Donald Trump biographer Tim O’Brien on Wednesday laid bare the facade of the former president as a business guru.
O’Brien, appearing on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” reflected on the former president’s yearslong practice of “stripping average folks from their paychecks” after The New York Times reported that more than $100 million of Trump’s legal fees had been paid from money fundraised off his peddling of 2020 election lies.
Trump’s Atlantic City casino business “busted average working class folks on the premise that maybe they get rich,” O’Brien recalled. “Of course, some of them were going there for fun, but a larger sort of mojo of the business was selling a false dream to these folks.”
The four-times-indicted presumptive GOP nominee’s “Art Of The Deal” book was “meant to be a Bible about how to be successful in business, when in the real world he’s a serial bankruptcy artist,” he continued.
Trump presented himself on his NBC business reality show “The Apprentice” as an “entrepreneurial guru to the masses and the hardest working corporate executive when in fact he’s lazy, he plays golf most of the time and he’s not particularly bright,” O’Brien explained.
Trump later monetized his presidency “whether it’s his hotel near the White House or now, in a really grand mal, grotesque way, taking campaign finance donations and using to pay his personal legal bills,” he added.