Two decades ago, when Donald Trump introduced himself to the American public from the back of a limousine going through New York City, he told a simple story of triumph disguised as a confession.
“About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt,” he said in the opening scene of his reality TV show, The Apprentice, which premiered in January 2004. “But I fought back, and I won – big league.”
The show offered Americans an opportunity to see Trump as he saw himself: a successful real estate mogul with towering skyscrapers, vast golf courses and the gusto needed to broker a good deal. A man who found redemption through hard work, an epitome of the American dream topped with a strawberry blond quiff.
Twenty years later, Trump’s real estate empire is facing peril. For 11 weeks, the inner workings of his company have been discussed at a New York fraud trial. A judge has already decided Trump committed fraud. He will rule on punishment later this year.
Trump’s companies could lose their New York licenses, making it nearly impossible for him to run his real estate business. He is also facing a vast fine – state lawyers made the case for a $370m penalty on Friday – which could force the company to sell off its properties.
At this point, prosecutors and Trump’s defense team have rested their cases. Closing arguments are set to take place on Thursday.
The last three months offered Trump and his lawyers their chance to defend Trump in court against accusations that he purposely exaggerated his net worth on government documents. Instead, they worked to uphold the shimmering portrait Trump has painted of himself for the last 40 years. The story that gave Trump celebrity and, ultimately, the White House could lead to the downfall of his company.
Deja vu in court
A scathing pre-trial summary judgment made the trial an uphill battle for Trump’s team. Issued on 26 September, less than a week before the trial started, the ruling said documents submitted by prosecutors showed Trump had committed fraud. The ruling is currently under review by an appellate court, but if upheld, Trump will lose his business licenses, severely curtailing his real estate business in New York.
The ruling was supposed to dramatically narrow what the trial should cover. Instead, Trump and his team relied on many of the arguments judge Arthur Engoron had already struck down in his ruling.
If figures on government documents were wrong, Trump’s lawyers argued, it was the fault of Mazars USA, the Trump Organization’s former accounting firm.
“Every decision I made was based on all the information that I would have gotten from Mazars,” Donald Trump Jr, a defendant in the case, said during his testimony.
When asked whether it was the Trump Organization’s or Mazars’ duty to ensure the documents were accurate, Trump emphasized that the firm “got paid a lot of money to do this work”.
But in his pre-trial ruling, Engoron noted that Mazars had disclaimers on the statements that said Trump was responsible for “fair representation” in the financial statement.
“The Mazars disclaimers put the onus for accuracy squarely on the defendants’ shoulders,” Engoron wrote.
Inside and outside the courtroom, Trump also tried to argue the merit of the “worthless clause”, a disclaimer on the financial documents that he argues signals to lenders that the estimations on the financial documents are “worthless”.
Again, in his pre-trial ruling, Engoron had deemed the worthless clause argument moot.
“The ‘worthless clause’ does not say what defendants say it says, does not rise to the level of an enforceable disclaimer and cannot be used to insulate fraud,” Engoron wrote.
Will Thomas, a professor of business law at the University of Michigan, said that Trump’s team seemed to largely offer arguments that were “about whether the court got its summary judgment wrong”.
“It’s not that they’re entirely irrelevant, but I don’t suspect that any of that stuff really meaningfully moved the needle” for Trump, he said.
What also didn’t help Trump is the seeming evasiveness he and other Trump Organization executives, including his two adults sons, showed on the stand when faced with documents that implied they were aware that their valuations were inflated.
Thomas noted that Engoron will have a lot of leeway in interpreting evasiveness on the stand. If Trump appeals, the appellate court “can review legal statutes, judicial opinions – they can assess whether the trial court got the law right”, he said.
“But they’re not in the courtroom. They can’t judge all those intangibles that go with live testimony. So the standards of review make it really hard to overturn factual determinations, particularly when it comes to something like ‘Which witnesses do I give credence to?’,” Thomas said.
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‘A fantasy world’
One of the more critical points Engoron made in his pre-trial ruling outlined what he called Trump’s “fantasy world”, which he said relied on “bogus arguments”.
“In defendants’ world: rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air … and square footage [is] subjective,” he wrote. “That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”
Here, Engoron essentially peeled away the argument that real estate valuation is an “art”, free from laws and restrictions.
But Trump and his team continued to defend the idea that Trump was in his rights to determine the value of his properties. On the stand, he insisted that Mar-a-Lago was worth at least $1bn, though Palm Beach valued the property at between $18m and $27m.
Trump and his family were dismissive about the role legal restrictions played in valuations. For example, Mar-a-Lago’s deed says that Trump will not turn the club into a private residence. Trump said that turning his office building at 40 Wall Street into condominium units was an “absolutely perfect use for that building” though Trump had given up rights to turn it into a condominium in the building’s ground lease agreement.
Trump and his lawyers argued that the former president could just look at a building and decide its worth. “All you have to do is look at a picture of the building and say, ‘That building’,” Trump said while on the witness stand in early November, talking about the Trump office building at 40 Wall Street. “You just look at it and you say: ‘That’s worth a lot more than $550m.’”
Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer and author of The Truth About Trump, said that Trump’s success in business has always been a central element of his identity, even if he knows it’s based on exaggerations.
“A salesman has to love his product in order to sell it, and he’s committed to that principle,” D’Antonio said. “He assumed that finance and business were rigged games, so he assumes politics is a rigged game. This belief justified doing anything.”
Trump has always surrounded himself with people who will uphold the ideals he sets out for himself. In this trial, Trump’s lawyers were always ready to indulge the president with compliments while defending him, reassuring him of his wealth and power.
Christopher Kise, Trump’s lead attorney, said in opening arguments that Trump “has made billions of dollars building one of the most successful real estate empires in the world”. Alina Habba, another Trump lawyer, echoed Trump’s claim that Mar-a-Lago was worth at least $1bn.
“I assure you that there is a person out there that would buy that property, that spectacular property, for way over a billion dollars,” she said in her opening statement. “That is not fraud, that is real estate.”
Who makes the final judgment?
Rather than seek vindication from the court, Trump and his defense team often seemed more interested in appealing to another audience: the millions of viewers who watched The Apprentice and saw a wealthy businessman fly over Manhattan in a helicopter emblazoned with his name. The ones who believe his story.
Throughout the trial, Trump seemed uninterested in convincing Engoron of his innocence and took on a strategy of provocation, blasting Engoron and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, on social media, calling the trial a “witch-hunt” and denouncing the judge even while on the stand.
“How do you rule against somebody and call them a fraud, as the president of the United States, who did a great job,” said an enraged Trump during his testimony. “It’s a terrible thing you did. You knew nothing about me.”
It’s the bravado that helped Trump gain millions of viewers on his reality TV show, back in the days when he was most associated with the phrase “you’re fired”.
Trump seems to be betting that amping up his story will help rile up his supporters for the 2024 election, though it scores him no legal points. In the end, how voters judge him may be more important for Trump. His strategy is working – Trump is leading in Republican polls in a field of former allies and followers.
But the courts are following Trump closely. Besides the potential decimation of his real estate company, Trump faces the possibility of prison time with future criminal cases that are set to go to trial. If his New York fraud trial has been any indication so far, the story that raised him to fame can only do so much to save him.
