Despite Donald Trump’s self-mythologizing ostentation – despite his gold toilets and eastern European models, despite his airplanes, golf courses and gleaming bad taste – he always had more shamelessness than actual money. This has been painfully obvious for years, so in a way, what the New York attorney general revealed on Wednesday, first in a press conference, then in a more than 200-page legal complaint, was nothing new. Letitia James alleges that Trump lies, and he most often lies to aggrandize himself, and specifically, he lies a lot about money. He’s not as rich as he says he is.
This week, James’s office filed a civil suit against Donald Trump, his three eldest children, the longtime Trump Organization chief financial officer Alan Weisselberg (who pleaded guilty to 15 felonies last month), and the Trump Organization itself. The lawsuit alleges a longstanding pattern of financial fraud in which, James claims, the Trump Organization deliberately inflated the value of its assets – including all of Trump’s most famously gaudy properties – when seeking loans, in order to secure more generous credit terms.
