U.S. President Donald Trump lied his way onto the Forbes 400 list, the magazine’s annual ranking of wealth, by using a fake persona when he was known as a real estate mogul, a former reporter with the magazine claims.
Jonathan Greenberg claims Trump called him in 1984, pretending to be an official from the Trump Organization. Greenberg claims in an op-ed for the Washington Post, Trump used the name “John Barron” to boast about how rich Trump was.
The journalist recorded his conversations with Barron and noted that he was “amazed” that he didn’t “see through the “ruse” that he was speaking with Trump.
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“Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him,” Greenberg wrote.
Greenberg goes on to allege that Trump widely overstated his net worth, by 20 times what the magazine had him pegged for.
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“In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million,” Greenberg wrote.
Trump was reportedly “obsessed” with the list that so many other wealthy business people wanted to keep their names off. Greenberg notes that Trump “was desperate to scale” the list.
“When I first contacted him for the inaugural issue, Trump pulled out all the stops to convince me that he was the wealthiest real estate developer in New York,” Greenberg claims in the op-ed. “At an afternoon-long meeting in his cavernous Fifth Avenue office, he argued that his family was worth more than $900 million and deserved to be higher on our list than any of the far more accomplished developers (with names like Rose and Rudin) who had spent generations building top-tier housing in the golden borough of Manhattan.”
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Forbes recorded Trump’s net worth in 1984 at $400 million, while his father brought in $200 million, numbers Greenberg believes were not accurate.
Trump, however, did climb the Forbes listings, and has been listed in the magazine since the mid-1990s.
The magazine pegged Trump’s current net worth at $3.1 billion, after losing about $400-million during his first year at the White House.
Forbes cites the stock market, New York City’s struggling retail real estate market and the “president’s polarizing personality” among some of the reasons for the financial decline.