Then what does all this — the yacht, the bronze tower, the casinos — really mean to you? Props for the show. And what is the show? The show is “Trump” and it is sold-out performances everywhere. — Donald J. Trump, interview with Playboy magazine, 1990

The show, as it turned out, had been going on for longer than people realized — long before it ended up on NBC and Fox News. The set design was not subtle, but it was effective. And the production went far more over budget than we knew, until now.

A New York Times investigation into President Trump’s taxes published Tuesday revealed that even during his 1980s “Art of the Deal” heyday — when he was posing for glossy magazines in his Fabergé egg of a penthouse, buying a 281-foot boat from the Sultan of Brunei, going on “Donahue” and “Oprah” — he was losing staggering sums of money: over a billon dollars, with a b, by 1995.

By early Wednesday, “Fox & Friends,” the president’s favorite morning show and support system, had transformed into an emergency finance tutorial on why down is actually up. Squinting at his notes, the host Brian Kilmeade argued that the president’s losses — “if you consider a billion dollars a lot of money” — showed that “he’s a bold businessman.”