Donald Trump: Always on the Beg

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

There are at least three reasons Donald Trump is selling his mugshot tee-shirts for forty-seven dollars apiece:  his supporters are idol-worshipping dimwits and Trump is not nearly as rich as he pretends to be and it's in his nature.

When Donald Trump first announced his run for President in 2015, he burnished his image with a claim that he was worth nine billion dollars.  It turns out much of that claim was just a fanciful delusion that he was perpetrating, and a full third of it was his guess as to what he thought his "brand" was worth.  This past April,  Forbes Magazine, a publication that annually strokes the egos of the world's wealthiest individuals by ranking them in order of what Forbes determines their net worth to be, placed Donald Trump's net worth at a mere $2.5 billion, or less than a third of what he had belched about eight years earlier.  And Bloomberg, which did a recent listing of the world's five hundred richest people, ignored Trump entirely.

Donald Trump is all about image, and his racket empire is also all about image.   He wants Americans (and particularly the rubes who sit hypnotized watching Fox News all day) to see him as one of the Gods who has a permanent seat at the table at Valhalla, when in reality he is more closely akin to a used car dealer who shows all that he has and then some in an effort to appear wealthy.

America's real masters of wealth don't spend their extremely valuable time kissing up to Trump - they ignore him.

This week New York Attorney General Leticia James took a shot at Trump and hit him where it hurts:  in his self-promoted image as a billionaire.  Her office is suing Trump, some of his adult children, and his "business empire" for falsifying the organization's net worth in order to obtain favorable bank loans and insurance rates.  James and her office estimate that Trump inflated his net worth by as much as $2.2 billion per year from 2011 until 2021.  The civil fraud trial involving those charges is headed to court on October 2nd.

One interesting nugget gleaned from Ms. James' court filings which were released this past Wednesday was that Trump nearly tripled the reported size of his apartment in Trump Tower in New York City from 11,000 square feet to 30,000 square feet, a move that allowed him to claim that the apartment actually had a value of $327 million - and a very nice asset for help in securing loans.

And while Trump was quick to overvalue his properties for help in obtaining favorable loans and insurance deals, he apparently also was quick to lower the valuations of property when the tax man was making inquiries - a process that some might label a "smart business" practice, while others might more readily see it as fraud.

But while adjusting property values on-the-fly and shuffling mortgages might not put more quick cash into the household budget, selling foreign-made tee-shirts for forty-seven-dollars-a-pop  to the gullible and starstruck definitely will.

Donald Trump, the grandson of a draft-dodging Klondike pimp and the son of a racist urban landlord, is just doing what comes naturally to him, but on a much grander scale.