Analysis: For Trump, lifetime of scandals heads toward moment of judgment

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

84% : Trump is appealing.
82% : Trump beat some of the investigations and lawsuits against him and some proved unfounded, but the sheer volume is remarkable.
61% : In what was then a stunning move, the FBI conducted a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to find classified documents that Trump took with him when he left the White House and then refused to give back even when subpoenaed.
55% : "In all the different ways that Trump has upended the traditional rules of American politics, that may be one of the most striking.
54% : Trump monetized the presidency for himself, as his Trump International Hotel in Washington and other properties became magnets for money from people and institutions currying favor, including the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines.
53% : Tax documents obtained by the Times in 2020 showed that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he originally ran for president, and only $750 again in 2017, the first year of his presidency.
51% : Trump went into the family business, helping run his father's empire of rental apartment buildings.
51% : Alvin L. Bragg, the district attorney for Manhattan, charged Trump with falsifying business records to cover up the affair and the payments.
47% : According to a Times investigation in 2018, Trump and his siblings took a real estate empire from his father that banks a few years later would value at nearly $900 million and, through favorable appraisals, paid taxes on it as if it were worth just $57 million.
47% : The Michigan attorney general, for her part, named Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in her own election case.
46% : After marrying Czech model Ivana Zelnickova in 1977 and fathering three children, Trump began carrying on an affair with a younger model, Marla Maples.
46% : Trump and his accountants have proved to be master manipulators of the tax code.
43% : While living with Maples, he boasted of infidelity to a reporter during a call when, bizarrely, he impersonated a spokesman for himself and insisted that Trump had "three other girlfriends" in addition to the woman sharing his home.
41% : He is appealing both judgments.Avoiding TaxesNo president in American history has been wealthier than Trump.
40% : Another jury earlier this year found that he continued to defame her and ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million.
40% : Trump became a target or defendant in so many courthouses that his post-presidency has become a full-employment act for defense attorneys.
39% : Trump fought the matter in court but ultimately agreed to a settlement.
39% : At the same time, he outlined more than 10 instances in which Trump might have committed obstruction of justice by trying to thwart the investigation -- including the dismissal of Comey.
38% : In the months after he departed the White House, authorities in Washington, New York, Georgia, Florida and Michigan opened investigations that ultimately led them to Trump.
37% : In fact, in 11 of the 18 years examined by the Times, Trump paid no income taxes to the federal government whatsoever.
37% : While U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia sought to tip the contest to Trump, the newly sworn-in president refused to believe that and took any inquiry into the matter as an attack on his legitimacy.
36% : Stephanie Clifford, a porn film actor who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, claimed to have had a tryst with Trump in 2006, four months after Melania Trump gave birth to his fifth child.
36% : Trump was indicted not once, not twice, not three times but four times.
35% : What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to "retribution.
34% : Michael Cohen, then Trump's lawyer and self-described fixer, arranged for six-figure payments to be made to both Clifford and McDougal in 2016 to ensure their silence before the presidential election, hush-money that would later come back to haunt Trump.
33% : One after another, judges and juries found against Trump, branding him a fraudster, a sexual abuser and, through his real estate firm, a tax cheat.
31% : But Trump has boasted that he still made money in Atlantic City even after leaving a trail of losses for nearly everyone else involved, including workers who lost jobs.
30% : That judgment seemed to register compared with the criminal cases brought against Trump.
29% : Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year, said she had a 10-month fling with Trump around the same time.
29% : Unlike every other modern president, Trump refused to voluntarily release his tax forms, going all the way to the Supreme Court in an ultimately futile effort to shield them from public view.
27% : Trump made prolific use of his presidential pardon power to help friends and political allies -- and particularly figures who he might have had reason to fear would turn against him by talking with prosecutors if faced with prison time.
27% : The judge not only hit him with penalties that could top $450 million, he also barred Trump from leading any business in his original home state for three years.
25% : For that, the House ultimately impeached Trump for abuse of power on a largely party-line vote, making him only the third president ever to be charged with high crimes, although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds vote necessary for conviction.
24% : The second indictment came in federal court in Florida, where special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with mishandling classified documents and obstructing authorities trying to retrieve them.
24% : Smith brought an election interference case against him in federal court in Washington, while Fani T. Willis, district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, brought a racketeering case against Trump for trying to switch Georgia's electoral votes.
23% : If Trump is elected next month, he could pull the plug on the federal prosecutions, and even the state cases in New York and Georgia may be frozen while he is in office again.
22% : Even after recovering from that debacle, Trump failed again.
19% : Most notably, Trump sought to use his office to strong-arm another country to deliver dirt on Biden, a political rival.
16% : Trump insisted this amounted to "total exoneration," although Mueller explicitly said he was not exonerating the president.
15% : "Trump has been accused by two dozen or so women of sexual misconduct.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.