"Donald Trump has always sold himself as something of a self-made man who built an empire out of nothing but a dream and hard work, and a loan from his dad," Stephen Colbert said on Tuesday's Late Show. But it turns out even that "small loan of $1 million" — which, Colbert joked, is "barely enough to silence eight porn stars" — was just a tiny fraction of the $413 million Trump got from his father over the years, according to a blockbuster New York Times investigation. "In order to hide the money from the IRS — which is a crime — Fred Trump had been funneling money to his children for years," he recounted, and Donald Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today's dollars by the time he turned 3.
"So let me get this straight," Colbert said. "At one point, Donald Trump was an extraordinarily wealthy toddler, and today — he is still that."
"You're not going to believe this," Jimmy Kimmel said on Kimmel Live, but "Donald Trump isn't a self-made millionaire after all." His audience reacted accordingly. "He's not just a con man," he added, pointing to Trump's 3-year-old allowance, "he was a con baby first. He was a millionaire, Donald Trump — on his own — by the time he was 8 years old. But he earned that money — he ate every piece of broccoli on his plate." And he was reportedly getting millions of dollars a year from his dad through his 50s, Kimmel said.
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Trump's lawyer called the Times' more serious allegations of tax fraud and evasion "false" and "extremely inaccurate," and Kimmel had an idea: "Gee, if there only was a way to know for sure, maybe some sort of a tax return that could be released or something to clear this all up?"
You can learn more about the Times report from one of the reporters who broke the story, in the CNN interview below. Peter Weber
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