5-2-18
What we didn’t know about Trump on Election Day 2016
Breaking Newstags: election 2016, Trump
For decades, Trump has presented his own net worth as substantially larger than it actually is. Last month, The Post reported on an incident in 1984 in which Trump, posing as his own publicist, called Forbes and made the case for being much wealthier than the magazine calculated. This subterfuge continued, in various guises, for years. Even when he announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2015, Trump claimed to be worth more than $10 billion — up to three times the estimates of his worth from independent analysis.
Why is this important? In part because it was Trump’s only credential. He pitched himself as a dealmaking, problem-solving business expert, but the numbers presented for his net worth (and the failure to release income data from his tax returns) meant that we had no way of evaluating whether he was actually much good at business. Sure, various buildings have his name on them, but it’s not clear what that means in terms of his business acumen — even granting that business acumen is transferrable to governance.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel