A compulsive liar and fraud from the very beginning
by digby
This story and audio of Trump pretending to be an alter-ego named "John Barron" to get on the Forbes 400 richest list is just ... astonishing. We knew he did this.But t goes back to 1984, just showing that it isn't that Trump is slipping. He's always been a freak who lied to people's faces without compunction and dared them to call him on it:
In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual ranking of America’s richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we’d valued Trump’s holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was.
The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself.
When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn’t see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him. “Barron” told me that Trump had taken possession of the business he ran with his father, Fred. “Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump,” he said. “You have down Fred Trump [as half owner] . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now.” Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me he owned “in excess of 90 percent” of his family’s business. With all the home runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he should be called a billionaire.
At the time, I suspected that some of this was untrue. I ran Trump’s assertions to the ground, and for many years I was proud of the fact that Forbes had called him on his distortions and based his net worth on what I thought was solid research.
But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had built to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn’t just poorer than he said he was. Over time I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.
He's always been a pathological liar and a delusional con man:
There's more at the link. It's fascinating.
I'm watching Republican shills say this doesn't sound like him and it's old and meaningless, but this man has been conning people for decades, committing fraud and going bankrupt, refusing to show his tax returns. More than 60 millions people voted for this criminal because they were deluded into thinking that he was some kind of genius businessman who would make all the deserving people like them rich.
It's always been bullshit but he had all the trappings, the golden penthouse, the airplanes, the TV show and the model third wife. But it was an elaborate hoax.
I have seen this sort of thing a few times in life with seniors being duped out of their nest egg by slick conmen who told them what they wanted to hear. And they wanted it so badly that even those who knew better ignored their instincts to live the dream for a little while. I think a lot of Trump voters were like that. Trump told them it was ok to hate mexicans, Muslims and blacks. That it's normal to think of women as only sex objects, mothers or uppity bitches. That big city elites take all the goodies and then look down on them. And that Trump would make them rich like him because he's just like them and look how rich he is.
It was all bullshit from beginning to end. But they are enjoying the dream.
You know how it is when you buy Powerball ticket the day before the drawing and sit around thinking about what you'd do with all that money if you won? That's what voting for Trump
