There are two exceptions. One is a purely family-run business, like the firm in which Trump spent his entire previous career. And the other is the U.S. presidency, where he will remain, despite more and more-manifest Queeg-like unfitness, as long as the GOP Senate stands with him.
Trump didn't spend his entire career with the family business. He founded a publicly traded company where he had to disclose his results, and those results were predictable.
AIUI it was a ruling not a settlement, and J&J are appealing.
2: Yes, the other drug companies settled, but J&J took the risk and had a non-jury trial. I'm thinking the appeals will be going on for a long while.
I think Trump is worse than the standard GOP because he got the committed racists, who wouldn't vote for someone like Bush and used to stay home. I don't think those people are going to stay back home now. The damage will last well past Trump.
I've been wondering if J&J's lawyers are secretly pleased with the ruling. The $572M figure seems high, but it's vastly lower than the $17B sought by Oklahoma. And, when deciding whether to settle or go to trial, part of any lawyer's calculations would have been: can we "lose" at trial but still get a lower number from the judge than we've been able to reach through negotiations?
5 Yes. And unless there's something strange in the record,* the Ok Sup Ct is only likely to move the figure down, not up. And this would likely affect negotiations in the MDL in Ohio as well, probably in the drug companies' favor.
* No, I'm not going to look into it.
4: There was an article by a political scientist I read years ago that said (based on opinion surveys) that there were two kinds of racists in the US. There was the ones who said black people were poor because of poor culture or lifestyle. These people mostly voted Republican. Then there were the people who just hated black people for who they are. These people were split between Democrats and Republicans. I thought this article was super-weird at the time, but it has proven prophetic.
8 makes a lot of sense. Trump is presumably type 1 - there's a good piece I read recently about his philosemitism being basically a combination of standard-issue antisemitism ("The Jews are a clannish, unscrupulous bunch who conspire together and are only interested in money, exploiting others, and corrupting innocent Christian girls") and his own moral code ("...and that's great, sounds like they're my kind of guys!")
I think you're right about Trump and the Jews, but his feelings about blacks seem to me to be closer to (2) on that taxonomy. He'd have been a sucker for the WIllie HOrton ad
10: I don't know. He quite likes black people who are self-interested, money-obsessed, narcissistic grifters. He gets on fine with Don King and Kanye West. He went to the wall for that rapper ASAP who got arrested for assault in Sweden. He just despises most black people because they haven't built fancy buildings to live in, which I suppose he would say is because they're lazy and low-energy and stupid.
11: Bearing in mind he grew up in his father's business which AFAIK consisted mostly in building and running publicly funded apartments for brown people.
11: Almost no one is so racist that they won't carve out exceptions for lone individuals who they know personally and who stroke their ego and don't challenge any of the broader biases. Millions of racist people love Oprah.
To be fair to the inconsistent racists, she may have given them a car.
13: it's slightly different though. He's racist against black people, in this theory, because black people are generally not horrible enough. When he meets one who is incredibly unpleasant, they get on really well, but normally he gets his images of black people through the media where they're generally portrayed as being fairly nice, albeit poor and disadvantaged, and he hates that.
I think he literally just thinks people of color are vermin.
13: It's more or less the consensus position of white people in the U.S. that the success of people like Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce, Denzel Washington, Colson Whitehead, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and many others but above all Barack Obama, proves absolutely that the U.S is not racist.
On 12: is that right? I seem to remember Trump Sr. didn't rent to non-white people if he could help it.
17: Yes, except for the part about knowing who Colson Whitehead is. (I know, because I'm not racist.)
19: Yes, I was trying to name people from different fields of endeavor.
18: Dunno. Or Trump Sr got management contracts on public housing and then drove out black people? We should ask someone from NYC. Either way, it's suggestive about his worldview.