Donald Trump spent Tuesday evening attacking the survivor of a sexual assault. It was a move guaranteed to generate shock and disgust, even for a nation seemingly inured to Trump’s there-is-no-bottom tactics. But there may be a good reason that Trump was busily focusing the nation on his personal failings—no matter how awful they seem. Because at least then everyone isn’t looking at his finances.
On Tuesday, the New York Times published a lengthy, extensively researched article showing that everything about Trump’s riches to even more riches story is a fraud. Far from starting with a “small loan” from his father as Trump has insisted again and again, he took in at least $60 million in loans from dear old dad—and that was in addition to salaries from cover companies and under the table payments. Trump was still receiving a hefty allowance from his dad, Fred, right up into his 50s. In total, Donald Trump received at least $413 million from his father. And that’s not counting the little things, like gold-plated everything right up and through college. It’s not including the Tower he calls home, which was built while Fred Trump was chairman of the Trump Organization with Fred Trump’s money.
On Wednesday morning, CNBC reported that New York State authorities were looking into allegations of fraud and tax evasion in how money had been funneled to Donald Trump and his siblings. That fraud appears to have left the public to pick up the tab on what should have been over half a billion in taxes from the Trumps—a number that appears to be large enough to merit some interest from regulators. And hidden in the details was a scheme that allowed Fred Trump to reward his children … by punishing the people who rented his apartments.
Fox & Friends tried to put their own Trump-friendly spin on the story, saying it amounts to nothing more than Trump “benefiting from a rich father” and dismissing the New York Times charges of “outright fraud” as “creative accounting,” a voice from Trump’s past has a different view. Tony Schwartz, who wrote The Art of the Deal for Trump in 1985, had already blasted Trump as a man who projected bravado in public, but spent his private life completely under the thumb of his demanding father. The Washington Post reports that Schwartz found the Times report “far beyond even what I thought had happened.”
Schwartz: It’s like the cover has been ripped off this man. Whatever myth there was, as you said earlier, that he was a self-made man, or that he was even a legitimate businessman, is gone forever.
Schwartz may be the author, but it’s Trump who is the fiction. Even in 1985, the story of his real estate success existed on paper—but was very hard to find in bricks and concrete. Trump, and his good friends John Baron and John Miller, had admirable success in promoting him to prominence in New York tabloids and making him a fixture of gossip columns. But Trump’s “genius” never extended to be able to strike real world deals that generated money for his family or investors.
Schwartz: This is a man who invented himself. That’s his claim to fame. He literally invented it from whole cloth. There’s nothing about him that is real. Now we really see that. And it’s extraordinary.
To generate their report, the New York Times plowed through more than 100,000 pages of dense financial documents. Some of what was revealed with a scheme in which Fred Trump set up a fake construction supply firm, and ran his bills through it when purchasing actual materials. This gave him the opportunity to add an additional 15 to 20 percent surcharge on every block or board that went into his buildings. That money went into the accounts of Donald and his siblings, who were on the books of this fictional company in equally fictional positions even as children. But Fred didn’t stop with just hiding funds going to his kids. Those extra changes also allowed Fred Trump to report higher costs, which he used to justify higher rents.
In a very real sense, the low- to middle-income renters who occupied Fred Trump’s buildings for decades put a part of every monthly payment right into Donald Trump’s trust fund. Trump didn’t make his millions outsmarting other millionaires at the bargaining table. He made them by playing with his toy limos while his father extracted dollars from working class New Yorkers.
It’s an image, and a truth, that Trump very much doesn’t admit. It’s also a fantastic bit of journalistic sleuthing. But, as admirable as that reporting may be … it’s very hard not to wonder why this didn’t happen in 2016.
