Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times was tossed out on Friday because it was a “megaphone” for PR and way too long. It was also full of half truths and untruths about his financial success.
Late Monday, Trump filed a $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the Times, Penguin Random House and several of the newspaper’s top writers. The complaint cited a book and three articles that his legal team says damage his business and celebrity image, and alleged that the writers manipulated facts to fit a “desired narrative.”
Trump has his own long history of writing his own desired narrative, as his decades-long relationship with Forbes shows. In 1982, he appeared on the first-ever Forbes 400 list, with a $200 million fortune shared with his father, Fred Trump. “Donald,” we wrote, “claims $500 million. » Never mind the fact that, as later reported by a former Forbes writer, Trump owned little of the family real estate empire and only his father should have made the list. By 2015, when Forbes pegged then-candidate Trump’s wealth at $4.5 billion, he insisted he was worth over $10 billion. Now, after ten years in politics, Trump seems to think he’s managed to grow his fortune by at least 10x.
