Friday open thread: 93 million
No, 93 million is not the figure of how many people will vote to successfully re-elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024. (Although it may well be.) It is, in fact, how much money self-declared billionaire Donald Trump has as cash on hand.
How much cash does Donald Trump have? He’s often said he has a lot. At times he’s said he had a little. Some say he’s flat broke.
Of the former president’s more than two dozen holdings, much of them tough-to-value real estate, his pile of cash and liquid assets should be the easiest to pin down—you just add up the balances on his account statements. But Trump doesn’t share those publicly, and his government financial disclosures only required him to list his cash and investments in broad, imprecise ranges. So, the exact size of Trump’s cash pile has always been something of a closely kept secret.
But filings released Tuesday by New York Attorney General Letitia James, as part of her civil investigation into the Trump Organization’s financial dealings, offer the clearest picture yet: Trump’s liquid assets stood at $93 million in 2020, according to the documents.
That makes Trump far from cash poor. But he has less in the bank than many of his fellow real estate billionaires. And he has far less than the fanciful sums he’s tried to sell Forbes—and, according to the attorney general, his own lenders and insurers—over the years.
Now, of course, I feel safe in saying that all of us would tiptoe through the tulips were we to have $93m in the bank. But, of course, we're also not egotistical, thinskinned narcissists who value ourselves solely, or even primarily, by our financial resources. Trump, however, is.
As the Forbes article points out, Trump has spent decades trying to con it into accepting that he's richer than he is.
Trump has been exaggerating his stash his whole career. In 1982, seeking a higher spot on the inaugural Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, Trump aimed his lawyer, Roy Cohn, at us. “I am sitting here looking at his current bank statement,” Cohn told reporter Jonathan Greenberg, who recounted the phone conversation in a 2018 Washington Post article. “It shows he’s got more than $500 million in liquid assets, just cash.” We didn’t buy that lofty number, which was more than the Trump family’s entire real estate empire was worth at the time.
I'm sure it's shocking to anyone reading this that Trump has lied his entire life as to his wealth. But, when your self-worth is based solely on how others perceive you—and they had better perceive you as being a corporate titan—then lying is all you can do. Trump's entire life is a house of cards—a hut made out of twigs which might, might have survived had he kept his bulbous nose out of politics and just kept raking in cash from Russian mobsters. Instead, he was shown to be a fool by a Black president, and his ego demanded that he run for and win the office to undo all that Barack Obama had accomplished.
The thing is: That's tempting the Fates. And the Fates punish hubris as the worst of all moral crimes. Even though he was ubiquitous, he was also off the radar. He was just another gauche, louche showman of questionable morals. But our culture is full of those people, and they tend to avoid the attention of the relevant authorities. But by descending that escalator, he put the biggest of targets on his back and on those of his useless family. Maybe if he'd been a half-decent president he'd have gotten away with no investigations. But that was going to be impossible. He was a corrupt criminal in his business life, and that corruption and criminality didn't magically disappear when he entered the White House. He saw his stint at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as the grift of a lifetime. Instead, he sowed the wind and is now reaping the whirlwind.
But, back to his relative poverty, considering he's a "billionaire". That is the unkindest cut of all. His self-worth depended on duping the rubes into thinking he was richer than Croesus—no, neither he nor his followers know who that is, but that's immaterial—and that he could make them into mini Trumps. Instead, he's leveraged up to his eyeballs, with very little liquidity, and facing ruination from New York Attorney General Tish James' civil suit against his company. Ms. James has Trump dead to rights, and when he loses the case, all of his creditors will come knocking. And that's not factoring in the fines which New York will levy. AND that's not counting all the markers his mob friends will call in. He will be that which he fears the most: a loser. The biggest loser in American history. And, again, that's before his criminality receives justice in our courts.
Of course, I want to see him in prison. And I firmly believe we will all see that. But even more, as the great philosopher Billy Ray Valentine said, the best way to hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people. He'll die in prison, destitute, his family penniless, his name a synonym for both treason and abject failure. And I will drink a celebratory bourbon.