It had to happen. With the voluminous material on Donald Trump’s taxes (income from some 500 business entities and taxes paid or not paid) that was released in a devastating story in the New York Times on Sunday, the facade of the self-proclaimed business whiz and multi-billionaire has fallen most of the way to the ground.

Although his “business empire” is not yet scattered about the landscape, it’s getting close. And, what was the response of President Trump? “Fake news! It’s all fake news.” Spoken like a true fake president.

What investigative reporters and authors of many books about the “Trump empire” have written over the years is apparently true. As one magazine headlined, “(Trump) couldn’t manage a lemonade stand.” Unfortunately, for the past nearly four years, he has “managed” the United States of America into the ground before his businesses landed there. He is a laughing stock among the leaders of the rest of the world, no matter in what part of the political spectrum they stand. They know a buffoon when they see one and they know how to deal with one.

Trump has singlehandedly done what many others have tried to do over decades and generations: He has forced nations in the rest of the world to go forward, joining together in various forms of economic and political alliances, without including the U.S. in their plans. That means that the dollar will become less and less important, just as the importance of the U.S. as a world leader, has become less important.

The president owes so much money to who-knows-what lenders that he is a national security threat, according to an intelligence official in a report by the Associated Press. Anyone who has held a security clearance for military or other purposes knows that one of the questions that has always been asked is about personal debt: The bigger the debt, the bigger the security threat, because a debtor on the scale of Trump (especially considering his low character) is bound to consider himself before his country. He appears to have done that, but the people don’t know to what extent, because his tax returns have not been revealed. For more than four years, he has insisted the he can’t make his tax returns public, since they are under audit by the IRS. He has maintained this fiction, even though his own IRS officials have said that he could release his returns at any time, even under audit, if he chose to do so. What he owes creditors is estimated to be between $300 million and $400 million.

Everyone knows by now that he only paid $750 in federal income taxes in two of the past 15 years and paid nothing for 10 of those years. His listed losses were so great that he was allowed to get away with paying less in federal income taxes than your average wage worker. It didn’t take long for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign to come up with a commercial comparing how much average workers paid in income taxes: Elementary school teacher, $7,239 in taxes; firefighter, $5,283; construction manager, $16,447; and registered nurse, $10,216. Trump came in dead last in that list with his $750.

His presidency was seen to be a long shot because he was an unknown quantity in politics, but his Electoral College win of the office shows how important something as irrelevant as reality television and its “stars” have become to society. His stardom in “The Apprentice” gave him credibility with a percentage of the electorate that is seemingly unshakeable. The cult-like followers of The Apprentice simply moved their allegiance from the buffoon who went from the small screen to the White House.

Trump’s reason for running seems to be that, like The Apprentice, it would be a good way for his name, his brand, to be elevated in the mind of the people, so that he might be able to drag himself out of the financial hole he has dug for himself through his incompetence as a businessman. As president, he has destroyed much of what was considered to be a solid, though flawed, set of institutions that made up the U.S.A. He has weakened or largely destroyed the people’s confidence in the judiciary, the foreign service, the public education system, the U.S. Postal Service, the military, to name a few. But one of the most egregious acts has been his attacks on the free press, which, under the First Amendment, was seen by the founders to be the glue that holds a democratic-republic together. He has debased the office of the presidency by his childish, bullying antics.

What might be the worst thing he has done is to inflame the underlying racism that pervades much of the nation and that is a lingering taint of chattel slavery. He has seen the “good” in neo-Nazis and white supremacists and white nationalists, just as he has called Black Lives Matter a “terrorist” movement, when they are protesting for civil rights and equal treatment by police and the world at large in the U.S. And, BLM and other groups, formal and informal, are acting in a manner consistent with their rights under the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment. Trump will have none of that, because he sees the world through the lens of a white supremacist. He sees no validity in the struggle against police brutality against black and brown people, and he allows others to claim in his stead that there is no structural racism built into every facet of the country.

It’s as if there has been no struggle for more than a half-century to attempt to overcome those structures. There has been some progress, but how far we have to go is illustrated by who sits in the White House. Trump is the president and the task before the U.S. anti-racist movement could be centered on just that one fact. It’s true that he isn’t the cause of the current monumental problem, but he certainly did build on the chaos and create more and more of it. It won’t stop when he is escorted from the Oval Office and Washington, D.C., but his absence will help greatly.

The outcome of the presidential debates and the campaign from now until Nov. 3 should have little bearing on the effort to seek equality, fairness, and justice. There can be no let-up in the effort to end police and judicial and political and financial brutality, but that effort needs to live on stronger than ever.