Dan Alexander’s new book "White House Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned The Presidency Into A Business." looks fascinating. I suggest listening to the entire interview Dave Davies did with him last week on NPR’s Fresh Air. Here is the transcript , or you can listen to the whole thing via podcast or via the Fresh Air website.
Alexander opens his book by revealing that the government of Qatar has been bribing or paying off Trump for several years by renting completely empty and unused office space at 555 California Street, a ridiculously valuable office building in San Francisco where Trump owns a 30% share:
DAVIES: So would - you got there. What did you find?
ALEXANDER: So I get there. And it was, you know, this moment of the document that I wasn't sure if it was real or not coming to life. There was a beautiful office with Qatar Investment Authority written on the wall. The thing looked like it had been, you know, given a spectacular buildout. But the really strange part was that no one was there. There was no one at the front desk where, you know, the receptionist would normally be. A lot of the interior walls were glass, and so you can kind of see through it. There was no one in any of the conference rooms, no one anywhere. Even the - all the furniture looked like nobody had ever sat in it.
And so I knocked on the door. No one answered. And then I saw that on the front desk, there was a plant. I think it was an orchid or something. And it was totally brown, looked like it had been dead for months. And so this seemed to be an office that somebody was renting and not actually using. And so then your brain starts connecting these pieces. This is the Qatar Investment Authority, which acts as an arm of the Qatari government, renting an empty office space in Donald Trump's most valuable holding. And here it is, sitting in front of me. And no one knows that this is going on.
Then he goes on to say that Donald Trump is not like other billionaires. He cares deeply about where he is exactly on the Forbes list that ranks the truly rich in the USA, whereas most billionaires care not much at all.
And if you look through, it's not just the Forbes list. I mean, this is a guy who, you know, back in the late '80s, Spy magazine did this test where they sent - they tried to figure out, who's the cheapest rich person in New York? And so they sent checks to all these different people. And, you know, the first check - I don't remember the exact amount, but let's say it was a dollar. And they said, who's going to cash this check? And, you know, maybe a dozen people cash the check.
Well, they repeated the exercise over and over again to figure out who was actually the cheapest. And I think that the final number was like, you know, 37 cents or something like that. And there were only two people on the starting list who cashed the check. One was a Saudi arms dealer, and the other one was Donald Trump. He's a guy who cares about small amounts of money, even though it doesn't make any logical sense.
His point being that the money being received by Trump Enterprises from the Qatar government for unused office space was maybe only 135,000? dollars per year, and that would be negligible to almost all truly rich people. But that Donald Trump is so cheap, he cares.
And on this point we can all breathe a sigh of relief, because the foreign governments who want to bribe the current president* can do it for relatively small amounts of money. They’re not going to have to starve their citizens in order to pay off Trump.
And Dan Alexander did extensive research. He says careful examination by Forbes has Trump net worth currently at $2.5 billion, more or less, though a lot of the money is tied up in Trump branded properties where revenues have suffered greatly as the Trump brand has been tarnished by politics. So he really is a billionaire, yet with all that money, he still cares about how much $$ he can scam from the Secret Service by charging premium rates for golf carts.
This is more or less the same psychology that directed Ebenezer Scrooge in the famous Dickens novella.
Now we have the news about Trump’s leaked tax returns from the NYT. With no taxes or almost no taxes paid by Trump a lot of years due to huge business losses. Based on what I’ve heard from Dan Alexander, who is a senior editor at Forbes, I’m willing to bet those “losses” involve criminal tax fraud.