LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, YOUR PRESIDENT
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It's been known for years that Donald Trump used to pretend to be a fake Trump Organization representative named "John Barron" on the phone with reporters in the 1980s. In 1990, he testified under oath while giving testimony for a lawsuit that he used the alias "on occasion." During the 2016 campaign, the Washington Post reported that Barron "appears to have been Trump's go-to alias when he was under scrutiny, in need of a tough front man or otherwise wanting to convey a message without attaching his own name to it." The Post later published a 1991 recording of Trump pretending to be a different fake spokesperson named John Miller. 

But we've never heard Trump pretending to be Barron — an alter ego that apparently meant so much to him that he gave his youngest son the same name — until now.

Journalist Jonathan Greenberg, who originated the Forbes 400 list as a young reporter in the early 1980s, recently rediscovered an old recording of an interview he conducted with Trump-as-Barron in 1984. In a new longread in the Washington Post, Greenberg recounts how Trump did whatever it took to get his name on the list — telling Greenberg outright lies about his wealth, both as himself and as Barron, and also enlisting his lawyer Roy Cohn to lie to Greenberg on his behalf. 

In the recording Greenberg has of his conversation with Trump pretending to be Barron, Trump insists that most of the assets from his father Fred's real estate "have been consolidated to Mr. Trump," such that Trump held "in excess of 90%" of the assets. The voice of Barron is clearly Trump's, although Greenberg writes that he "didn't see through the ruse" at the time.

 

Greenberg later discovered that, in reality, ​Trump owned 0% of his father's real estate business at the time. "According to Fred's will (portions of which appeared in a lawsuit), the father retained legal ownership of his residential empire until his death in 1999, at which point he left it to be divided between his four surviving children and some of his grandchildren," Greenberg writes. This means that Trump should never have appeared on the Forbes 400 list in the 1980s in the first place.

Greenberg's essay on his early encounters with Trump's self-interested dishonesty is worth reading in full. In it, Greenberg grapples with the role he and his colleagues at Forbes played in creating Trump's reputation as a real-estate genius and sheds new light on Trump's pathological need for fame and attention. The lengths that Trump went to to get his name on the Forbes 400 list are hard to believe… or they would be hard to believe if we hadn't spent the last three years witnessing Trump go to similar lengths to become president.

[The Washington Post]

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