It’s a big week for John Barron. On Monday night, Barron accompanied Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, to Mt. Vernon, the country estate of America’s first President. On Tuesday evening, Barron will preside over his first state dinner at the White House. And he will use his real name: Donald Trump.
Trump hasn’t availed himself of the alias John Barron in years. But thirty-four years ago, in 1984, things were different. That May, Trump claimed to be Barron, a fictional official with the Trump Organization, in a phone call with Jonathan Greenberg, a young researcher at Forbes, who was working on the magazine’s annual ranking of the four hundred richest people in America. Two years earlier, Trump had made it onto the Forbes list for the first time, with an estimated fortune of a hundred million dollars. In an effort to get himself moved up, Trump, speaking as Barron, insisted that he was worth at least nine hundred million dollars, and probably much more, because he had recently inherited the bulk of the real-estate fortune of his father, Fred. “Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump,” Barron told Greenberg. “You have down Fred Trump . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now.”
As Greenberg recounted in a piece in the Washington Post a few days ago, practically everything about this phone call was phony. Fred Trump kept hold of his real-estate empire until he died, in 1999, and in his will he divided it up among his four surviving children and some grandchildren. In 1984, far from being a billionaire, Donald Trump was worth less than a hundred million dollars. Probably much less: Greenberg now says he shouldn’t have been on the Forbes list at all. “When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn’t see through the ruse,” Greenberg wrote. “Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him.”
At practically any other time in American history, public confirmation that the occupant of the Oval Office is a serial con man who lied, schemed, and impersonated his way to public prominence would have dominated the news for weeks. These days, though, the media is virtually overwhelmed by the sheer number of Trump stories. When Greenberg’s article appeared, on Friday, it had to compete with the latest developments involving the former F.B.I. director James Comey, the Trump associate Michael Cohen, the former F.B.I. official Andrew McCabe, and North Korea. Although a few cable news shows and commentators did pick up on Greenberg’s piece, the burst of interest didn’t last long.
That’s unfortunate, because the seventy-one-year-old Trump currently in the White House is merely an older version of the thirty-seven-year-old Trump who misled Greenberg all those years ago. “When I first contacted him for the inaugural issue, Trump pulled out all the stops to convince me that he was the wealthiest real-estate developer in New York,” Greenberg wrote in his article. “At an afternoon-long meeting in his cavernous Fifth Avenue office, he argued that his family was worth more than $900 million and deserved to be higher on our list than any of the far more accomplished developers (with names like Rose and Rudin) who had spent generations building top-tier housing in the golden borough of Manhattan.” After Greenberg reacted skeptically to some of Trump’s claims, he got a call from the developer’s lawyer, Roy Cohn. “I am sitting here looking at his current bank statement,” Cohn said. “It shows he’s got more than $500 million in liquid assets, just cash. That’s just Donald, nothing to do with Fred, and it’s just cash. He’s worth more than any of those other guys in this town!”
Whether you find these recollections amusing or pathetic is a matter of taste. The disturbing aspect of the story is that Trump and Cohn’s flimflam routine worked. Forbes didn’t take Trump entirely at his word: Greenberg says he was proud to have challenged many of his numbers. But the magazine did put Trump on its list of the super-rich, and it kept him there for years on the strength of an estimate of his fortune that Greenberg now concedes was greatly exaggerated. “The joke was on me—and everyone else,” Greenberg writes. “Trump’s fabrications provided the basis for a vastly inflated wealth assessment for the Forbes 400 that would give him cachet for decades as a triumphant businessman.” In 1990, after many of Trump’s businesses ran into serious trouble, Forbes took him off its list for a time, but in 1996 it restored his position. Once again, the magazine’s estimate of his net worth was probably greatly inflated.
Judging by subsequent history, the lesson that Trump learned from this experience was that lying to the media works. His regular appearances on Forbes’s list didn’t merely give him bragging rights in New York real-estate circles. They also burnished his personal brand, which he eventually rode to a starring role on a network-television show, “The Apprentice.” From there, he set his sights on the White House.
Another lesson that Trump seems to have learned early is that, if you are going to make things up, there’s no point underdoing it. When he was running for President, he claimed to be worth more than ten billion dollars, even though most independent analysts reckoned the true figure was less than half that. “Trump has latched onto such fanciful figures not simply because he’s insecure about his wealth but because he knows that pretending he has that kind of money keeps him in the media’s eye and keeps potential business partners interested in him,” Timothy L. O’Brien, the author of a critical 2005 biography of Trump, noted at Bloomberg View on Monday. “It’s all part of the long con.”
A long con, indeed. And a tactic that Trump continues to use. In the past few days alone, the President has claimed that North Korea has already “agreed to denuclearization.” (It hasn’t). He has described his Mar-a-Lago resort as “the Southern White House.” (It’s a Trump enterprise, not a public building.) And he’s said that his poll numbers are the highest ever. (The latest Gallup survey puts his job approval at just thirty-eight per cent.) About the only difference, these days, is that when Trump has a self-serving whopper to spread around, he goes on Twitter and attaches his own name to it. In the age of @realDonaldTrump, there is no longer any need for John Barron.
