[Pete F.]

I posted this because Dangles always appreciates information about Deranged Donald other than Faux

By Paul Brandus in Marketwatch
Published: May 8, 2019 9:09 a.m. ET


I’ll bet that few of President Trump’s supporters will actually read the article in The New York Times outlining just how he was able to blow $1.17 billion between 1985 and 1994. They won’t either out of antipathy towards that paper, or because the article’s too long, or because they’re so in the tank for Trump that they think he walks on water, is more honest than Mother Teresa and all the rest—and anyone who says anything that doesn’t validate this world view is automatically a far left stooge.

But they might learn something, because the disclosures rip a Titanic-sized gash in the myth Trump has spent a lifetime peddling, namely that he’s a big-brained, super deal-making genius. I mean, you don’t have to be a Trump University grad to know that losing $1.17 billion in ten years isn’t exactly the definition of success.

But that’s what Trump did, we now know, thanks to reporting by the dogged Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, who obtained tax data (but not actual returns) for that period—giving Americans the most detailed look ever at the financial dealings and shenanigans of the man who now sits in the Oval Office.

What’s interesting here is that even with one mild recession, the overall period in question—1985 to 1994—was a boom time for the U.S. economy. GDP grew 43%, and the stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 SPX, +0.31% , grew 171%—not counting dividends.

If you parked cash in an index fund on New Year’s Day 1985 and went away for a decade, you would have done quite well. Yet Trump was blowing through cash, even at his flashy Atlantic City casinos. How anyone could lose money in a casino in the 1980s—when the only options were Nevada or New Jersey—is beyond me. Trump’s lack of a Midas touch was also evident at everything from a failed airline to a football team in a league that thought it could actually compete with the NFL.

The Times’s reporting adds important context to other stories that have been written about Trump in recent years. David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post—another great newspaper Trump loves to bash—won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for exposing Trump as a charity-stiffing charlatan. Buettner and Craig report that one possible reason for this is that because Trump’s adjusted gross income was in the red for each of the ten years (again 1985-1994), “he was not allowed to deduct any charitable contributions.”


The problem here—and a reflection of Trump’s phoniness and shameless self-aggrandizement—is that this didn’t stop him from pretending to be a big donor to charitable causes. He got his photo in the New York papers a lot by showing up at events to benefit charities he never gave a dime to.

It’s hard to get much slimier than this, though I think Trump managed to top himself in later years by cheating on his third wife with a porn star and then paying her off to the tune of $130,000 (think of how that could have helped a worthy charity).

Trump’s gusher of red ink may also help explain his reputation for cheating the very people who worked for him. A sweeping investigation by USA Today in 2016 revealed that Trump, over the last three decades, has been the target of some 3,500 lawsuits by employees and contractors over alleged non-payment. The paper notes that many of the people who sued Trump were hard-working blue-collar types like dishwashers, painters and waiters—the very kind of “small guys” that candidate Trump claimed he was always looking out for. The president’s alleged cheating continues to the present: Trump has been hit with at least $5 million in unpaid liens by workers at his lavish new hotel here in Washington—just five blocks from the White House.

To square the circle, Trump’s history of financial incompetence and alleged swindling also helps explain how he eventually got into bed with the Russians. In the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had collapsed (I was working in Moscow at the time), and there was a lawless, Wild West free for all as Russians grabbed whatever assets they could (sidebar: there are 71 billionaires in Moscow alone today, Forbes reports). Many Russians needed to launder cash; Trump needed cash. It was a marriage made in heaven. For decades, “at least 13 people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties,” the Washington Post has reported. Trump may be off the hook on colluding with the Russians during the 2016 campaign, but his collusion with dirty Russian money is beyond question.