Trump wasn't evil, but he might have been stupid

There is a great article over at Yahoo Finance about Donald Trump and the housing bust:

You’re likely to hear this a lot during the next several months: Donald Trump “rooted for the real-estate crash” that caused a foreclosure epidemic and forced 5 million families from their homes. 

Trump’s likely Democratic rival in the presidential election, Hillary Clinton, recently produced an ominous 44-second video that makes Trump seem like Voldemort preying on hapless middle-class families for his own gain. And Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren ignited a tweet war with Trump when she said in a recent speech, “What kind of a man roots for people to get thrown out of their house?” 

The controversy stems from these comments Trump made in an obscure audiobook in 2006: 

“I sort of hope that [a real-estate bust] happens because then people like me would go in and buy. If this is a bubble burst, as they call it, you know, you can go in and make a lot of money.” 

Trump made those remarks around the time the bubble was fully inflated, with home prices near their peaks.

There are two problems with the allegations made by Democrats.

First:

Trump is a commercial real-estate developer, and like any investor, he hopes to take advantage of cycles to buy low and sell high. That’s the same thing ordinary home buyers hope to do, and there’s nothing wrong with it. 

Plus, as a commercial developer, Trump was probably thinking of ways he might capitalize on a drop in the price of office, resort and apartment buildings, not homes that would have to be abandoned by middle-class families. Markets ebb and flow all the time, with buyers and sellers constantly losing at each other’s expense. Usually, there’s no perfidy involved.

How dare Trump try and take advantage of a corporate real estate bust that kicks corporations out of their homes! Go ahead Democrats, say that please?

Anyway, the second problem:

It appears Trump never actually bought into real estate as it sank toward a bottom in 2009 and 2010. In fact, he bet the wrong way on housing in 2006 by launching Trump Mortgage, a firm meant to sell residential and commercial loans. “I think it’s a great time to start a mortgage company,” Trump told CNBC at the time. “The real estate market is going to be very strong for a long time to come.” He was dead wrong and Trump Mortgage turned out to be an embarrassment that closed the following year. 

In investing terms, Trump "bought at the top".

Picture Trump defending himself against this in a debate: "I was never trying to kick people out of their homes as Crooked Hillary alleges. In fact, I actually had my own mortgage company, which I created at the peak of the bubble. If anything, I got kicked out of their homes! I took a bath on this one, and you're blaming me?"

Crooked Hillary and Faux-Cahontis need to try another attack. This one makes Trump sound a lot smarter than he actually was.