Donald Trump’s Fox & Friends lickspittles gaslit their viewers by falsely claiming that a New York Times bombshell showing his enormous and repeated business failures during the 10 years he was promoting himself as a business genius was actually evidence of his success.
The Times’ report covers 10 years, 1985-1994 and is devastating in its depiction of Trump losses:
The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.
In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.
In the Times’ The Daily podcast today (at about the 15:00 mark), host Michael Barbaro specifically asked the authors of the article whether the gigantic losses might represent strategic accounting. Reporter Russ Buettner replied that the losses were too large in proportion to what Trump actually owned for that to have been the case. “We’re so beyond that in these numbers. We’re orders of magnitude past that. There’s actual, real money being lost here and a lot of it,” Buettner said.
But Fox’s Trump Friends cohosts didn’t need no stinking facts as they chatted among themselves on behalf of Dear Leader.
From the Media Matters transcript (my emphases added):
BRIAN KILMEADE: For you or I, maybe buying a summer home is a big move, or maybe even a trailer. But for Donald Trump, he says I got some money but I want to really expand my empire. I want to take chances. That's what he's done through his entire life as a personality, as a host, as a businessman. And guess what? Not all of us win on everything we buy.
[…]
AINSLEY EARHARDT: [Voters] realize he's a billionaire. He was campaigning on the trail with his plane behind him that's as big as a Delta jet, with his name on it. It is -- we can't even fathom that kind of money. So I'm sure that they -- if you have that kind of money, you look at tax laws. You buy things to take a loss so that you make more the next year. But that's not how most of us think. So I think it's interesting to read this article. It's interesting to see that he had a $29 million boat, or that he had this.
STEVE DOOCY: That's a big boat.
EARHARDT: Yeah. But I don't think it's going to sway anyone at the polls if the economy's doing well.
KILMEADE: It intrigues me more actually.
[…]
EARHARDT: If anything, you read this and you're like, wow, it's pretty impressive all the things that he's done in his life. It's beyond what most of us could ever achieve.
[…]
KILMEADE: As if you buy something and it doesn't pan out right away, or ever, you're a loser. No, you take shots. You have an opportunity to do things. That's the way he lived. The reason why we all knew Donald Trump's name is for 30 years, that's what he did. He bought towers, hotels, golf courses. He did it in other countries. What do people not understand about that he's a little bit different than most people?
FACT CHECK: This is a blatant distortion of what Trump’s finances show. They do not show a brilliant businessman who lost big and won big. They show ten years of a big showman who lost big every year. The three sycophants are either lying or being willfully ignorant.
Watch the Trump Rehab propaganda below, from the May 8, 2019 Fox & Friends, via Media Matters.
FACT CHECK TRUMP PLANE: Trump’s first plane is another example of The Donald’s financial woes. It was an old 1969 737 bought used by the never profitable Trump Shuttle airline and sold to pay off the airline’s debts he personally guaranteed. After the sale Trump was left holding $25-$35 million in Trump Shuttle debt. Anyhow, Trump later bought the plane back for personal use. In fairness to Fox News, Trump subsequently bought a 757 so they have an excuse to leave the embarrassing saga of Trump Shuttle out of the discussion, I suppose. 🤣
The reality is fairly obvious, as is the reason why Pence’s tweeter hasn’t wanted this information to go public. It shows he’s absolutely not the business mastermind he’s played on TV, and it shows that his actual worth is a lot less than he wants people to believe.
But you’d think people would have already figured out part of this from the complete incompetence of the Pence White House.