong to that degree, and without real signs of behavioral modification that stick, the safest damn thing to do is keep them the hell away.

Violence has a specific meaning, and twisting yourself into knots in order to define things you don't like as violence is dishonest.

> I’m somewhat left leaning [...]

Um, really? If I were to look at your comment history, what would I see?

EDIT: ok, yeah, I actually checked. The threads on page 1 include: 1) this one, 2) "National sales tax would be significantly better than income tax.", 3) "Meta has made more positive contributions to society and the world than every HN commenter combined". Can you feel the left leaning?

How are any of those contradictory?

Big difference between

"barred from holding jobs"

versus

"make it known to the public that they've shown they're not trustworthy enough to be given large sums of investment money"

plenty of jobs for them to hold.

they can drive uber, clean toilets, work at a starbucks, etc

Sorry, as someone who believes in reform this is unconscionable to me. Someone reformed should be able to hold any job (exception for violent crimes of course).