Trump ‘A Black Hole Who Feels In Every Moment Like A Fraud,’ Says ‘Art Of The Deal’ Co-Author Tony Schwartz
After a stunning New York Times expose on Tuesday detailed how Donald Trump allegedly participated in “outright fraud” to shield his income from taxes, and that Trump “received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire,” avoiding paying taxes on much of that hand-me-down fortune, Trump is “more enraged” by the Times revelations “than anything that ever happened to him.”
That is the assessment offered by Tony Schwartz, who has known Trump for more than 30 years and was Trump’s co-author on the book for which Trump is best-known, his 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal, as the Inquisitr has reported.
Interviewed on Tuesday by MSNBC host Ari Melber, Schwartz said that Trump has always secretly suffered from low self-esteem, feeling unworthy of success, and that the Times investigation has revealed the thing that Trump fears most — that not only does he feel like a fraud, but that he has also based his business career on fraud.
“I have felt and said forever that (Trump) is a black hole and feels in every moment like a fraud,” Schwartz told Melber in the Tuesday afternoon interview. “What comes out tonight is he had every reason to feel like he was a fraud.”
"I have felt and said forever" that Trump is "a blackhole and feels in every moment like a fraud"
"What comes out tonight is he had every reason to feel like he was a fraud" – @tonyschwartz pic.twitter.com/7n6GbgE8MT
— The Beat with Ari Melber ? (@TheBeatWithAri) October 2, 2018
“The cover has been ripped off this man, whatever myth there was (that Trump) was a self-made man or even a legitimate business man is gone forever,” Schwartz said on the program The Beat with Ari Melber.
According to the Times reporting, Trump’s father, New York real estate baron Fred Trump, gave approximately $1 billion to Donald Trump and the other Trump children. But while taxes should have been paid at a 55 percent rate on that massive fortune, producing a tax bill of about $550 million, thanks to various tax dodges and shelters, the Trump children paid only about $52.2 million in taxes, a rate of roughly 5 percent.
When Trump was a recent college graduate, he received the equivalent of approximately $1 million per year from his father. But as Trump got older and seemingly more independent, he in fact received even more money from Fred Trump — about $5 million per year as Donald Trump was in his 40s and 50s, leading the Law & Crime blog to declare, “Donald Trump is the farthest thing from self-made you could possibly imagine.”
But Trump has long made point of portraying himself as a self-made success story, claiming during the 2016 presidential campaign that the extent of his father’s involvement with his business was “a small loan of a million dollars,” according to CNN.
