Donald Trump is truly the .00001% candidate. He asserts that
he is worth a cool $10 billion, having long been cagey about just how much he
has. That figure, too, may be more scam than reality. Forbes pegs Trump's
fortune at $4 billion in its 2015 top billionaires list, where he places 405th
in the world and 133rd in the U.S. In
his 92-page Federal Election Committee financial filing, which doesn’t require
the disclosure of his total wealth, the value of his global enterprises,
assets, debts, and income sources are listed in ranges, rather than exact
figures. More than 20 items are characterized as worth “over $50 million.” He
has at least $1.4 billion in assets and $285 million in debt, if we use just
$50 million as a guesstimate on those items; $2.8 billion in assets and $570
million in debt, if we pick the figure of $100 million instead. In other words,
we still don’t know what he’s worth. As with so much else, we just have to take
his word for it. He claims to be “the definition of the American success
story,” as his campaign website puts it.
Donald’s father, Fred, convert a business in low-income housing
into a $300 million fortune that Donald inherited. Trump recounts his first
major deal was Swifton Village, a foreclosed apartment complex in Cincinnati
that he said he bought with his father in 1969, while still
in college. (Cincinnati Magazine claims the purchase was Fred’s exclusively.)
The price was $6 million and in 1972, they resold it for $12 million, according
to Trump (and a far more modest $6.75 million according to other estimates).
In 1973 the Penn Central Railroad filed for bankruptcy and
was intent upon selling its long abandoned yards in the Manhatten’s West
thirties and sixties districts. Trump still did nothing without his father’s
involvement. As their
development firm had no official name, they decided to call it the Trump
Organization, which covered them both and, they hoped, had a certain gravitas.
Over the next several years, Trump solicited support from New York Mayor Abe
Beame, who belonged to the same club as his father and to whom his father
and he gave money.
Trump’s companies have officially gone bankrupt four times
since 1991, or as Trump spun it, “I used the law four times and made a
tremendous thing. I’m in business. I did a very good job.” that’s a small
number of bankruptcies relative to the hundreds of companies that comprise his
empire, they represented a fair amount of debt.
There was the Trump Taj Mahal (with $1 billion in debt) in
Atlantic City in 1991 and the Trump Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City in 1992 (with
$550 million in debt). Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, the company created
from the post-bankruptcy ashes of the Taj Mahal, the Trump Plaza, and also
Trump Marina in Atlantic City filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (with
$1.8 billion of debt) in 2004. Bankruptcy number four, Trump Entertainment
Resorts (the post-bankruptcy company created to take over the remains of Trump
Hotels and Casino Resorts) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (with
$1.74 billion of debt) in February 2009. While Trump owned 28% of its stock, as
he told Bloomberg News upon resigning from the board four days before the $53
million bond payment that forced it into bankruptcy was due, “I have nothing to
do with it. I’m not in it. I’m not on the board.”
He glosses over his method of creating new companies to
purchase the bankrupt ones, after shedding their debts, and his convenient exit
timing from management posts to shed blame. In 1989, for instance, Trump
purchased the Eastern Air Shuttle, connecting New York, Boston, and Washington,
D.C. with hourly flights, for roughly $365 million. But the Trump name didn’t
carry the day and passengers didn’t pony up for the line’s fancier seats and
gold lavatory fixtures. Instead, in 1990 Trump defaulted on the loans he had
taken out to finance the company, and its ownership reverted to its creditors,
led by Citibank. The Trump Shuttle was then merged into a new corporation,
Shuttle Inc., and in April 1992, its routes were assumed by USAir Shuttle,
which is one way the rich make problems disappear.
In April 2006, at a Trump Tower gala, Trump’s son Donald,
Jr. promised that Trump Mortgage would become the nation's number one home-loan
lender. In a CNBC interview shortly afterwards, Trump said, “Who knows about
financing better than I do?” Eight months later, the company closed down amid
the crashing housing market and negative publicity over an unfortunate hiring
choice. Trump’s CEO, E.J. Ridings, had lied on his résumé. His previously
advertised “top” spot at one of Wall Street’s “most prestigious banks” turned
out to have been as a lowly broker -- for one week. As Trump continually
reminds us, he only has the best people work for him.
Then there was “Trump University,” active from 2005 to 2010,
where, for $25,000-$35,000, students could assumedly learn how to become
real-estate gods like Trump. According to related lawsuits, they were then
enticed to take out credit cards under phony business names to help pay for the
privilege, and to inflate their income by projecting profits from non-existing
businesses. Earlier this month, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman
told the New York Daily News that approximately 600 former students have filed
suit against the “university” in Manhattan Supreme Court. Similar suits are
pending in California. Schneiderman claimed Trump banked $5 million personally
from the scam. Trump had also ignored 2005 warnings not to use the word
“university” in the name.
He has talked about “our leaders and representatives” for
making terrible deals that have cost American jobs. He fails how he and his
daughter, Ivanka, have clothing lines made in China and Mexico, (that land of
“rapists,”) and Bangladesh, a country
continuously in violation of human rights for garment workers. Anti-China anger
plays well with the xenophobic crowd, but the weaker Yuan keeps costs down on
Trump’s clothing business.
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