If only there were cameras
The head of the Trump Organization takes the stand this morning in its Manhattan civil fraud trial. You can say a lot that will roll of this odd duck’s back, but questioning Trump’s net worth cuts to the core of his pathologically insecure self-image. He’s prone to lash out at those who do.
We know that here from experience. The 2019 post that drew a threat letter from one of Trump’s lawyers commented on MSNBC reporting that Trump’s real estate empire was in such shaky financial shape that he had hostile foreign powers backstopping his loans. Hullabaloo got caught in the backlash.
Former Trump personal attorney, Michael Cohen, thinks Trump will respond just as poorly to having his financial condition questioned to his face on the witness stand. He won’t be able to keep his cool, Cohen told CNN anchor Phil Mattingly (Raw Story):
“At the beginning, he’s going to try. He’s going to try very hard to stay within the lane, because he already knows that he’s — he and the judge don’t clearly see eye-to-eye, so he’ll try to stay in the lane, but as the prosecutors continue to drill down on him with information and with allegations that he overinflated his net worth by billions, that’s going to irritate him. Because his net worth, his statement of financial condition, it’s really a combination of his id, his ego, his superego, all mashed into one narcissistic sociopath.”
Cohen said he has testified that Trump “would make that mob-style statement, I’m not worth 4.5, I’m worth 5 or 7 or 8,” and expect his employees to generate a financial statement that reflected the number he’d pulled from his ass. Those financial statements, already determined by the New York court to be fraudulent, are why “John Barron” is in court today as the judge decides what the Trump Organization’s financial penalties will be. It’s no longer a matter of what he claimed but how much he’ll pay in fines.
This is a reality show I’d pay to watch.