MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said an exhaustive New York Times investigation of President Donald Trump and his family's apparent tax fraud exposed his reputation as a self-made businessman as a lie.
The report shows Trump's father funneled millions to his children and bailed out repeated failures by the future president, whom he made a millionaire as a grade-schooler.
"He's Richie Rich," Scarborough said. "His daddy gave him $2 million by the time he was 8 years old."
The "Morning Joe" host said that report, which went online Tuesday, was the apparent reason Trump has publicly attacked Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
"The White House is trying to stop him from blowing up over the last couple of weeks, all of these different things, and that news article comes out," Scarborough said. "That investigation comes out -- and kaboom, he explodes."
The report -- which Scarborough and his panelists noted was not denied by the White House or the president -- thoroughly debunked Trump's essential myth.
"The most devastating part of this story for Donald Trump, the fiction that is Donald Trump's narrative of his life, actually was, again, the hard number that showed," Scarborough said.
The report showed Trump would have been better off just sitting on his inheritance than making the business investments he had throughout the course of his life.
"If he had just spent the past 45 years playing horseshoes and going out on the professional horseshoe circuit and put all of his daddy's money into a basic mutual fund, he would be richer today and be a lot better at horseshoes," Scarborough said. "So you got that."
