President Business Deals sucks at business and making deals. That's the takeaway from a breathtaking New York Times report on Trump's tax filings from 1985 to 1994, which show Trump lost about $100 million every year for a decade. "Year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer," says the Paper of Record. Losing $1 billion over 10 years, he was hemorrhaging more than $11,000 an hour. In each of 1990 and 1991, he lost around $250 million—more than double the losses of the nearest taxpayers in the public IRS information the Times reviewed. In 1994, "almost $2 of every $100 reported to the IRS in losses were Donald Trump's." Donald Trump is a man of superlatives, so it was never enough for him to be a shit businessman. He had to be the worst.

This confirmation that the Artful Dealmaker's public persona was an almighty scam will not be a shock to many people outside the president's authoritarian cult. For those in it, this won't matter at all. They didn't much care when we learned his father hadn't actually given him "a small loan of $1 million" to get his business started, but in fact had left him over $400 million through a variety of tax dodges and outright fraud—and then bailed him out when he fucked things up. The reaction on his favorite teevee show, Fox & Friends, represented how the 40-or-so percent of Americans who will support him no matter what will process this: "If anything, you read this and you're like 'Wow, it's pretty impressive, all the things that he's done in his life,'" said host Ainsley Earhardt. "It's beyond what most of us could ever achieve." Ain't that the truth.

Trump runs his mouth during a photoshoot after he took over Central Park’s Wollman Rink in 1986. Ted Thai Getty Images

Meanwhile, back in reality, don't be so sure that this puncturing of the Big Hulking Trumpian Bullshit Balloon won't have some effect going forward. Trump will need the support of the five-to-eight percent of people who do not approve of him personally or of his job performance, but could see him as a more "effective" leader—the kind of guy who Shakes Things Up and Gets Things Done—than whomever his ultimate Democratic opponent may be.

In 2016, at least, that notion depended mightily on the tawdry myth of his self-made billionaireness, delivered into the popular imagination through the all-American television conveyor belt of The Apprentice. Suddenly, the Rogue Outsider Tycoon Man With Businessman Skills is a feckless heir who squandered his fortune and greased by on a slip-n-slide of snake oil and bullshit. You lost a billion dollars of your Daddy's money seems like a decent debate line for his eventual opponent, even if some of the cash belonged to various investors and contractors he stiffed along the way.

Trump poses on a construction site ahead of a 20/20 interview in 1987. ABC Photo Archives Getty Images

Or maybe, like everything else, it won't matter. In the shorter term, though, it will certainly ramp up the urgency of getting access to the various documents Trump is working desperately to keep secret. Presumably, like the full and unredacted Mueller Report he moved to suppress today, this is because all this stuff COMPLETELY EXONERATES! him. (So did Robert Mueller, who he's trying to block from testifying before Congress, and White House Counsel Don McGahn, who he has blocked.) After all, the House Ways and Means Committee is seeking more recent tax returns from the president to get a glimpse into who's paying him and why. This is relevant first of all because Trump is blatantly trying to monetize the presidency and may have conflicts of interest that drive him to make decisions that are not in the best interests of the American public. But it's also now relevant because the more we learn about Trump's private dealings, the less confident we can be he's ever run an organization above the board.

The same goes for the financial records that Trump has sued Deutsche Bank and Capital One to suppress. After the president drove four of his companies to bankruptcy and, as we now know, lost $1 billion in a decade, mainstream banks would not lend to him. But for some reason, Deutsche Bank would. Why? Where was the money coming from? Where did it go? It sure would be nice to know. What was Trump up to between 1995, by which time he'd lost over a billion dollars, and 2004, when he scored The Apprentice gig and got himself back into his own distinct version of respectability? He inherited another big chunk of his father's fortune on his death in 1999, but does that explain it all? We'll also need to look at his dealings abroad, like in Panama, and his inaugural committee, among many other shops he's run.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes rightly suggested that Donald Trump is now safely in the clubhouse as the most successful con artist in history. This guy bullshit his way through bankruptcies, a billion dollars in losses, and an entire presidential campaign until he became the World's Most Powerful Man. It's a testament to his skills as a snake-oil salesman, an American archetype that's older than the nation itself. It's also an indictment of the society we have built for ourselves in recent decades, leaning heavily on a facade of civility and American Dream talk and a psychotic view of reality through a television prism, all while the old menace of lawless anarcho-capitalism rages beneath.

Trump believes the world is a chaotic wilderness where power is itself a virtue and seizing it is about making the sale. Relentless lying, after all, is itself a kind of coercion, in which you bend others to your will by forcing them to accept the infrastructure of your false reality. He was right in the end, and now, unfortunately, he threatens to destroy any remaining hope that we can build the kind of society we've long deluded ourselves into thinking this country is.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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