September 28, 2009

By Thom Hartmann

Back in the day, Donald Trump’s niece alleges, he stole hundreds of millions of dollars from his father‘s estate, screwing his other family members and the IRS (you and me).

He then went on a massive spending binge, pouring that money into airlines, steaks, vodka, Trump-branded games, casinos, a fake university, etc. Virtually all of them failed, and he experienced multiple bankruptcies.

Just at the time Donald was most wiped out and maybe even facing the possibility of homelessness, NBC rescued him with the Apprentice program. That paid him a few hundred million dollars more, which he used, along with massive loans, to buy some more hotels, including the one in Washington, DC.

But now those new hotels and golf courses aren’t doing so well, either, because he is such an incompetent businessman and because the virus is hurting the hotel business. As a result, in the next few years he’s going to have to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in loans that he personally guaranteed at a time when his hotel properties around the world are generating virtually no revenue.

In other words, for the second time in his life, Donald Trump is almost certainly broke or on the verge of being broke.

When his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, hit that wall last year, he was able to hop on a US government plane and go to the Middle East, where dictators and fossil fuel billionaires who wanted the Trump administration to sell them advanced weaponry handed over the objections of Congress him over $1 billion.

We still don’t know how Trump and Kushner compromised American security and sold us out in exchange for that billion dollars for Jared, although historians will probably figure it out over the next decade.

Now Trump is going to have to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars and the question is: which dictator is he going to borrow it from, and what part of American policy or American assets is he willing to sell off, betray or destroy to get it?

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.



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