Now we know why Donald Trump has been going berserk about the Washington Post this week

| 6:50 pm EDT April 20, 2018
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Two days ago Palmer Report pointed out that Donald Trump was becoming so cartoonishly obsessed with the Washington Post and its owner Jeff Bezos, he was telegraphing that he knew the Post was about to publish a very ugly story about him. Now that story has surfaced today, and remarkably, it’s not about the Trump-Russia scandal or even about the Trump-Cohen scandal. It’s about something Trump seems to care even more about than whether or not he goes to prison.

Back in 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called up a Forbes reporter and wildly misled him about which properties Donald Trump did and didn’t own, in order to create the false appearance that Trump was twenty times wealthier than he was. This allowed Trump to make it onto the Forbes 400 list. Now the Forbes reporter in question has written an article in the Washington Post which exposes all the ugly details. By the way, the name of the Trump Organization official in question: John Barron.

That’s right, Donald Trump called up Forbes and used his infamous alias and a fake accent in order to lie his way onto the list of wealthiest people. If you’ve studied Trump over the years, you know that, incredibly, he really does care about perceptions of his net worth more than he does about comparatively small matters like going to prison for treason. More specifically, Trump is scared to death that people will figure out he’s lying about his net worth, that he’s not really a billionaire, and he’s so in debt that in realistic terms he’s broke.

In simple terms, net worth is defined by assets minus debts. Even if your assets are worth billions of dollars, you’re not a billionaire if your debts are even larger. Now we know that in 1984, Donald Trump’s assets were worth around five percent of what he was claiming. If he’s still massively overstating his assets, and you throw in his huge known debts, along with the illegal foreign debts we all know he’s hiding, then Trump’s net worth is probably negative.