Before the Big Lie, There Was the Man Who Told It

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THE LONG CON — PART I  |  A CATN INVESTIGATIVE REPORT

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Before the Big Lie, There Was the Man Who Told It

Donald †rump did not become a liar on November 4, 2020. He became one long before most of America was paying attention — in the boardrooms of Atlantic City, on the pages of a ghost-written book, and in the bedside cabinet of a Manhattan penthouse where, according to his own first wife, he kept the collected speeches of Adolf Hitler.

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In the late 1980s, while New York City burned with racial tension and the crack epidemic hollowed out its poorest neighborhoods, a real estate developer named Donald †rump was sleeping beside a cabinet. Inside that cabinet, according to a September 1990 Vanity Fair profile written by journalist Marie Brenner and sourced to †rump's own first wife, Ivana, was a book: My New Order, the collected speeches of Adolf Hitler. That is not a metaphor. Nor is a political attack. That is a documented fact, reported while †rump was still a celebrity businessman, thirty years before he seized the most powerful office in the world. Ivana †rump told her attorney, Michael Kennedy, that her husband read from it "from time to time." When Vanity Fair asked †rump about it directly, he did not deny the book existed. He confirmed it. He said a friend had given him "a book about Hitler." Then, in a single breath, he claimed he would "never read" it, a statement rendered absurd by the fact that he had just admitted it was there.

This detail matters — not as a curiosity, not as tabloid fodder — but as the opening chapter of a story that has been hiding in plain sight for four decades. The man who would one day call Democrats "enemies of the people," label antifascists domestic terrorists, demand the arrest of political opponents, and build an enemies list of 350 Americans targeted for retribution was, in the late 1980s, sleeping beside the words of the twentieth century's most accomplished propagandist. The Heritage Foundation's own president would later describe their shared political blueprint, Project 2025, as a "second American Revolution — bloodless if the Left allows it to be." †rump did not discover authoritarianism in 2020. He had been studying it for decades.

The Myth of the Businessman

To understand why the Big Lie of 2020 worked on so many Americans, one must first understand the bigger lie that preceded it by thirty years: that Donald †rump was a successful businessman. In 1987, a book called Trump: The Art of the Deal appeared on shelves across the country. It spent 51 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It turned a regional real estate developer into a national celebrity, the embodiment of American ambition and deal-making genius. What readers did not know, what they could not know, was that the man whose name appeared on the cover had not written a single word of it.

The book was ghostwritten by journalist Tony Schwartz, who spent eighteen months following †rump for research. What Schwartz found during that time has haunted him ever since. In a landmark 2016 interview with The New Yorker, Schwartz said he deeply regretted his role in mythologizing the man. "Lying is second nature to him," Schwartz said. "He has no attention span. There's an emptiness inside †rump. There's an absence of a soul. There's an absence of a heart." He said writing the book was "the greatest regret" of his life, called it "blood money," and said the book should be taken out of print or recategorized as fiction. "I put lipstick on a pig," Schwartz said. "I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting †rump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is."

The term "truthful hyperbole" — which appeared in The Art of the Deal as †rump's supposed business philosophy, a charming admission that he stretched the truth to close deals — was not †rump's phrase at all. Schwartz coined it. It was, in Schwartz's own words, a way of putting a palatable label on something far darker: a man who lied as a matter of routine, without guilt, without consequence, and without end. The book described †rump as a shrewd dealmaker who understood how to read people, how to build things, how to win. The New York Times would later examine his actual financial records and find something else entirely.

DOCUMENTED RECORD — THE SIX BANKRUPTCIES

Bankruptcy No. 1 — Trump Taj Mahal, 1991.

Opened in April 1990 and financed with $675 million in junk bonds at 14% interest, the Taj Mahal defaulted on interest payments within six months of opening. By 1991 it filed for Chapter 11. †rump surrendered 50% ownership to bondholders to restructure the debt.

Bankruptcies No. 2 and 3 — Trump Castle and Trump Plaza, 1992.

Unable to keep up with debt obligations on two more Atlantic City casinos, both properties filed for Chapter 11 protection in 1992.

Bankruptcy No. 4 — The Plaza Hotel, New York, 1992.

†rump acquired the Plaza Hotel in 1988 for $390 million, financing it with $550 million in debt. By November 1992 it filed for bankruptcy. He surrendered 49% to lenders.

Bankruptcy No. 5 — Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, 2004.

The parent company of his Atlantic City operations filed for Chapter 11 after accruing approximately $1.8 billion in debt — †rump's largest bankruptcy to that point. He resigned as CEO.

Bankruptcy No. 6 — Trump Entertainment Resorts, 2009.

The restructured entity filed again. †rump left as chairman that same year. The Taj Mahal, which he had called "the eighth wonder of the world," closed permanently in 2016.

In each of these collapses, a pattern repeated itself with remarkable consistency. The losses fell not on †rump personally but on investors, bondholders, contractors, and workers. The painters who painted his casinos. The electricians who wired them. The small business owners who supplied them. These were working people — the kind who live in Joplin and Springfield and every rural city in Missouri — who had done their jobs, signed their contracts, and were left holding nothing when the buildings went dark. †rump, meanwhile, negotiated personal liability protections that shielded his own wealth. As the New York Times documented in a landmark 2016 investigation, "even as his companies did poorly, Mr. †rump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business."

During the same period he was filing these bankruptcies and failing his investors, †rump was also failing the Internal Revenue Service. A bombshell New York Times investigation published in September 2020, based on over two decades of †rump's tax return data, found that in eleven of the eighteen years examined, he paid zero federal income taxes. In 2016 — the year he won the presidency, campaigning as a billionaire champion of the working class — he paid $750 in federal income taxes. In 2017, his first year in the White House, he paid $750 again. The method was straightforward: he reported losing far more money than he made, turning his cascade of business failures into a tax-avoidance strategy. His financial disclosures claimed he earned at least $434.9 million in 2018. His tax filings reported a loss of $47.4 million the same year. He was telling two entirely different stories to two entirely different audiences, and only one of those audiences had the power to hold him accountable.

PUTTING IT IN PERSPECTIVE

A certified nursing assistant in Jasper County, Missouri, earning $14 an hour and working full time, pays more in federal income taxes in a single month than Donald †rump paid in all of 2016 and all of 2017 combined. A school bus driver in Joplin, getting up before dawn to drive someone else's children to school, pays more. A waitress working doubles on the weekend pays more. These are the same Americans †rump told, from a golden escalator in a Manhattan tower, that he alone understood their struggles and would fight for them. While working Americans paid hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars in federal taxes out of every single paycheck, money withheld automatically before they ever saw a dime of it, the self-proclaimed billionaire who told them he was their champion paid a grand total of $750 in federal income taxes for the entire year of 2016. Not per paycheck. Not per month. For the whole year. And then, in 2017, he did it again.

The fraud did not stop with his personal returns. In 2022, the Trump Organization itself was convicted of seventeen counts of tax fraud after prosecutors documented a fifteen-year scheme, from 2005 to 2021, to pay top executives in untaxed perks: rent-free luxury apartments, Mercedes-Benz vehicles, private school tuition. The company's longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty to fifteen counts including grand larceny and criminal tax fraud, admitted to concealing $1.7 million in personal income, and served time on Rikers Island. The Trump Organization was fined the maximum available penalty: $1.6 million. The man who ran for president promising to run America like a business had been running his business like a crime for fifteen years.

Death Penalty Ads and Innocent Children

On April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old woman was beaten and sexually assaulted while jogging in Central Park. The city was traumatized. Within days, police had arrested five teenagers — four Black, one Latino, ranging in age from fourteen to sixteen — and extracted confessions from them during marathon interrogation sessions without parents or attorneys present. The teenagers recanted almost immediately. None of them had entered guilty pleas. The evidence against them was thin, the confessions coerced. None of that mattered to Donald †rump.

Eleven days after the attack, †rump paid $85,000 to run full-page advertisements in four New York City newspapers. The ads read, in capital letters: "BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!" He wrote that the boys "should be forced to suffer" and that "when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes." At a press conference following their arrest, †rump told reporters: "It's more than anger. It's hatred, and I want society to hate them." The five boys were convicted. They were sent to prison. They served between six and thirteen years. In 2002, a serial rapist named Matias Reyes confessed that he alone had committed the crime. DNA evidence confirmed it. The convictions of all five men were vacated. New York City paid them a combined $41 million settlement in 2014.

†rump called the $41 million settlement "a disgrace." Asked in 2019 whether he would apologize to the exonerated men, he said: "You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt." They had not. Not once. Not ever. During the 2024 presidential debate, with Kamala Harris watching from across the stage, †rump repeated the lie again, claiming the men had "pled guilty" and "killed a person." They had pled not guilty. The victim survived. The five men, now known as the Exonerated Five, filed a federal defamation lawsuit against him. As of this report's publication, a federal judge has allowed the case to proceed, ruling that †rump's statements were "demonstrably false." He has never apologized. He never will.

"It's more than anger. It's hatred, and I want society to hate them." — DONALD †RUMP, PRESS CONFERENCE FOLLOWING THE ARREST OF FIVE INNOCENT TEENAGERS, 1989

This was not a momentary lapse of judgment. This was not a man swept up in a city's panic who later reconsidered. This was a man who, thirty-five years later, still refused to acknowledge five exonerated human beings as innocent, even after a court of law vacated their convictions, even after DNA evidence confirmed they had nothing to do with the crime, even after the actual perpetrator confessed. For †rump, the lie about those five young men was not a mistake to be corrected. It was a tool to be wielded. It always has been.

The Birther Lie: A Rehearsal for 2020

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States on January 20, 2009. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review. He served in the Illinois State Senate and then the United States Senate before winning the presidency with 365 electoral votes. The state of Hawaii's health director, Chiyome Fukino, issued a formal statement confirming she had personally reviewed Obama's original vital records and that he "was born in Hawai'i and is a natural-born American citizen." Every relevant authority, every court, every official investigation confirmed the same thing. None of it mattered to Donald †rump.

Beginning in 2011, as he contemplated a presidential run, †rump launched what would become a five-year campaign to delegitimize the first Black president by questioning whether he was a real American. He told television audiences he had sent investigators to Hawaii and that "they cannot believe what they're finding." He tweeted in August 2012 that "an extremely credible source" had told him Obama's birth certificate "is a fraud." ABC News tallied 67 instances in which †rump tweeted or retweeted content questioning the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate. When Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011, an extraordinary concession by a sitting president to a transparent smear campaign, †rump did not stop. He kept going for five more years.

He questioned the certificate's authenticity. He suggested Obama's college records would reveal his "real" place of birth. When the Hawaii health director who had confirmed Obama's citizenship died in a plane crash in 2013, †rump cast conspiratorial doubt on her death. In June 2014, he tweeted: "I was the one who got Obama to release his birth certificate, or whatever that was!" — a statement that managed to simultaneously take credit for forcing a disclosure he claimed was fake. It was Orwellian in its construction, and it was entirely deliberate.

On September 16, 2016, with the presidential election seven weeks away, †rump held a carefully stage-managed press event at his new Washington hotel. He featured military veterans endorsing his campaign for approximately thirty minutes. Then, at the end, he walked to the microphone and said eleven words: "President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period." He took no questions. He walked off the stage. In those same remarks, he falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign had started the birther controversy, a claim every major fact-checking organization immediately debunked, and falsely claimed that he himself had finished it. Neither statement was true. Every major fact-checker confirmed: Clinton's campaign had never raised questions about Obama's birthplace, and †rump had not finished the controversy; he had launched it to national prominence and sustained it for five years after it should have died.

PUTTING IT IN PERSPECTIVE

The birther lie was not a sideshow. It was a rehearsal. For five years, †rump demonstrated that a significant portion of the American electorate could be convinced to believe something that was demonstrably, provably, officially false — if the lie was told loudly enough, repeatedly enough, and by someone with enough celebrity to amplify it. He learned that corrections did not work. He learned that evidence did not matter. He learned that the louder he said it, the more people believed it. He learned all of this eleven years before November 3, 2020. The Big Lie about the election was not born in the days after votes were counted. It was born in the years he spent lying about a birth certificate. When the time came to tell the biggest lie of his life, he already knew exactly how.

The Escalator, the Slur, and the Long Shot That Wasn't

On June 16, 2015, Donald †rump descended a golden escalator inside his Manhattan tower and announced that he was running for president of the United States. The British gambling company Ladbrokes offered 150-to-1 odds against him winning. His campaign had hired a casting company to fill the crowd with paid actors. Almost no one in mainstream political media believed he was a serious candidate. Within the hour, he had said something that would define the next decade of American political life.

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best," †rump said. "They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." He did not produce evidence. He did not cite data. There was none to cite: studies consistently showed that immigrants committed crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. None of that mattered. The speech went viral. The outrage was national. And his poll numbers went up.

What the political establishment failed to understand in that moment, what it would continue to fail to understand for the next decade, was that †rump was not making an argument. He was not trying to persuade through evidence or reason. He was performing. He was identifying enemies, naming them loudly, and watching his audience respond. He had learned this from the Central Park Five. He had practiced it through birtherism. Now he was doing it at the scale of a presidential campaign. The ghostwriter who had spent eighteen months at his side in the 1980s had warned anyone who would listen. "Trump is not only willing to lie," Tony Schwartz said, "but he doesn't get bothered by it, doesn't feel guilty about it, isn't preoccupied by it." Nobody listened. Ladbrokes changed its odds. The rest, as they say, is history — or rather, the history we are all still living through.

"Lying is second nature to him. There's an emptiness inside †rump. There's an absence of a soul. There's an absence of a heart." — TONY SCHWARTZ, GHOSTWRITER OF THE ART OF THE DEAL, SPEAKING TO CBS NEWS, 2019

By the time Donald †rump placed his hand on a Bible on January 20, 2017, he had spent nearly four decades building one of the most documented records of public dishonesty in American history. He had called five innocent children guilty and never apologized. He had sold a bestselling book built on fabricated success while losing over a billion dollars. He had bankrupted six businesses, leaving workers and investors to absorb the losses while protecting his own wealth. He had paid as little as $750 in federal income taxes while asking working Americans to trust that he understood their financial struggles. He had spent five years pushing a racist lie about the first Black president and dismissed the entire thing with eleven words and no accountability. And he had launched his presidential campaign with a speech that compared Mexican immigrants to rapists, watched his poll numbers climb, and concluded, correctly, that for a large enough portion of America, the truth was simply not required.

That is the man who took the oath of office. That is the man who would go on to lose the 2020 election, by more than seven million votes, by 306 electoral votes to 232, certified by Republican and Democratic officials alike in state after state, and then tell the country it had been stolen. He did not invent lying in 2020. He had been perfecting it since the 1980s, in a bedside cabinet in a Manhattan penthouse, beside the collected speeches of a man who understood better than almost anyone in history what a crowd will believe if you say it loud enough and long enough and with enough fury.

What that oath concealed was already known to the intelligence community. On January 6, 2017 — fourteen days before he placed his hand on that Bible — the CIA, ƒBI, and NSA jointly released a classified assessment with a single, unambiguous conclusion: Vladimir Putin had personally ordered an influence campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, to damage Hillary Clinton, and to help Donald †rump win. The agencies assessed this with high confidence. Two years later, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, after reviewing over one million documents and interviewing more than 200 witnesses, confirmed the finding in nearly 1,000 pages, calling the evidence "irrefutable" and the counterintelligence threat to the United States "grave." Most damning of all: †rump's own campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had been sharing internal campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimni, a man the committee formally identified as a Russian intelligence officer. †rump called all of it a hoax. His own party's Senate committee called it irrefutable. He had not just lied his way to the presidency. He had been helped across the finish line by a foreign government, and then spent the next four years pretending it never happened. Part Two of this series will return to this record in full.

Part Two of this series documents the Big Lie itself: the votes, the courts, the officials †rump's own party who told him the truth, the $787.5 million Fox News paid rather than let its anchors testify under oath, and the four separate occasions on which †rump admitted, in his own words, that he lost.

WHAT YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW

The Truth Is Not Enough. Action Is.

Reading this is a start. Sharing it is a step further. But the most powerful thing any person can do right now is make sure that the people around them, especially those who have been told a different story, have access to the documented record. Democracy does not defend itself. People defend it.

• Share this article with someone who needs to read it, especially someone who might push back.

• Verify your voter registration at vote.org and confirm the registrations of people you know.

• Support independent journalism that does not answer to corporate advertisers or political donors. CATN operates without institutional funding because the truth should not be for sale.

• Connect with local civic organizations in your area. In southwest Missouri: Indivisible Joplin and 50501 Joplin are doing the ground-level work that national organizations cannot do from a distance.

• Follow and support the independent Substack journalists who are documenting this regime in real time, including Heather Cox Richardson, Judd Legum at Popular Information, and Aaron Parnas.

THE LONG CON — INVESTIGATIVE SERIES

Part I — Before the Big Lie, There Was the Man Who Told It

Part II — The Big Lie: 81 Million Votes, 64 Dismissed Cases, and the Words †rump Said in Private — coming next

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