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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWaPo's Johathan Greenberg discusses his 1984 phone call from "John Barron."
Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
Posing as John Barron, he claimed he owned most of his fathers real estate empire.
By Jonathan Greenberg April 20 at 5:30 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-lied-to-me-about-his-wealth-to-get-onto-the-forbes-400-here-are-the-tapes/2018/04/20/ac762b08-4287-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html?utm_term=.3b0cbce595e0
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 magazines annual ranking of Americas richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, wed valued Trumps 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 didnt 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 familys 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 Trumps 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 wasnt 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.
C_U_L8R
(45,003 posts)All the malformed synapses of Trump... what a phony.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)This is definitely one of the reasons he won't release his tax returns. He's not nearly as rich as he wants people to think he is.
Miles Archer
(18,837 posts)A sample joke, as handwritten by Trump: Their all losers and I like associating with loser because it makes me feel even better about myself.
by LAURA BRADLEY
OCTOBER 11, 2016 10:36 AM
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/10/donald-trump-comedy-central-roast
Much behind-the-scenes negotiation, as detailed in a delightfully dishy feature on The Huffington Post Tuesday, was what youd expect: Trump complained that the woman he was supposed to hand his coat to onstage wasnt hot enough; he demanded that jokes implying hes not as rich as he says he is were off limits; roasters were told to refer to him only as Mr. Trump. Hair jokes were also apparently off-limits, until one was written that managed to tie his wealth into the punchlineand even then, the net worth used in the joke became a negotiation. But perhaps the funniest details of the process are Trumps own revisions to the jokes Comedy Centrals writers gave him.
I have done this a long time, and nobody blacks out punchlines, writer Jesse Joyce told the Huffington Post. But a copy of Trumps revisions, as shown in the article, reveals that the future Republican nominee crossed out several of the jokes punchlinesleaving only the set-up. (Example: he changed the word huge to big.) To Joyce, it represented a classic lack of an understanding of how a joke works.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)I have never seen such an insecure person in my life.
NewJeffCT
(56,828 posts)you could just about his daughter and incest, but his wealth was a no-no. WTF?
Brother Buzz
(36,444 posts)Miles Archer
(18,837 posts)...it's also on Raw Story, but since Raw Story referenced getting it from WaPo, I opted for the WaPo version. The same audio is embedded in the Raw Story piece.
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/revealed-trump-used-john-barron-alias-lie-wealth-sneak-onto-forbes-400/
Greenberg says that he and his fellow Forbes reporters had long suspected that Trump exaggerated his wealth. However, he also says that Trumps hyperbole about his net worth had the perverse side effect of making reporters assume he was only stretching the truth not simply making it up whole cloth.
This was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that people believed that some kernel of it had to be real, he writes. The tactic landed him a place on the Forbes list he hadnt earned and led to future accolades, press coverage and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency.
Laffy Kat
(16,383 posts)gratuitous
(82,849 posts)But everyone look at Jonathan! Useless as a condom at a eunuch convention.
MyOwnPeace
(16,928 posts)"Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me............."
Ewwwwwwww!!!!!!!!!!!!
Knowing IQ45 like we do now, who would EVER want to have anything to do with that "sockpuppet!"
spooky3
(34,458 posts)Than does Trump.
ProfessorGAC
(65,076 posts)There are too many red flags. Too many behaviors that aren't consistent with a person who is personally running a business empire worth billions.
I know Cuban was on a reality show, but it was about rich people considering the lending of venture capital. They weren't doing it for a paycheck. They were doing it as a view into how pitching ideas to the money people actually works. (No, i never actually watched the show, but the premise and the trailers were pretty clear and obvious.)
In this case, said person was "grooming" others for a career in wealth building. Why would someone superrich go on TV to show other people how to do it?
Too many red flags. If one does a reality show for the paycheck, one is not one of the wealthiest people in the world.