Donald Trump may now lose out on the one payday he really needed
One of the remarkable ironies about Donald Trump’s attempt to sell the lease on the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., is that the price tag — $375 million — is twenty five million dollars shy of the amount of money he started with. Fred Trump, the former president’s father, gave his son about $400 million over the years, a figure that the financial “genius” and “brilliant businessman” parlayed into a billion dollar debt in the 1980s and 1990s. What began as a free gift has now become an amount of money necessary to keep his creditors at bay.
But now that the accounting firm Mazars has fired Trump as a client, the original application Trump filed in the first place for that lease has been called into question. The application was supported by financial statements that Mazars now says are unreliable, so the government is being asked to cancel the lease and thereby invalidate the sale. In short, there may be no $375 million payday for Trump. Stay tuned for that outcome.
But $375 million out to be pocket change for a self-proclaimed multi-billionaire, right? No. Trump is clearly no such thing, not even close. It turns out that Trump’s claim to billionaire status is more about how he feels at any given time than anything so prosaic as a financial statement might say. We know this to be true because Trump himself openly admitted it.
According to the Rachel Maddow show, Trump once sued a reporter for writing that he was not a billionaire, and he pursued the case for years. But when Trump sat down for a deposition for that suit the opposition lawyers couldn’t pin him down.
Trump had this to say under oath: “My net worth fluxuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and feelings — even my own feelings!” That’s right, feelings. Nothing more than … feelings. Hard though this may be for you to accept, brothers and sisters, Donald Trump lost that lawsuit.
Well I have this feeling. I feel that Trump is broke, mothballs wallet, destitute, skint, impecunious, ruined, insolvent, pauperised, Poor Man Walking. I feel that Donald Trump has represented himself as rich for years and many of us have been suckered into believing him. Yet despite every advantage he has enjoyed, a rich boy’s upbringing, a four hundred million dollar gift from his father, cheating on his taxes, cheating contractors who do work for him, cheating his customers, cheating his lawyers, he still can’t make a decent buck.
I feel Donald Trump is the worst businessman in the world, the worst I have ever heard of. And, unlike Donald Trump, I think I could prove my feelings in a court of law. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.