It’s immoral to fulfill the terms of a contract you made with a sucker
By 
Imagine making a handshake deal with Donald Trump, in the year 2020:
Several of the attorneys who spearheaded President Donald Trump’s frenzied effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election tried, and failed, to collect payment for the work they did for Trump’s political operation, despite the fact that their lawsuits and false claims of election interference helped the Trump campaign and allied committees raise $250 million in the weeks following the November vote.
Among them was Trump’s closest ally, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Trump and Giuliani had a handshake agreement that Giuliani and his team would get paid by the Trump political operation for their post-election work, according to Timothy Parlatore, an attorney for longtime Giuliani ally Bernard Kerik.
But the Trump campaign and their affiliated committees ultimately did not honor that pledge, according to campaign finance records. The failure to pay Giuliani and his team came up last week in a private interview between prosecutors on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team and Bernard Kerik, a member of Giuliani’s team in late 2020, according to Parlatore.
Parlatore told CNBC that the Giuliani operation was never compensated for their work; Bob Costello, Giuliani’s attorney, declined to comment further about the agreement, citing privileged conversations between his client and then-President Trump.
“Lawyers and law firms that didn’t do shit were paid lots of money and the people that worked their ass off, got nothing,” Kerik complained in a 2021 tweet.
Trump has a long history of not paying his bills. But the revelation that he likely stiffed Giuliani, a longtime friend, is all the more striking given that much of the work Giuliani did for the Trump operation is detailed in a sprawling RICO indictment in Georgia released Monday, in which Giuliani is a co-defendant alongside Trump and 17 other people.
The interesting question here is whether Rudy even expected to get paid. My guess is that he did — one thing Donald Trump demonstrates is that it is very easy to convince yourself that other people are suckers who get take advantage of but you’re not one of them. It’s like the Madoff Ponzi scheme. I am convinced that a substantial number of sophisticated investors figured out that a fund that produced equities fund returns with savings account consistency wasn’t on the level, they just assumed they were in on the con rather than being the marks.
Anyway, while I generally have no sympathy for people who commit fraud, in this specific case I’d have to say caveat fuckin’ emptor, pal. (And, in fairness to Trump, it’s hard to argue that Rudy hasn’t been fairly compensated for these particular services.)