No one knows how much money President-elect Donald Trump is worth. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel via AP)
All year, newspapers and magazines have been publishing reports that suggest Donald Trump is not as rich as he says he is, that he doesn’t pay taxes and that he used the Trump Foundation as a conduit for self-dealing. Now, reporters are looking askance at conflicts of interest that his businesses will trigger.
Trump doesn’t like it. He calls the press “big liars” and goes out of his way to attack individual reporters and news organizations that criticize him, especially if their work threatens to tarnish his solid-gold brand. He has threatened to “open up the libel laws.” But to keep on the right side of the Constitution, here’s a modest proposal to quiet those pesky “losers and haters” who won’t stop harping on his fortune.
He could give it away.
Only Trump knows just how much he’s really worth — if anyone does, for he has also said that his estimate of his net worth is a function of his mood. In any event, in July, he claimed in a campaign disclosure form that the true amount was $10 billion. He has consistently said he is a billionaire — and consistency is an achievement for a man who so frequently steps on his own lines. When Timothy L. O’Brien, a former New York Times reporter, claimed that, 10 years ago, Trump’s net worth was a mere $150 to $250 million, Trump sued for defamation. He lost at trial and then on appeal. In March, Trump told The Washington Post that O’Brien was “a whack job, a total nut job . . . one of the sleaziest people I’ve ever done business with.”
[Trump is America’s Silvio Berlusconi]
But what is it that drives the press to wonder about Trump’s wealth and what he does with it? Entry to his mind is closed, but it’s plausible that he believes that reporters envy him. They’re losers; he’s a winner. He got the babes. Their elevators are stainless steel or, maybe, brass, when his are golden. His name is all over the place, not theirs. He has the hotels, the golf courses, the beauty contests, a private view of the top-flight girls in the dressing rooms. When he fired people on TV, he didn’t have to run his personnel decisions past any committee. It stands to reason that they would try to take him down. Nobody even wants to buy their papers, not even to wrap fish in! (Anyway, real people want steak!)
The lying media hardly ever talk about Trump’s generosity. Sure, the big liars did make a point of mentioning that Trump didn’t contribute to his own foundation after 2008. And they mocked him because the foundation spent $20,000 on a beautiful, six-foot-tall portrait of Trump. They said his foundation paid his business expenses to the tune of $258,000. They said it spent $12,000 to buy a football helmet signed by Tim Tebow. And that Trump later wrote a $10,000 check on his foundation account to buy a smaller portrait of himself, this one only four feet high, and then hung it on the wall of the sports bar at his Doral resort in Miami. Would the sarcastic media have been happier if he’d kept it at home, where ordinary people couldn’t see it?
So no wonder Trump thinks the government has no right to tell anyone how to spend his or her money. He’s a businessman, and he owns businesses! He’ll also own the White House, so where’s the conflict of interest? Anyway, since when is it illegal to decorate a sports bar? What is this, the old Russia, which was a pathetic country before it got spruced up by a really great leader?
Plainly Trump doesn’t get the credit he deserves for his charitable endeavors. Yet envious and unscrupulous journalists deny him credit for his good works. And since he’s a modest man, he has never taken credit in public for all the great things he has done. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett call news conferences to announce that they’re giving away big chunks of change and everybody says what generous philanthropists they are! Trump suffers because he doesn’t brag enough.
The time has come for him to finally quiet the naysayers. He can announce that, starting tomorrow, he’ll write a check to anybody who asks (unless they’re still being audited by that goon squad at the IRS). He can give to the poorly educated! To Hispanics! He can even give to Muslims once they’ve gone through extreme vetting. He can donate to African Americans, and they’ll take it, because what do they have to lose?
[Trump sees black America as a dystopian hellhole. So do most white people.]
Just like that, he can wipe the smiles off the faces of the media ghouls. The cameras will eat it up. What pictures — millions of people lining up outside Trump Tower, weeping with gratitude! When they kneel to thank him, all he need say is, “You may rise,” as he places the checks in their sweaty little palms! Perhaps he’ll have here the seed of a new reality show — “Gratitude is an Attitude, Losers.”
Trump has nothing to lose and a world to gain if he will only Give. It. Away. Giving is getting.
Meanwhile, his kids can be out and about in the world making another bundle. It’s a free country, after all. At least last time I looked.
