“Flagrantly untrue”: Trump busted for inflating his company’s worth 1000 percent

We now have formal confirmation that Donald Trump has been lying religiously about the worth of his hallmark company, the Trump Organization. Based on public filings, which indicate the company takes in just one-tenth of the revenue that Trump executives previously boasted about, Crain’s New York Business now lists the Trump Organization as the 40th largest privately held business in New York City.

Last year, relying on bogus figures self-reported by the Trump Organization, Crain’s had the organization among the three largest in the city, alongside Bloomberg and Hearst.

Turns out Trump executives, like their boss, have just been chronically lying about the business.

That appears to run in the family: Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. were once under investigation and accused of falsifying sales information in order to move units in a floundering new luxury hotel-condo building the family had opened in New York City.

In terms of the latest lies about the Trump Organization, “Last year’s $9.5 billion in revenue reported by the organization looks preposterous in light of federal filings made by the president in the past year,” Crain’s reports. “Those indicate the Trump Organization generates between $600 million and $700 million in annual revenue. Neither [Rhona] Graff nor a Trump Organization spokeswoman responded to requests for comment about the discrepancy.”

The Trump organization is the umbrella group that oversees real estate holdings, golf resorts, and an array of licensing deals. As the city’s 40th largest privately-held company, the Trump Organization finds itself alongside KIND snack bars, and the regional sporting goods chain, Modell’s.

“It was obviously important to Donald to have his company at the top of the list and I don’t know why he felt that way but the numbers that he presented are just flagrantly untrue,” Crain’s reporter Aaron Elstein told WNYC.

Crain’s reporting is just the latest confirmation that Trump’s running claim of being a wildly successful billionaire businessman is a charade.

In 2016, journalist Tim O’Brien estimated Trump’s wealth to be between $150-250 million. (Trump sued O’Brien for defamation and the case was dismissed.) As for Trump’s personal wealth today, we still have no idea because his tax returns are literally locked away in a vault.

Things haven’t gotten any better since Trump entered the political arena. In fact, Trump’s political rise appears to have translated into bad news for his businesses. Crain’s notes that prices for luxury apartments at Trump Tower have plummeted by 23 percent since Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was also recently caught chronically fibbing about his wealth. Obsessed with being portraying as a billionaire, and equally obsessed with being included on Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest people in the world, Ross engaged in a series of “fibs, exaggerations, omissions, fabrications and whoppers” for 13 years designed to make him look like a billionaire.

Birds of feather …