The billion-dollar boaster: Trump’s taste for hyperbole

Donald Trump built his brand on shameless exaggeration – or what he prefers to call “truthful hyperbole”, said Gwenda Blair on Politico. It was a feature of his first Manhattan project in the mid-1970s, when he refurbished the Grand Hyatt Hotel. To make the hotel sound even grander, he relabelled the floor numbers (the sixth became the fourteenth) and claimed, repeatedly and falsely, that it had the biggest ballroom in the city.

He repeated the trick with Trump Tower, which rises to a 68th floor, despite only having 58, and was billed – again falsely – as the tallest concrete structure in the world. But Trump’s “superpower” could now be his undoing.

Last week, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, announced a $250m civil lawsuit against him and his company, alleging fraud on a “staggering” scale: that for years he has inflated the value of his assets by billions, in order to secure cheaper loans.

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Some of the examples cited are “jaw-dropping”, said the New York Post. Trump claimed, for instance, that his apartment in Trump Tower spanned more than 30,000sq ft and was worth $327m, yet it was only a third of that size and worth a fraction of that. But Trump’s boastful ways were hardly a secret. If big banks gave him favourable rates on the basis of his claims, more fool them.

Trump would hardly be the first business leader to engage in this sort of spin, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. James is making a mountain out of a molehill. She has yet to identify any victims, and it’s unclear whether her allegations “will come to much in the way of proof or consequence”.

Trump is facing two federal criminal investigations – into the storing of classified documents in Mar-a-Lago, and the efforts to overturn the 2020 election – that could result in serious charges. By comparison, this civil case is a pesky sideshow.

It’s true that the lawsuit itself won’t put Trump at risk of prison time, said Matt Ford in The New Republic. But it could do fatal damage to his company. If James’s suit prevails, it will not only lead to costly fines and penalties; it will also severely undermine The Trump Organisation, by effectively stopping it doing business in the state of New York. The fact that it is a state-level proceeding means that, even if Trump reclaims the presidency in 2024, he won’t be able to make the case go away. This makes it perhaps the most potent threat facing Trump right now