Trump On Lying About Net Worth: ‘I’m No Different Than A Politician’
The Donald Trump 2012 pseudo-campaign is deeply rooted in two main points: “Barack Obama wasn’t born in America,” and “I’m really, really rich.” The first point has been loud and preposterous enough to take up most of the media’s time since Trump parachuted onto the political scene; tonight, Eliot Spitzer took a shot at his other campaign issue, finding millions of dollars in discrepancies between the size of Trump’s wallet and what’s actually in it.
Spitzer, no stranger to taking on New York’s more affluent residents, sat down with legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin on his show In the Arena today to make some sense of Trump’s financial situation as described by Trump. Toobin did not find any particular legal issues, but many political ones in “puffing up his net worth”: “the issue is, ‘is he telling the truth about how much money he actually has?’ and this certainly seems like a problematic valuation.”
The numbers Spitzer managed to dig up were damning: he valued his golf course complex at $360 million– about $330 more than it was worth three years prior– based on real estate that did not exist on the property, nor was in the process of being created. In fact, the number came from a 75-mansion complex that, currently, only existed in the form of six of those proposed mansions, three of which were sold. His million dollar speaking fees? Actually something more like $400,000, though Trump counted $600,000 in advertising as part of the package. As Spitzer put it, “still not a bad paycheck, but not a million bucks.”
And then there is Trump’s net worth which, according to Trump, appears to be somewhere around $3.5 billion dollars. In attempting to acquire loans, two banks did their own valuations and found wildly disparate numbers– North Folk Bank valuing him at $1.2 billion, and Deutsche Bank putting that number somewhere around $788 million. The accounting in the rest of Trump world showed a similar pattern.
But more damning than his numbers are Trump’s own words about how he arrived at them. Citing a legal deposition where he was asked whether he had exaggerated his net worth, Trump says, “I’m no different than a politician running for office… you don’t want to say negative things,” later adding, “I think everyone does.”
One of Trump’s biggest selling points to the cynical voting populace that will define the 2012 elections is that he’s “not a politician,” but businessman. Listening to himself say he is no different than politicians, in any capacity, is a self-induced wound that could bleed all the way to the closing of 2011.
The segment via CNN below:
