14) Trump Lied About His Business Success

Updated September 17, 2024

Reason #14 to Vote Blue on Nov 5

Trump had no political experience when he ran for President in 2015. So it’s understandable that he used his lifetime of business experience as a positive credential.

We didn’t know it then, but we know it now: his success depended on defrauding others. On Feb 16, 2024, Trump was ordered to pay more than $350 million in penalties, plus interest, following a civil fraud trial finding that Trump and his associates had “blatantly used false financial data” to borrow money at lower rates over many years. In addition to the fines, he and his adult sons were banned from taking top company jobs in New York. (1)

Being a fraudster is not exactly a positive credential.

That explains why Trump never made his tax returns public. He actually did have something to hide. Although he promised to release his returns at the start of his 2016 campaign for the Presidency, by May he had changed his mind and refused to do so. Unfortunately for Trump, someone found a way (probably illegally) to make some of his returns public. (2)

If he had released his taxes in 2016 on his own, we would have known he was a fraud sooner!

Beyond that, Trump’s hotel/casino businesses declared bankruptcy six times due to their inability to meet required payments and inability to re-negotiate debt with banks and other creditors. He paid himself, top collaborators, and family, of course, but let the businesses fail. (3)

Trump started his career, back in 1973, being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination — because he would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African-Americans, and he made sure that the people who worked for him understood that was the policy. He fought the case for two years, but finally settled with the settlement offer the federal government provided at the very start; the Trumps did not, in fact, have to admit guilt in settling the suit, but it required the Trumps to place ads in newspapers saying that they welcomed black applicants. They were also required familiarize themselves with the Fair Housing Act and obey it. Trump and his father fought this result unsuccessfully for two years. (4)

He’s had a variety of businesses that basically targeted and fleeced low income people, all of which have failed. For example, there was his business success training “university.” It was billed as a “how to get rich” program that utilized online materials and live seminars in hotel ballrooms. The State of New York said he was illegally using the term university, so he changed it to institute. It began in 2005, was shut down in 2010, and following three separate lawsuits, was settled in 2017. Trump had to refund $21 million to certain students who had sued, and pay another $4 million in fines to the State of New York. (5)

Trump has defrauded the middle class and low income people long before he was elected.

At least 10 other Trump businesses failed. (6)

At least 60 lawsuits were filed against Trump, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings that document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: A dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others. (6)

Trump’s wealth and so-called “success” is built on repeated fraudulence and continually taking advantage of others (not paying people he hired or purchased from).

Dishonesty is a poor trait for the Presidency.

UPDATE! (on Sep 17, 2024)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters behind the 2018 bombshell New York Times exposé of then-President Trump’s finances, today published Lucky Loser, that reveals 500 pages of detail how one of the country’s biggest business failures lied his way into the White House.

Soon after announcing his first campaign for the US presidency, Donald J. Trump told a national television audience that life “has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me.”

Building on a narrative he had been telling for decades, Trump spun a hardscrabble fable of how he parlayed a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar business and real estate empire. This feat, he argued, made him singularly qualified to lead the country. Except: None of it was true.

Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise whatsoever.

Drawing on over twenty years’ worth of Trump’s confidential tax information, including the tax returns he tried to conceal, alongside business records and interviews with Trump insiders, New York Times investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig track Trump’s financial rise and fall, and rise and fall again.

For decades, he squanders his fortunes on money losing businesses, only to be saved yet again by financial serendipity. He tacks his name above the door of every building, while taking out huge loans he’ll never repay. He obsesses over appearances, while ignoring threats to the bottom line and mounting costly lawsuits against city officials. He tarnishes the value of his name by allowing anyone with a big enough check to use it, and cheats the television producer who not only rescues him from bankruptcy but casts him as a business savant – the public image that will carry him to the White House.

A masterpiece of narrative reporting, Lucky Loser is a meticulous examination spanning nearly a century, filled with scoops from Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago, Atlantic City, and the set of The Apprentice. At a moment when Trump’s tether to success and power is more precarious than ever, here for the first time is the definitive true accounting of Trump and his money – what he had, what he lost, and what he has left – and the final word on the myth of Trump, the self-made billionaire.

Learn more about the content of the book:

(1) Buy and read the book from Barnes and Noble.

(2) Listen as Terry Gross, the long-time host of NPR’s Fresh Air, interviews the two authors, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig.

(3) Watch a brief 8 minute interview with the authors on CNN below.