Donald Trump is now facing double trouble

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During his disastrous town hall event on Thursday evening, an overmatched and rambling Donald Trump appeared to admit that his $421 million in personal debt is indeed owed to foreign entities. This is the debt that was uncovered when Trump’s tax returns became public last month. But here’s the thing. Forbes has revealed that Trump’s debts are actually more than double this.

That’s right, Forbes has highlighted even more Trump debt, bringing the total that Trump personally owes to various lenders to more than a billion dollars. This means Trump is being financially controlled by even more entities than we knew. Even worse, in some of the nations that Trump is believed to be the most in debt to, such as Russia and China, the banks are officially or unofficially part of the government. This means Trump has owed that money to foreign governments, even as he’s served as President of the United States.

Forbes points out that Trump still has a few billion dollars in assets to his name, which it concludes means he’s “not broke.” But we find this conclusion to be naive. What are the odds that the billion dollars in debt that has been uncovered is the only debt Trump has? Why are we still taking him at his word that he doesn’t have even greater hidden debts? Trump’s desperate financial moves consistently suggest that he’s just trying to survive the day without going bankrupt because he has no cash on hand, and he can’t tap into his assets because they’re all over leveraged.

What stands out to us here at Palmer Report is how badly Donald Trump botched the phrase “under leveraged” during his town hall. Even after he tried to say it four or five times, all he could come up with was “under levered.” It’s clear that Trump had never heard the term in his life, until his taxes were exposed, and one of his handlers told him to start going around saying he was under leveraged. Trump has spent fifty years in finance, running up nonstop debts. Yet he knows so little about finance, he wasn’t even familiar with a term like “leveraged” until it was recently fed to him as a talking point. Just how bad at business is this guy?

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