Admiration is too strong, bemused is more like it. I have learned not to fight the tide 777. If see a tsunami I go for higher ground, there are people who depend on me to be smart about the battles I pick. Trump, just might be the next president of the United States. <iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/xIraCchPDhk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
You are already on record claiming to admire organized crime/mafia. I can't say that Trump won't be president, no one really knows...but I don't see him getting the funding necessary to run a full fledged campaign. Trump is not a real patriot in my opinion. He reminds me of a small town real estate developer who wants to run for mayor for the sole purpose of being able to grease the real estate projects he has in mind. He is scum. There is nothing amusing about the guy, and worse is the idiot Americans who get behind him. Taking advantage of a real opportunity is one thing...being an opportunist is quite different.
And let me affirm that. I have no problem admiring a worthy adversary, please review my posts for clarity. I do not engage in schadenfreude, if you are good at something, that is great, I have no problems with that. You, for example are quite incendiary, I admire that. You are one of the best so called trolls I have ever seen. Do I agree with all of your tactics, such as lifting statements out of context, as you just tried to do? Nope. But you are good at it. So I say Viva La 777!
That is incorrect. He did sue an author who wrote he wasn't a billionaire, and the judge promptly threw it out, because they realized he put too much value on his brand recognition. ----------------------------------- "Donald Trump has filed a $5 billion defamation suit against the author and publisher of the 2005 book, "TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald." The suit filed Monday in Camden, N.J., claims author Timothy L. O'Brien, a New York Times journalist, grossly misrepresented Trump's net worth and "knowingly made egregiously false and malicious statements about Trump, his family, his personal life and his business dealings," Trump said in a news release issued Tuesday. Trump claims in the suit that he provided O'Brien and Warner Books with correct information, which they chose to ignore. Trump is seeking $2.5 billion in compensatory damages and $2.5 billion in punitive damages from O'Brien and Warner Books."
Read the book I referenced earlier. The author compared his statements at different times, and they were not matching. Also, his ranking on the Forbes has been wildly fluctuating over the 25+ years... My personal guess is around 800 mill. He owns lots of things what we can't put an objective money value on, like his name recognition.
I wonder how much of that is the intangible "goodwill" he attaches to the Trump brand. $2 billion? In any event, I think it will amortize very quickly as his foolishness continues, because sometimes bad publicity is really bad publicity.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...nald-trump-is-a-mere-millionaire-1687222.html $5bn: the cost of saying Donald Trump is a mere millionaire Businessman sues journalist who questioned scale of his wealth, reports Stephen Foley Donald Trump's response, when an investigative journalist published a book alleging he wasn't the billionaire he claimed, was to fire off a $5bn lawsuit, a typically thunderous gesture from the orange-haired skyscraper mogul and star of the US version of The Apprentice. But when hauled before lawyers to give a testimony in the case and explain how he valued his empire, he gave answers that would have made an accountant blush. In the 2007 deposition, made public before a court hearing yesterday, Mr Trump said he uses "mental projections" to estimate the worth of his properties, admitted exaggerating the success of his businesses ("who wouldn't?"), and says that his perception of his own personal "brand value" goes up and down with his mood. The upshot is that Mr Trump's actual worth is more mysterious than ever, at a time when he is fighting to salvage numerous property deals from the recession and has seen his Atlantic City casinos business go bankrupt. Mr Trump says that anyone claiming he is not a billionaire is undermining his business, and that the allegations in TrumpNation, a book by New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien, had cost him lucrative deals across the world. Mr O'Brien and his publishers were in a New Jersey court yesterday arguing that his lawsuit is ridiculous, and asking a judge to throw out the mogul's claims for $5bn in compensation and damages. Mr O'Brien wrote that Mr Trump was worth a quarter of a billion at best, and perhaps no more than $150m. At the same time, Mr Trump was telling his banks and Atlantic City casino regulators that his businesses were worth $3.6bn â and telling any reporter who asked that he was worth $6bn. The difference, he explained, was that his personal "brand value" amounts to around $2bn. "There are those that say the value of the brand is very, very valuable," he said at the deposition, and added: "My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feeling." With lawyers preparing for yesterday's hearing, Mr Trump remained belligerent over the weekend. Talking to the Wall Street Journal, he promised that Mr O'Brien would "wish he had never heard of that goddam book". In the deposition, Mr Trump was confronted with evidence that, in public interviews, he had exaggerated his ownership stake in some of the properties that bear his name. There are Trump-branded skyscrapers, casinos, golf clubs and other businesses throughout the world, but many have outside investors or bank loans underpinning them. An assessment by Deutsche Bank, when it underwrote a loan for one property, was that Mr Trump was worth $788m. He said Deutsche did not count all his assets. There was also a skirmish over the meaning of the word "average". While he publicly claimed that an apartment development was selling for $1,300 per square foot on average, he conceded that "on some units I averaged $1,300" â meaning that this was most likely closer to a best price than to an average. The developer was asked if he ever exaggerated in statements about his properties. "I think everybody does. Who wouldn't?" he said. "Would you like me to say, 'oh, gee, the building is not doing well, blah, blah, blah, come by the building' â nobody talks that way. Who would ever talk that way?" At one point, a questioner asks if that means he inflates the value of his properties in general, non-financial public statements? "Not beyond reason," Mr Trump said
Trumps suit was thrown out http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0311/Is_Trump_rich.html Is Trump rich? Donald Trump said ludicrous things about Obama's birth (yes, people have interviewed his kindergarten classmates) this morning, and also this: [Part] of the beauty of me is that I'm very rich. So if I need $600 million, I can put $600 million myself. That's a huge advantage. Really? Well, Trump once called Trump's net worth "one of the great mysteries of the business world, and the touchy Trump sued the estimable Tim O'Brien for pegging his net worth, in a 2005 book, as low as $150 million, when Trump was claiming it was $4 billion. The suit was thrown out. And net worth is a tricky thing: Trump's share in The Apprentice, for instance, is quite valuable, and he reportedly owns parts of real estate projects. But those aren't necessarily the kind of liquid assets from which you can withdraw, or even easily borrow, $600 million. A major obstacle to Trump's running, my colleague Maggie Haberman has pointed out, is that at some point he'd actually be required to disclose his assets -- something he's spent his entire career trying not to do.