In particular, one thing Trump is clearly doing is taking lavish consumption — flying a private 757 around to a series of luxury vacation destinations — and recording it for tax purposes as business expenses rather than income.

The reason I don’t travel on a private jet is that doing so would be very expensive and I’m not rich enough.

But if I could count private jet flights as negative income that offsets my taxes, I could probably swing a trip or two. Problem is it’s illegal.

You’d need to ask real accountants and tax attorneys through what alchemy exactly Trump pulled this off, but “losing money” on your own lavish lifestyle isn’t being “bad at business” it’s either crooked or a huge policy failure.