14 – He Really IS a Self-Made Millionaire

That’s right – the Donald wasn’t (technically) lying when he claimed to have started with nothing. His father, Fred Trump, was a mid-scale developer. He built affordable housing in low-income NYC neighborhoods, accumulating $400,000,000 in assets by 1999 – the year he passed away.

Well, before Donald made his first billion, he bankrupted his father’s Trump Hotel/Resort/Casino empire four times. So, technically, he started from less than nothing.

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His first trips to bankruptcy court were over the ‘Trump Taj Mahal’ (in 1991) and the ‘Trump Plaza’ (1992.) After reorganizing all of his holdings into ‘Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts,’ the Donald borrowed even more from investors and defaulted on a total of $1.9 billion in 2004. Somehow, he get refinanced again, surviving until the housing bubble-crisis of 2009. When that happened, Trump walked away from his properties altogether, leaving investors with another $400,000,000 of debt.

As he does with most of his ‘accomplishments’, Trump wrote a book to brag about “winning with the lenders and winning with the banks and winning with the bankruptcy judges.”