SURPRISE: TRUMP HAD MILLIONS IN UNDISCLOSED DEBT WHILE PRESIDENT, AND HE PROBABLY WOULD A SECOND TIME AROUND TOO
We’re just now finding out that Trump had $19.8 million in previously unreported debt to a company with historical links to North Korea while serving as commander in chief. What else might we not know?
BY BESS LEVIN
Vanity Fair, December 5, 2022
Shortly before being inaugurated in 2017, Donald Trump announced, to the dismay of ethics officials and laypeople who understood just how corrupt it was, that he would not financially divest from the Trump Organization while serving as president. At the time, it was obvious that this was a completely ridiculous setup, and in the intervening years, that assessment proved 1000% correct, as the 45th POTUS lined his pockets with not only taxpayer money but money from foreign governments. Of course, Trump making money, via the for-profit business one of his sons pledged to give him quarterly updates on during his time in office, wasn‘t the only major issue with the arrangement; on the flip side, there was the question of the enormous amount of cash Trump owed to other entities, which by his own admission clocked in at about $400 million at the end of his term. “From a national security perspective, that’s just an outrageous vulnerability,” Larry Pfeiffer, the director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence at George Mason University, told The Washington Post at the time.
Yet the even bigger vulnerability, from the perspective of the United States, was not just that its commander in chief owed a fuck-ton of money to a fuck-ton of people, but that said commander in chief had a long history of never telling the truth about anything. Which is apparently why, despite years of scrutiny—and the many opportunities he had to reveal it—we’re only just now learning that, when he was running for president the first time, and for several months after he took office, Trump owed millions of dollars to a company previously linked to North Korea.
Snip…
Oh, and about 2024: Shortly after Trump announced that he was running for president for a third time, The New York Times reported that Trump had signed a deal with a Saudi real estate company that “intends to build a Trump-branded hotel, villas, and a golf course as part of a $4 billion real estate project in Oman.” (According to the Times, that came after the Trump Organization hosted Saudi-government-backed LIV Golf tournaments at its clubs in New Jersey and Florida, paid for by money originating from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.) “This is yet another example of Trump getting a personal financial benefit in exchange for past or future political power,” Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Times. “The Saudis and Oman government may believe that giving Trump this licensing deal will benefit them in the future, should Trump become president again. This deal could be a way to ensure that they will be in Trump’s good graces.” And speaking of the Trumps, the Saudis, and absurd conflicts of interest, it was just a few short months ago the Times reported that a newly formed private equity firm owned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner received a $2 billion check from the Saudi government, which may or may not have been a thank-you for treating Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman so nicely amidst that whole kidnapping-and-murder-by-bone-saw scandal. Just something to think about!
Source:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/donald-trump-undisclosed-debt
= new reply since forum marked as read
