Hard proof: Donald Trump was never a business genius

There has been much talk of late about open secrets. Russell Brand’s allegedly abusive behaviour towards women — which he strongly denies — was, it has been suggested, an “open secret” in the comedy world. Before that, Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults on women were claimed to be an “open secret” in the movie business. The suggestion is of a conspiracy of silence among those in the know, maybe to protect what I shall call, with a gulp of nausea, “the talent”, maybe because they assumed everyone else knew too.

Yet, as is so often the case, what some see as conscious conspiracies are often just cock-ups and chance. In regard to Weinstein, I have spoken to many people in Hollywood and most had no idea what he was up to. “I knew Harvey was a bully — everyone knew that — but it never occurred to me he was a rapist,” one big-name director told me. Open secrets are rarely open or secret: it is just that people don’t know something, or don’t see it, or simply don’t put the pieces together. Until, suddenly, they do.

Sometimes, though, you come across a genuine open secret, and a particular one exploded last week in a civil lawsuit in New York. Justice Arthur Engoron ruled that Donald Trump is — and I’m going to use some technical legal terms, so do try to keep up — a big fat liar. To be specific, that he committed fraud by inflating the value of his assets, possibly by billions of dollars. “Oh, financial fraud — that’s complicated. I don’t understand stuff like that,” an idiot (me) might initially think. Well, let’s look closely at Engoron’s judgment to see if even idiots can grasp Trump’s lies.

In one example, the former president claimed his apartment in Trump Tower was 30,000 sq ft. In fact it’s 11,000 sq ft. “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” the judge wrote. Displaying the same brilliance as their client, Trump’s lawyers argued that square footage can be subjective, a claim Engoron had little truck with. So dumbstruck was the judge by the slapstick levels of incompetence on display that in his judgment he quoted the Marx brothers: “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Before he became an international celebrity, Trump was a New York celebrity, and no one in New York ever believed he was a brilliant businessman. After all, he managed to bankrupt his New Jersey casinos — who bankrupts casinos? The only Wall Street bank that would do business with him was Deutsche Bank, and once it finally started asking questions about Trump’s finances in 2020, the response of his lawyer was to ignore its emails. Some people ghost those they meet on Tinder; Trump ghosted a bank that had lent him more than $400 million in the past decade.

Journalists from Forbes have long recounted how Trump would pretend to be “John Barron” and call the magazine to tell them Trump should be on their annual rich list. His image as a brilliant businessman was created by the 1987 memoir Trump: The Art of the Deal, but no one believed he actually wrote it. Rather, it was the work of the journalist Tony Schwartz, who has since expressed much regret. Trump was clearly always just a caricature of a billionaire businessman — Little Orphan Annie’s Daddy Warbucks with a combover. This was an open secret. Everyone knew it, right?

But one of the biggest shocks for New Yorkers about the 2016 election was just how many Americans didn’t know about this open secret — they believed his bluster. There is a similar, but more enjoyable, kind of shock in reading Justice Engoron’s judgment. Oh, was that lying illegal? And he’s being punished for it? We thought it was just Trump being Trump.

It would accord Trump too much gravitas to describe him as a Faustian figure, but in exchange for the power he got from the presidency, he has destroyed himself. Should the appeals court uphold Justice Engoron’s decision, Trump could lose control of his New York properties, including Trump Tower. If he hadn’t run for president, it’s possible the journalist E Jean Carroll’s claim he raped her in the 1990s would never have come to light and, eventually, court, where the judge last year described it as “substantially true”. (Just Trump being Trump!) It is similarly possible that New York’s attorney-general, Letitia James, wouldn’t have accused him of lying to lenders and insurers, leading to last week’s judgment.

If Trump had been happy with being a reality-TV billionaire, he could have spent his dotage relaxing at Mar-a-Lago, rather than losing in the courts. And because of those legal woes, this 77-year-old has just had to renegotiate his wife Melania’s prenup, as she sees the way the wind is blowing and wants to “protect her interests” (ie, money).

But the schadenfreude is limited. Because if Trump has been torn apart by his presidency, then so has America. As last week’s Republican presidential primary debate underlined, he has shoved the party to the populist right, and even when he’s not there — as he wasn’t that night — he still defines the election. The imminent shutdown of the US government over an inability to agree spending levels for the next fiscal year is entirely the fault of hardline Trump loyalists. The Republicans are caught in their own Faustian pact with him.

Any hope his supporters might turn against him after last week’s judgment is as deluded as their belief that Trump is a brilliant financier. He will almost certainly be the Republican presidential nominee, no matter that a judge has ruled the emperor has no clothes. Trump’s lies have swallowed both him and his country.

@HadleyFreeman