How Trump Lied His Way Onto Forbes’ Richest List

The CBC reports:

Jonathan Greenberg knew Donald Trump was lying to him when he placed him on the Forbes list of America’s richest people, but he didn’t know the magnitude of Trump’s lies until this week. The Times report shows Trump suffered massive losses, a total of $1.17 billion US from 1985 to 1994.

Through five of those years, Forbes continued to list Trump among America’s wealthiest, and Greenberg put him on the list in 1982, as well. But he says it was a mistake. “He was worth under $5 million that year when I put him in at $100 million. He should never have been on that list and neither should his father,” Greenberg said. “I mean, he totally snowed me.”

According to Greenberg, Trump took elaborate and transparent measures to make the case he was richer than he was. “He pretended to take a phone call from his father advising his father how to place tens of millions of dollars in bond holdings,” Greenberg said. “And when I got close I could hear that there was no one on the other end.”

Last year the Washington Post ran an extensive piece on this issue, recounting how Trump posed as the nonexistent “John Barron” in calls to Greenberg, who, as you’ll hear below, recorded those calls.