The Incredibly Shrinking Donald - Adam Kinzinger
Alan Weisselberg just confessed to a judge that he lied about Donald Trump’s wealth. This matters because as chief financial officer for the Trump Organization, he was the former president’s financial henchman. In coming clean about how he inflated the boss’s worth, he shook the foundation of a false identity Trump has created with lies and deceptions. If money is the measure of a man – and Trump believes it is – then he’s getting smaller every day.
Trump began manufacturing a billionaire persona in the 1980s when he was still a local phenomenon in New York. He took the game to a national (and eventually international) level when he became the host of the TV show The Apprentice. In the video open of the very first episode viewers got a helicopter view of the New York skyline and a narration from Trump himself. “My name is Donald Trump,” he says while riding the streets of Manhattan. “And I am the largest real estate developer in New York.”
He wasn’t. Not even close. And so began the construction of a golden facade.
The evidence of Trump’s lies about his wealth and success includes his many bankruptcies and a 2005 book, Trump Nation, that pegged the self-proclaimed billionaire as worth, at most, $250 million. In 2015, as Trump claimed to be worth $10 billion, Forbes estimated the figure at $4.6 billion, number 403 on the magazine’s annual list of the 500 richest people. Forbes now says he is worth $2 billion less. He has dropped off the list completely
Now Trump is asking a New York court to free him from paying a $454 million fine for business fraud and accept, instead, a $100 million bond. The obvious question is: Is this guy, who had said he was worth as much as $10 billion, really unable to pay less than $500 million the court requires?
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In 2012 Trump said, “Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich.” Set aside the weirdness of a grown man declaring the source of his “beauty” and consider for a moment how much he has made wealth the source of his political identity. No president, or presidential candidate, has ever bragged about money the way Trump has. Now consider why he has felt compelled to lie about his assets and cash on hand. Could it be that he has always felt insecure about his true worth, in every sense of the word? I mean, who would Trump be without his alleged assets, which he says is how he “keeps score.”
The truth, which most people do not know, is that Trump has never owned many of the buildings that bear his name. In many cases the true owners have used Trump’s name for marketing purposes, paying him modest annual fees for the privilege. Unfortunately for him, the value of the brand as declined and in some cases become a negative. In New York the name has been taken off a huge residential complex overlooking the Hudson River. Apartment developments in Florida, Connecticut, and suburban New York have shed the name and so have hotels in Manhattan, Toronto and Panama City.
While the licensees have headed for the exits, marketing authorities have noted that Trump’s own properties are no longer favored by the rich because they have been tarnished by his reputation for scandal and lies. The man is so desperate for cash that he recently began selling a gold-colored Trump sneaker. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign donors have seen roughly $50 million in contributions shifted to pay the lawyers defending him in various courtrooms around the country
A CFO pleads guilty. Trump asks a judge for a 75 percent discount. Building owners drop his name. Hopes are pinned on the sale of golden sneakers. A political action committee is raided to pay his personal debts. What we are seeing here is truth catching up with Trump’s lies about his defining quality – wealth. He has become, it seems, the incredible shrinking billionaire.
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