I have always been of the opinion that the reason why Trump will not show his tax returns is because they would show exactly how rich that he is not. They would also more than likely show that he owes the Russian banks and Russian mobsters much more than he is worth, as well as a few other things that he prefer stay hidden.
It does explain why 45* tweets so much trash about Jeff Bezos…
It was inevitable that more would be revealed about Trumpian fraud, and somehow that won’t make any difference when we reach the end of the Trump regime and US democracy is in shambles.
A new op-ed piece in WaPo covers the fakery that has been Trump’s financial empire. This comes with the release of the tapes of Trump in the 1980s pretending he’s John Barron, inflating his net worth to a Forbes reporter.
Then again we could have guessed that shortcoming, considering he tried to impress Stormy Daniels with a copy of Forbes’s 400 richest people list.
When he lost his appeal in 2011, a New Jersey appellate judge wrote, “The largest portion of Mr. Trump’s fortune, according to three people who had had direct knowledge of his holdings, apparently comes from his lucrative inheritance. These people estimated that Mr. Trump’s wealth, presuming that it is not encumbered by heavy debt, may amount to about $200 million to $300 million. That is an enviably large sum of money by most people’s standards but far short of the billionaires club.”
THE JOKE WAS ON ME — AND EVERYONE ELSE. TRUMP’S FABRICATIONS PROVIDED THE BASIS FOR A VASTLY INFLATED WEALTH ASSESSMENT FOR THE FORBES 400 THAT WOULD GIVE HIM CACHET FOR DECADES AS A TRIUMPHANT BUSINESSMAN.
But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had enacted to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn’t just poorer than he said he was. Over time, I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.
Anderson Cooper 360°
✔@AC360
A former Forbes reporter claims that Donald Trump, before he was president, called him posing as "John Barron," a purported executive with The Trump Organization, speaking on Trump's behalf and lied about his wealth in order to crack the Forbes 400 list https://cnn.it/2K1iX1v
The next year I received two calls from “John Barron,” the fictitious Trump executive who told me that Donald had taken “in excess of 90 percent” ownership from Fred. He also suggested that Trump was on track to earn a $50 million profit every year from his first Atlantic City casino. And so, in 1984, we increased Donald’s net worth estimate to $400 million and left Fred in, for his last year on the Forbes 400, at $200 million. (Barron also bad-mouthed the competition, saying that developer George Klein had struck a “bad deal” to redevelop Times Square — a bid Trump had lost — and was “going to go down the tubes.”)
Although Trump, posing as Barron, asked Forbes to conduct the conversation off the record, I am publishing it here. I believe an intent to deceive — both with the made-up persona and the content of the call — released me from my good-faith pledge. In a 1990 court case, Trump testified that he had used false names in phone calls to reporters. In 2016, when The Washington Post published a similar recording, Trump denied it was him.
I’ve always wondered if the real reason he has worked so hard to monetize the presidency is that he‘s hard up for cash. This article puts his wealth at about 2%-3% of what he has claimed, and that’s generously assuming he’s not leveraged to the teeth. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-lied-to-me-about-his-wealth-to-get-onto-the-forbes-400-here-are-the-tapes/2018/04/20/ac762b08-4287-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html …
8:35 AM - Apr 20, 2018
Perspective | Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
Posing as ‘John Barron,’ he claimed he owned most of his father’s real estate empire.
washingtonpost.com
Will Bailey@RepWillBailey
I’ve begun casting TRUMP: THE MOVIE
Elizabeth Shue: Stormy Daniels
David Schwimmer: Michael Cohen
The Late Phillip Seymour Hoffman: Steve Bannon
Vin Diesel: Michael Avenatti
How am I doing so far?
Monday, Apr 23, 2018 · 1:40:38 PM EDT · annieli
Ari Melber
✔@AriMelber
These bizarre Trump recordings only leaked now because the reporter realized the “off the record” agreement was itself a lie, since it was made with a person who doesn’t exist (Trump pretending to be his own made up spokesperson)... https://twitter.com/thebeatwithari/status/988079745169592320 …
on her own time to a passing presidential motorcade, the contractor is undermining freedom of speech and must be held accountable for unlawful discharge 
