Trump's Habit of Lying About Everything All the Time May Cost Him Trump Tower

[Celerity]

A judge has ruled he engaged in years of massive fraud.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/trumps-lying-about-everything-may-cost-trump-tower

https://archive.ph/XElnl



Unless you were dropped on earth just 24 hours ago, you obviously know that Donald Trump is famous for lying about everything all the time, and that he has been telling lies for basically his entire life. He lies about dumb stuff, like that he invented the phrase “prime the pump” and that he was named “Michigan’s Man of the Year.” He lies about serious stuff, like that he saw “thousands” of supposed terrorist sympathizers “cheering” from New Jersey as the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11. He told lies before he was president (sometimes by pretending to be his own spokesman, John Barron), he told lies when he was president (by The Washington Post’s count, a whopping 30,573 “false or misleading claims”), and he’s continued to tell lies since becoming an ex-president (see: the business about having won the 2020 election). At this point, his inability to open his mouth without 47 lies flying out should really be studied by a team of multidisciplinary scientists who can dedicate their life’s work to figuring out what is wrong with him.

Incredibly, the vast majority of Trump’s lies have never actually hurt him in the slightest. After all, he was elected president of the United States in 2016 and is currently the front-runner—by a landslide—for the GOP nomination. But on Tuesday, a specific set of falsehoods very much came back to bite him in the ass: the ones he told about his real estate holdings as owner of the Trump Organization. We speak, of course, of the explosive ruling issued by Judge Arthur Engoron, who declared—as part of a suit brought by the New York attorney general—that Trump, his two adults sons, and the Trump Organization committed years of fraud by hugely inflating the businesses’ assets (and Trump’s net worth), which led to better loan terms and lower insurance costs. Among the most absurd examples: Engoron found that Trump repeatedly overvalued Mar-a-Lago, and in one instance did so on a financial statement by as much as, wait for it, 2,300%. While an outside appraisal put the value of the Palm Beach club at approximately $28 million, due to restrictions on how the property can be used, the Trump Organization claimed it was worth as much as $612 million.

In another instance, Trump claimed his triplex at Trump Tower was 30,000 square feet—and valued it at $327 million based on that size—when it is actually only about 10,000. Which, y’know, is a pretty big difference. “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” Engoron wrote, according to The New York Times. Elsewhere, the judge responded to Team Trump’s various defenses of its business practices by writing: “In defendants’ world, rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air…. That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”

As New York magazine notes, Engoron “ordered that the business certificates that allowed the family’s limited liability companies to operate in New York be rescinded and that independent receivers be put in place to manage them. This could mean that Trump will lose control over the iconic properties that bear his name such as Trump Tower, as well as make it more difficult for the former president to do business in his home state.” On top of all that, five defense lawyers were fined $7,500 a piece for making “frivolous” arguments that the judge had already rejected. As Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter David Cay Johnston notes, “A judge calling a lawyer’s argument ‘frivolous’ is the equivalent of saying it is no better than nonsense from a drunk in a bar.”

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[UTUSN]

1. K&R