1. In 2004, Timothy O’Brien published TrumpNation. In the course of researching that book, “individuals who worked with Trump and a had a good sense of his finances” thought Trump’s net worth was “$150 to $250 million.” Trump later sued O’Brien for damages for saying he was worth so little. The suit was later dismissed.

2. During the litigation of that lawsuit, O’Brien and his lawyers were able to review a 2005 Deutsche Bank assessment of Trump’s wealth which placed his net worth at approximately $788 million. Deutsche Bank should know. While most big banks have shunned Trump because of his multiple business failures, Deutsche Bank has been Trump’s go-to bank for almost 20 years.

3. In financial filings, particularly with the FEC, Trump routinely overstates his income by reporting business revenue as income or conflating the two numbers. The difference between revenue and income is obvious to anyone who has run a business as small as a lemonade stand. ‘Revenue’ or cash flow is all the money that comes into the business before you subtract expenses and miscellaneous other negative entries. If you subtract the latter from the former you have ‘income’, what you actually take home at the end of the year. A company may have $50 million in annual revenues and be making $25 million profit, just breaking even or losing money hand over fist. Income here is the individual analog to profit for a business entity. Revenue tells you almost nothing about income. The fact that Trump routinely conflates the two numbers is such an elementary and massive effort to inflate the scale of his income that it points to someone trying to massively overstate income and wealth. Just how much is a good question. In this March 2016 article, Shawn Tully of Fortune tried to parse Trump’s filings and estimate just how much Trump was inflating his income.

4. Trump refuses to release his income tax returns and is knowingly incurring substantial political damage for failing to do so. He would only do so if they contained information he very, very much does not want to see made public.

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