Okay, I'm asking here: if you were truly worth $10 billion, wouldn't you use some of that money cashed out - in hand - to pay off said debts? I mean, $100 million is less than a percent of $10 billion: you could pay off that debt and still have $9.99 billion to your name. Done and done. One less thing to worry about.
One of Trump's selling points during the Primary campaign was that nobody could "own" him because he was so independently wealthy. But if he's in this much debt to banks - debt he hasn't paid off with a portion of billionaire wealth he's supposed to have - how can he claim that? Those banks surely own him: what would happen if they started calling in that credit he owes...?
...This needs to be an ongoing question at every press gathering, at every time Trump is at the podium: Is Donald Trump even really a billionaire?
And the answer to that, according to a New York Times report by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig coming out tonight, is NOPE.
Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition...
The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.
In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years...
trump lost so much money he actually qualified to not pay any federal taxes most of those years.
While this report doesn't cover trump's most current history - anything from 2006 onward, within the last ten years before the 2016 elections - the report demonstrates a clear and consistent pattern: donald trump was and likely still is a terrible businessman when it comes to actual management of property, casinos, sales, and other operations.
The ONLY thing trump ever seemed to be good at was selling himself - putting his name in BIG UNAVOIDABLE GOLD LETTERS everywhere - with the lie of being successful.
It was that lie - "I know what I am doing. I know how to run things." - that trump kept harping on during his presidential campaigns. For all the media disdain - and for all the warnings that kept coming from people like me, Christ I wrote this three years ago - a lot of the public had the wrongful image of trump as successful CEO. What a goddamn lie that proved to be.
The nation is still going to struggle with the horrors of this trump administration until enough Americans wake up to the reality that trump is a con artist, and that his protestations of being a success is false and grotesque.
It's just another lie from trump, America. For the LOVE OF GOD, stop believing his bullshit.
1 comment:
Word is he didn't care about losing money at his casinos because they were actually laundering money for the Russian mob.
So he either lost a billion dollars in ten years, or he lied to the IRS that he did to avoid paying income tax for eight of those ten years.
Add felony tax evasion to the list of things to prosecute him for the minute he leaves office.
-Doug in Oakland
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