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The Daily

How Trump Really Got Rich

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.3107.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2018

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

President Trump has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire. But after spending a year studying tens of thousands of pages of confidential records, our New York Times colleagues uncovered new details about the president’s financial history. Here’s what they found.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You have to swear it open glad before you're allowed in.

0:04.0

Okay.

0:10.0

It has not been cleaned since we took it over.

0:16.0

Can you just kind of walk me through the piles a little bit?

0:20.0

These are thousands of property records, deeds, and mortgages and transfers on every property ever owned going back for 60 years.

0:29.0

There you've got all these buildings here.

0:31.0

There's the house to the own.

0:33.0

And this is an aerial photograph of one of the buildings I assume.

0:35.0

Right.

0:36.0

That's correct.

0:37.0

And then there's bank statements, tax returns, detailed accounting records where we can follow where the money's going.

0:44.0

Okay, so I know this has been a sprawling complicated investigation.

0:49.0

But I wonder if you could just boil it down for me.

0:52.0

What is the big question that you have been trying to answer?

0:57.0

For all of us, the question always comes back to what's the actual ground truth about Donald J. Trump and how he got rich.

1:07.0

My father gave me great knowledge.

1:09.0

Didn't give me a lot.

1:11.0

The famous go-to talking point that Donald Trump says.

1:15.0

I started with a million dollar loan.

1:17.0

I built a company that's worth more than ten billion dollars, okay?

1:21.0

Is that his father loaned him a million dollars?

1:24.0

It's not been easy for me. It is not been easy for me.

...

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