This, from the gang at the New York Times, is simply beautiful:

From the back seat of a stretch limousine heading to meet the first contestants for his new TV show “The Apprentice,” Donald J. Trump bragged that he was a billionaire who had overcome financial hardship.

“I used my brain, I used my negotiating skills and I worked it all out,” he told viewers. “Now, my company is bigger than it ever was and stronger than it ever was.”

It was all a hoax.

I love how they throw the president’s favorite word right back in his face by calling his entire persona a frickin’ “hoax,”

Trump wasn’t a billionaire. In fact, he was broke as fuck, having just filed an individual tax return showing “$89.9 million in net losses from his core businesses for the prior year.” The Apprentice actually saved his ass. It got great ratings and had a nice run on television, earning him hundreds of millions of dollars in income and allowing him to build up his brand and prevent the total collapse of his business empire.

This isn’t some kind of revelation to me. I figured out in 2015 that something along these lines had occurred. Over the last five years, more and more pieces were revealed that helped fill in the puzzle.

What’s almost funny is that I vaguely remember my reaction when I first saw The Apprentice. I was a bit confused because I hadn’t thought about Trump much since his Atlantic City casinos went belly-up in the early 1990’s. The last thing I remembered reading about him was about how he owed the banks so much money that they couldn’t let him go completely broke or they’d never get repaid. Growing up in the New York media market, I’d learned to really dislike the man, and I resented that he’d been bailed out and allowed to continue living the high lifestyle when ordinary people would be living in a truck under a bridge down by the river.

And, yet, a little more than ten years later, here he was presenting himself as some business genius. I wondered what I had missed.

But, truth be told, I didn’t care enough to look into it until after he declared himself a candidate for president and started doing well in the polls. Even before that, I’d learned a bit more about the basics from people who were angry about his whole Obama birth certificate schtick. For example, I knew Trump University had been a giant scam well before it ran into legal trouble.

When I started to look into his businesses myself, it quickly became obvious that he’d reimagined his business model so that instead of building things, he simply got paid for the use of his name. This worked out a lot better for him than trying to run a profitable operation because he didn’t have to do any work beyond the licensing agreements. But it was a weird deal, because people were associating his name with wealth and luxury, and paying for it. But he never actually made money doing anything except pretending to make a lot of money.

I almost admired the way he pulled this scam off, except that he’d revealed himself to be a racist crank and he didn’t just use his name to sell condos. He also used it to bilk people out of their money by, for example, paying tuition to his fake university to learn real estate tips from a guy who lost several fortunes in real estate.

I know they are some people who love Trump and will always love him, but it’s nice to see the truth about him revealed, and revealed in actual tax documents. I consider it a small victory every time someone sees this information and for the first time understands that Trump is a scam artist.

His whole life and image has been a giant hoax, and those who have eyes to see can now see.