Did Donald Trump just screw up and admit he’s flat broke?

| 5:25 pm EDT October 21, 2019
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Donald Trump’s televised meltdown earlier today contained so many bizarre, jarring, and criminal moments, it’s easy for some of them to get lost in the shuffle. But as Trump was ranting and raving about “You people with this phony emoluments clause” today, he made a claim about his net worth which seems to give away that he’s every bit as flat broke as some of us have long suspected.

Donald Trump claimed today that being President of the United States has cost him between “two and five billion dollars.” This is, obviously, a lie. For every dollar he’s lost from the public refusing to stay at his resorts in protest, he’s probably gained a dollar by abusing the office to steer government funds and international dollars into those same resorts. But Trump does appear to have given something away here.

Forbes has pegged Donald Trump’s estimated net worth at $3.1 billion. Of course this doesn’t include any secret debts that Trump has to foreign banks, which are suspected to be in the billions of dollars, and are one of the reasons House Democrats are trying to get their hands on his financial records. But Trump is now claiming that he’s lost as much as $5 billion as a result of being president. That would leave him with a negative net worth.

It sounds to us like Donald Trump is acknowledging that his net worth is in the negative, and that he’s trying to pretend that he’s only flat broke because being president somehow cost him billions of dollars. It’s increasingly difficult to parse what this guy is incoherently talking about. At the same time, he’s also accidentally blurting out more embarrassing things about himself than ever. So we do wonder if he really did just admit that he’s broke and in debt.