The dude is a billionaire based on his businesses....
...speculate how $1BB net worth could become a few million for each grandchildren...
I read a pretty interesting analysis of Trump's NW claims over the years (and unfortunately his claims are almost all we have to go on), as well as a discussion of how Forbes, et al rank supposedly rich Americans... surprisingly, there is no documentation required, and looking at the figures he submitted for each year in succession (sometimes climbing by a billion+ a year, in a bad economy) only casts further doubt on their accuracy. Note that his only recent, public "refutation" of the claim that he's exaggerated his wealth was to call his accusers jealous men with "400-pound wives". The article gives insider estimates in the $200M range, and noted that he had to go back to his family for loans from the trust twice in his early years after squandering every dollar he had on bad investments. Additionally, what assets he does list are often wildly exaggerated - they gave an example of one of his buildings in NYC listed at $400M with a $120M lien, and a tax assessor's estimate lower than the lien value... and so on. Using conservative values gives the picture of a highly leveraged empire with huge exposure to volatile markets, which of course is what led to his bankruptcies in the past.
So, no, he's not necessarily a great businessman, and he doesn't necessarily have even a billion, or whatever he's claiming today. After all these decades of shameless self-promotion, he probably has little more than he inherited, and even after using every got-dam dirty trick to rob the people whose backs he rode on, he's probably spent close to 100% of his earnings on his embarrassingly gaudy lifestyle.
Obviously, I'm not a fan, but the financials aren't even my core reason... for me, it's that I work in foreign policy and he is so gleefully, unrepentantly ignorant and stupid about international politics that the GOP can never call itself the party of defense within my earshot, after nominating him. He didn't even
have a foreign policy until his protest campaign accidentally broke double digits, at which point he hired a Senator from my state to craft a neocon's wet dream of worldwide destruction which has me dying in some godforsaken shithole because its leaders offended his fragile ego. How about "no"....
