And the dynamite, she go boom! From The New York Times:

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found. Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help. But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

Not to repeat myself, but it always was going to be the money. The president* needed an incredible amount of money to build his brand, and then even more to maintain it after having gone bankrupt three times.

MARY SCHWALM Getty Images

Ever since the country became imperiled with the possibility that he might become president*, we've been looking at where the money came from over the past couple of decades. But this is the swindle and fraud that got everything kicked off. This is how he made all the money he would keep losing, time after time.

What emerges from this body of evidence is a financial biography of the 45th president fundamentally at odds with the story Mr. Trump has sold in his books, his TV shows and his political life. In Mr. Trump’s version of how he got rich, he was the master dealmaker who broke free of his father’s “tiny” outer-borough operation and parlayed a single $1 million loan from his father (“I had to pay him back with interest!”) into a $10 billion empire that would slap the Trump name on hotels, high-rises, casinos, airlines and golf courses the world over. In Mr. Trump’s version, it was always his guts and gumption that overcame setbacks. Fred Trump was simply a cheerleader. “I built what I built myself,” Mr. Trump has said, a narrative that was long amplified by often-credulous coverage from news organizations, including The Times.

Well, that's a nifty bit of Opus Dei-level self-flagellation right there.

Did we all know that his endlessly repeated autobiographical tale was complete horse-hockey? Of course, we did. But now we have numbers. The famous mere $1 million that Papa Fred left him as a starter kit? It was closer to $60 million. He was making 200-large a year from the old man by the time he was 3.

That's a lot of Maypo.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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