Trump knows he's lost — so he's using the New York case for his campaign: reporter
Economics reporter and Donald Trump biographer Tim O'Brien thinks that the former president already knows that he's lost the New York case. According to O'Brien, the image of Trump as a business tycoon has been swapped for a more lucrative persona and that's as a cult leader.
Speaking to MSNBC's Joy Reid on Monday after the day's proceedings, O'Brien reinforced what another biographer, David Cay Johnston, said about Trump's knack for lying about his financial worth. Johnston said Trump told him he was worth $3 billion, but then told O'Brien he was worth $6 billion, but struggled to figure out where the financial proof of that was.
"Trump inflated his wealth because he is a deeply insecure person about his own business prowess and his own track record," said O'Brien. "He saw it as a scorecard that he used to compare himself to other wealthy people in the United States. That's why he always lobbied for it, but it also served a business purpose, as we know. It put him in front of bankers who otherwise might not have been dealing with him. And he got away with that for a long time because I think the media treated it like a game. Law enforcement didn't see any harm in it, and bankers during a certain period of time were afraid to take him on because he would savage them in the press."
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He noted that banks ultimately washed their hands of him because he was known for filing for bankruptcy six times for five different companies. He also failed to pay back some of his loans and pay for other things. So, banks walked away from him, said O'Brien.
"What you're seeing in this courtroom right now is decades of this," O'Brien continued. "Donald Trump started doing this in the 1970s. He is a 77-year-old man who is finally being held to account for behavior he got away with for a long time because no one cared until he became president."
He explained that it also is part of the "unraveling of his family's business roots to New York." The elder Frank Trump built the family's empire and helped set his son up in business. He then bailed Trump out multiple times.
"I don't think he's going to stay in business," said O'Brien about the future of Trump's enterprise. "Fraud is a foregone conclusion. All we're talking about now are the kind of the scale of the penalties that are going to be assessed against him."
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen told Raw Story last week that Attorney General Letitia James' estimated penalty of $250 million is only the baseline, not the ceiling because there could be interest on the fines.
Trump "is not acting like someone who thinks he has a good story to tell," said O'Brien. "He's acting like someone who is cornered, and caged, and afraid, and lashing out at the judge and lashing out at Letitia James. And I think it's because he feels he has nowhere else to go. I think the other thing to be cognizant of is he rose to fame in public attention around the idea that he was a self-made entrepreneurial genius, and then he became a television celebrity. He's a shape-shifter. And he's now transitioned away from being a businessman into being the leader of a political cult. And I think when he's making these appeals in the courtroom, it's not as a businessman. He's trying to appeal to his political base because he knows he's had it in this courtroom, I think."
See the full conversation in the panel below or at the link here.
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