Karma is showing President Trump who’s boss, as the only-rich-because-he-inherited-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars Donald Trump has lost $1 billion in personal wealth since running for president, according to the latest Forbes billionaires list.
Trump’s fortune fell from $4.5 billion to $3.1 billion over the past two years.
As Trump plummeted from 138 to 259 out of 400, guess who rose to the top spot? Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos, of also the Washington Post. Bezos is worth $160 billion, a jump of $78.5 billion in one year — which is to say 52 times what Trump is worth, which in Trump math is approximately 1.5 times the age at which he claims women “expire.”
Karma can be so clever, wily little lady that she is.
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Then more Trump enemies, Bill Gates, worth $97 billion who dropped to second place after long domination at number one, and tax fairness warrior Warren Buffett, worth is $88.3 billion, and comes in at number three.
Gates has said that Trump didn’t know the difference between HIV and HPV, and that he showed way too much knowledge about Gates’ daughter’s appearance. “So when I first talked to him (Trump) it was actually kind of scary how much he knew about my daughter’s appearance,†Gates said, prompting groans from the crowd. “Melinda (Gates’ wife) did not like that too well.â€
Forbes did a whole article on how Trump is trying but failing to get rich off of the presidency. They asked, “By refusing to divest, Trump raised an unprecedented question: How would the most divisive presidency in modern American history affect a company built on the president’s persona?”
Turns out, even with his many, many ethical and legal violations, Trump is still failing to make money off of his presidency, which is beginning to sound like the Real Donald Trump story: How to inherit hundreds of millions and blow it all while failing miserably at everything but conning people.
Trump Tower, for example, is has seen its net operating income drop “27% between 2014, the year before Trump announced his run for president, and 2017, his first year in the White House….His net worth, by our calculation, has dropped from $4.5 billion in 2015 to $3.1 billion the last two years, knocking the president 138 spots lower on the Forbes 400.”
Forbes laid the blame on three things: One, the deeper reporting into Trump’s claims, “which revealed, for example, that the president had been lying about the size of his penthouse.”
Two, e-commerce dominating when Trump owns commercial space (which explains both his tariffs on things builders would need to create competing structures and his immigration policies which hurt competitors looking for cheap labor, Dan Alexander and Chase Peterson-Withorn explain in Forbes).
And three, surprising no one with a working brain, his presidency is sinking his own brand. “But the third factor comes from how Trump the president affects Trump the brand… Since his unexpected ascent to the White House, Trump has tried to leverage the trappings of the presidency to benefit his commercial projects, from visits to his golf courses to hosting summits at Mar-a-Lago to launching a new hotel-licensing business aimed at his voters. (The Trump Organization denies the licensing business has to do with politics.)”
“In further polarizing the country, he has also further polarized his business—to the tune of an estimated $200 million hit against his net worth.”
“Prices for condos in Trump Tower have fallen every year since 2015, when Trump declared his candidacy, and are an estimated 33% below their highs. Similar trends are playing out a few blocks away at Trump Parc East, where prices are down 23%, and at Trump Park Avenue, where they have dropped 19%.”
The “revenue at the president’s U.S. golf properties fell by an estimated 9% in 2017. It goes beyond politics—guests now endure metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs. ‘It’s not a country club experience,’ a source familiar with Trump’s golf business says,” Forbes reported.
When Trump tried to make money off of his less affluent MAGA crowd, he failed as well. Despite deals to brand lower-priced Trump brands to hotels in Middle America, Trump has only made $27,000 off of these deals last year. That does not even buy one of Melania’s costumes, complete one can only imagine with Colonial jewelry to match the hat, for her theme party/Marie Antoinette greets the little people events.
.â¦@FLOTUSâ© tells reporters in Egypt she wishes people would focus on what she does, not what she wears pic.twitter.com/7mJlR4ZOgB
— Jeff Mason (@jeffmason1) October 6, 2018
Sure, Trump is making money with the help of violating the emoluments clause with Trump International Hotel, but various Republican Party organizations are propping some of that profit up with huge investments, a well as foreign lobbyists (drain that swamp).
But ultimately, “Trump’s presidency remains a net loser for him, which seems ironic. In not divesting, he set himself up so that his actions, and those of people who engage with his businesses, present perpetual conflicts of interest—or the appearance of them.”
The only things Donald Trump values are his money and his image as a person with lots of money. But the gilded toilet is out, humanity is in.
By behaving the way he has, Trump has lost that image and he is also bleeding his daddy’s money.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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