Reporter says Donald Trump used alter ego 'John Barron' to get onto Forbes 400 list

Jessica Estepa | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Reporter says Trump lied to him to get on the Forbes 400; Has tapes May 1984...Jonathan Greenberg...now a reporter for the Washington Post…got a call from a Trump Organization official. Veuer's Nick Cardona has that details.

The reporter tasked with interviewing people for the Forbes 400 recently rediscovered the tapes of him talking to John Barron, a Trump Organization executive in the 1980s.

And he said he's surprised he didn't catch on to the fact that Barron was actually Trump himself.

"When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn't see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him," journalist Jonathan Greenberg wrote in a column published Friday in the Washington Post.

According to Greenberg, Trump, as Barron, said he owned much of the family's business and that he should be called a billionaire.

Even then, Greenberg wrote, he thought some of this wasn't true.

"But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had built to project an image as one of the richest people in America," he wrote. "Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue."

He and his colleagues at Forbes believed that Trump was merely embellishing, not saying "outright fabrications."

"We were so wrong," he wrote.

Greenberg contended that Trump has continued to do this, eventually leading to the highest office in the land.

"This was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that people believed that some kernel of it had to be real," he said. "The tactic landed him a place he hadn't earned on the Forbes list — and led to future accolades, press coverage and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency."