In the first installment of this post, located right here, we saw that Trump’s claim to be a “self-made man” was simply another of his pathetic lies. Trump was propelled by huge amounts of money given to him by his father (in illegal ways, mostly), money he ultimately squandered. We also saw that Trump has failed and failed and failed in his various business ventures (while always skimming whatever money he could for himself). Now, we will dive deeper into the roots of the Trump Myth, as I like to call it.
In tracing the story of Trump and the Mob (Part One is here, Part Two is here) we saw how Trump was propped up by some of the dirtiest money on the planet. Yet, despite all this, Trump still managed to end up in desperate financial straits. But his “rescue” was at hand.
A. The Apprentice and the Revival of Trump’s Fortunes
Perhaps the biggest factor in making Trump a national celebrity was the wretched “reality television” show The Apprentice. The show was the brainchild of Mark Burnett, a British immigrant who ended up living in California and who was one of the founders of the reality TV genre. The New Yorker did a very thorough article explaining just how important the show was in the making of the Trump Myth. Tony Schwartz, who ghost wrote The Art of the Deal, said “ ‘The Apprentice’ was the single biggest factor in putting Trump in the national spotlight.”
“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as [Jonathon] Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. During the making of “The Apprentice,” Burnett conceded that the stories were constructed in this way, saying, “We know each week who has been fired, and, therefore, you’re editing in reverse.” Braun noted that President Trump’s staff seems to have been similarly forced to learn the art of retroactive narrative construction, adding, “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.”
Such sleight of hand is the industry standard in reality television. But the entire premise of “The Apprentice” was also something of a con. When Trump and Burnett told the story of their partnership, both suggested that Trump was initially wary of committing to a TV show, because he was so busy running his flourishing real-estate empire. During a 2004 panel at the Museum of Television and Radio, in Los Angeles, Trump claimed that “every network” had tried to get him to do a reality show, but he wasn’t interested: “I don’t want to have cameras all over my office, dealing with contractors, politicians, mobsters, and everyone else I have to deal with in my business. You know, mobsters don’t like, as they’re talking to me, having cameras all over the room. It would play well on television, but it doesn’t play well with them.”
“The Apprentice” portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.” Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, “We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise.”
It was all a lie, an elaborately concocted fantasy designed to make Trump look like a star of American business instead of the sleazy, mobbed up grifter he actually is. The whole article is demoralizing to read, but it’s enlightening. When people who worked on The Apprentice say there are far worse things Trump said than were captured on the Access Hollywood tape, one is inclined to believe them.
The New York Daily News in 2018 examined a documentary called The Confidence Man. The documentary exposed Trump’s massive business failures in the 1990s. In a brief article, reality TV producer Bill Pruitt gives an interesting quote about The Apprentice:
"We are masterful storytellers and we did our job well. What's shocking to me is how quickly and decisively the world bought it. Did we think this clown, this buffoon with the funny hair, would ever become a world leader? Not once. Ever," he wrote.
"Would he and his bombastic nature dominate in prime-time TV? We hoped so. Now that the lines of fiction and reality have blurred to the horrifying extent that they have, those involved in the media must have their day of reckoning."
Indeed they must. And the most recent part of The Apprentice saga has just been revealed in yet another blockbuster report from The New York Times. In an article entitled How Reality-TV Fame Handed Trump a $427 Million Lifeline, the extent to which the show came to Trump’s rescue is documented at length. Excerpts:
But while the story of “The Apprentice” is by now well known, the president’s tax returns reveal another grand twist that has never been truly told — how the popularity of that fictional alter ego rescued him, providing a financial lifeline to reinvent himself yet again. And then how, in an echo of the boom-and-bust cycle that has defined his business career, he led himself toward the financial shoals he must navigate today.
Mr. Trump’s genius, it turned out, wasn’t running a company. It was making himself famous — Trump-scale famous — and monetizing that fame. [My emphasis.]
By analyzing the tax records, The New York Times was able to place a value on Mr. Trump’s celebrity. While the returns show that he earned some $197 million directly from “The Apprentice” over 16 years — roughly in line with what he has claimed — they also reveal that an additional $230 million flowed from the fame associated with it…
In his zeal to squeeze ever more dollars out of Mr. Burnett’s golden goose, Mr. Trump signed on to an array of questionable products and services, including some that claimed to sell insights into his business expertise. The first year of “The Apprentice” was barely over when Mr. Trump pocketed $300,000 to speak at an event in Dayton, Ohio, where attendees paid $2,995 to learn the secrets of instant wealth from a company that was later accused in a lawsuit of running a Ponzi scheme.
Trump used his fame from the show to license his name to anyone who wanted to use it. Among those who did were the makers of Double Stuf Oreos. Here is our future “president” hawking cookies to the American public:
Here is our future “president” hawking Domino’s Pizza:
And here is our future “president” selling laundry detergent:
The point is, Trump would grab at ANY endorsement deal that was out there, even for as small a sum as $100,000. Is this the behavior of a genuine billionaire—or someone who is perpetually on the brink of disaster?
B. Trump, the King of Debt
“I am a billionaire. Trump is a clown living on credit.” Michael Bloomberg
Trump’s tacky façade has finally been stripped away and we can all see that he isn’t any sort of financial “genius” at all.
The “great businessman” has shown himself incompetent in other ways. From Slate, 28 September:
One of the biggest sinkholes contributing to Trump’s losses and debts is his numerous golf courses. According to his tax filings, the president has lost more than $315.6 million total since 2000 from his 15 golf resorts in the U.S., Ireland, and Scotland. Trump spent $150 million in 2012 to purchase his largest resort, the National Doral in Miami, and lost $162.3 million on the property over the next six years. He also has a $125 million mortgage due on it in the next three years. He lost an additional $63.6 million on his three golf courses on the British Isles. Since running for and winning the presidency, however, Trump has seen a revenue windfall for his golf properties…
Adam Davidson, an economics writer for the New Yorker who’s reported on Trump’s businesses, has suggested that the president may have used his golf courses for something more nefarious. As Davidson laid out in a Twitter thread, Trump’s tax returns indicate that by 2011, he expended most of the funds he received from his father and from Apprentice producer Mark Burnett. At that point, Trump seems to have secured a new source of money, right around the time he started doing business with the likes of barons in Azerbaijan and was “flirting with Georgians and Kazakhs with ties to Putin,” as Davidson puts it. “All of these groups are—between 2011 and 2016—known to be laundering money through golf courses.”
Aha! Both an incompetent and a crook.
Then there was the Trump Foundation, which, you might say, ended badly. From The New York Times, December 2018:
Trump Foundation Will Dissolve, Accused of ‘Shocking Pattern of Illegality’
The Donald J. Trump Foundation, once billed as the charitable arm of the president’s financial empire, agreed to dissolve on Tuesday and give away all its remaining assets under court supervision as part of an ongoing investigation and lawsuit by the New York attorney general.
The foundation was accused by the attorney general, Barbara Underwood, of “functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests,” and of engaging in “a shocking pattern of illegality” that included unlawfully coordinating with Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
In addition to shuttering the charity, her office has pursued a lawsuit that could bar President Trump and his three oldest children from the boards of other New York charities, as well as force the payment of millions in restitution and penalties.
And not only did the Trump family use their “charity” as a piggy bank, others benefited from their largesse. From The New Yorker, December 2018:
If Trump really believes that he has been mistreated, he could fight it in court. And, indeed, such a trial might well be instructive.
It would give the President the opportunity to explain, for instance, how, on September 9, 2013, the Trump Foundation issued a check for twenty-five thousand dollars to And Justice for All, a political organization dedicated to the reëlection of Pam Bondi, the Republican attorney general of Florida, who later endorsed Trump’s Presidential bid, and how subsequently the foundation said, on its 2013 tax return, that the money had gone to a Kansas charity called Justice for All.
If Trump went to court, he could also clear up why, in the spring of 2007, the foundation paid a hundred thousand dollars to a South Florida charity, the Fisher House Foundation, to settle a lawsuit between Mar-a-Lago and the town of Palm Beach over alleged violations of building regulations. The legal petition filed by [New York Attorney General Barbara] Underwood’s office in June contains a copy of a handwritten note in which Trump ordered Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, to draw a hundred thousand dollars from the Trump Foundation rather than the Mar-a-Lago business or his personal bank account. Thus, Trump caused the foundation to use “its charitable assets to benefit another organization that he controlled, which constituted improper self-dealing,” the petitions said.
And of course, who could forget Trump University? From USA Today, April 2018:
A federal judge finalized the $25 million settlement between President Trump and students of his now shuttered Trump University on Monday, with New York's attorney general claiming “victims of Donald Trump’s fraudulent university will finally receive the relief they deserve.”
The order from U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel — the same Indiana-born judge Trump called biased because of his "Mexican heritage" — comes a year after he first approved the settlement. It marks the end of two class-action lawsuits and a civil lawsuit from New York accusing Trump of "swindling thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars through Trump University," in the words of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman…
Trump University was not an actual university but a for-profit seminar series, and former students waged a years-long battle claiming the course misled them with claims of teaching real estate success. The program ended in 2010. Some elderly plaintiffs who paid $20,000-plus in tuition died waiting to receive their checks from the settlement.
And from The New Yorker, June 2016:
The newly released documents, which included actual Trump University playbooks (one was also uncovered by Politico earlier this year), provide more detail about the sales tactics that its employees used. Some of these methods, such as encouraging customers to max out their credit cards and playing psychological tricks on them, are familiar from the world of time-shares and other dodgy industries. “If they can afford the gold elite don’t allow them to think about doing anything besides the gold elite,” one of the playbooks advised the sales staff. At another point, the manual said, “Don’t ask people what they think about something you’ve said. Instead, always ask them how they feel about it. People buy emotionally and justify it logically.”
These revelations didn’t move the 2016 race, as many observers thought they would—The Trumpanzees are amazingly indifferent to Trump’s wrongdoing—but they shouldn’t be forgotten. Trump is a scam artists and a con man—and he’s never been anything else. AND WHERE WAS HE GETTING ALL THIS MONEY?
Finally, by way of a preview into my next examination of the Trump crime world. From Business Insider, 29 June 2018
The son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was leading a real-estate division of Deutsche Bank as it gave President Donald Trump over $1 billion in loans to finance his real-estate projects when other banks wouldn't, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Justin Kennedy, the former global head of Deutsche Bank's real-estate capital markets division, was one of Trump's close business associates, The Times reported, citing two sources familiar with the matter.
Because of Trump's inconsistent track record in business, which included multiple bankruptcy filings and frequent lawsuits, most other major banks would not lend to him. Deutsche Bank loaned Trump the funds to construct and renovate skyscrapers and other developments in New York City and Chicago, The Times reported.
Stay tuned, folks. There’s much more to come.