Journalist Publishes Bullying Letters From Young, Failing Donald Trump

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It’s already well-known that Donald Trump is not only a prolific liar, but a stunningly bad, failed businessman, but how did he manage to convince so many investors to continue to give him money and take a risk on his businesses? A new expose by The Washington Post explains how, and it’s truly stunning.

Jonathon Greenberg, who helped calculate real estate profits by businessman hoping to make the Forbes 400 list, says that he has unearthered letters from Donald Trump prior to 1990 in which he bullied journalists who had evidence to expose him as a failure. In some cases, he simply made up scandals about them. In others, he sent them false information backed by fake documents so that they would publish “fake news,” which he could then attack.

‘I turned up three never-before-published letters from Trump to Forbes from 1989, in which he claimed to be worth $3.7 billion. We now know that he reported losses of about $100 million that year and that he was treading near insolvency. Then I started to contact other people who had collided with Trump in those years. Journalists told me how he tried to block their reporting on his empire ” by making up ethical scandals about them, furnishing fake documents and, in one case, threatening to expose the private life of a closeted media executive. Wall Street analysts witnessed a campaign of intimidation that began when Trump got one of them fired for (correctly) doubting his casinos ability to pay off their debts.’

Trump is also well-known for calling journalists and pretending to be a man named John Barron, his “VP of Finance,” in order to report wealth and successes by the Trump Organization that simply didn’t exist. In echoes of strategies he still uses as president today, he took credit for gains he never made or that others had made, lied about his business acumen, and did it all while pretending to be someone else.

‘I was the lead real estate wealth estimator for the Forbes 400 list in its early years. Trump called me twice in 1984, posing as his fictional “VP of finance” John Barron and professing the kind of riches that ought to land him on the list despite failing to document them. So when a New York Times exposé last month showed that Trump had lost $1.1 billion between 1985 and 1994, I looked back at my archives and began calling old colleagues to compare these figures with what Trump was telling journalists three decades ago..’

Not only has Trump lied to reporters for more decades than some of his adult children have been alive, he’s now gaslighted the country into believing he’s a wealthy businessman who has turned a failing economy around. None of that is true, but a lot of gullible voters have completely fallen for it.

‘How did Donald Trump, a self-serving promoter who lost billions of dollars for his investors, convince the world that he is a financial genius? By bullying and silencing people who could have stopped those deceits.’

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