Trump biographer David Cay Johnston unleashed another brutal breakdown of the president's finances Friday in a new Daily Beastreport. In the wake of Michael Cohen's testimony earlier this week, in which Cohen testified that Trump had inflated his net worth multiple times over the past few decades, Johnston took the time to highlight some of his past investigative work into Trump's wealth, or lack thereof.
"Trump’s financial fakery is good enough to fool millions of Americans, but not the members of the most exclusive rich people’s club in America, the National Football League team owners," he wrote of Trump's failed attempt to buy the Buffalo Bills.
"What Trump does is spend enough money to create the appearance of being a billionaire, something I’ve been reporting since I got hold of his financial statement in 1990, which showed he was no billionaire," he wrote.
The biographer has been sounding the alarm that Trump is nowhere close to being a billionaire for over a decade now, despite many parroting Trump's claims that he is one, just because Trump, and Forbes magazine, have said so.
"Creating a lifestyle that lets him pose as a billionaire costs less than $12 million annually, I estimate," Johnston wrote. "And he achieves that not through building wealth, but through his work as a financial locust who devours other people’s money through moving from one shady deal to the next," he continued. "Along the way he cheats banks, investors, workers, and governments at all levels," the biographer noted.
Soon, America may finally get to see actual tax returns from Trump that will prove, one way or another, if Trump is indeed an actual billionaire, or not, thanks to the newly elected Democratic majority in the House of Representatives who have vowed to get Trump's tax returns, and make the results of their inquiry public.
"When we see Trump’s tax returns, as we can expect to soon thanks to a 1924 anti-corruption law, you can get bet his income won’t support a net worth anywhere near even one billion dollars," Johnston predicts. "And don’t be surprised if his net worth turns out to be less than zero, as Trump was forced to admit in 1990 when I reported that his net worth was negative $295 million, meaning that you are probably worth more than Donald Trump," he said.
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