These days, Donald Trump happily self-aggrandizes under his own name. But it seems that in the '80s and early '90s, he had the sliver of shame required to adopt an alias and pose as his own employee when grandstanding to reporters. In a Friday Washington Post article, former Forbes 400 reporter Jonathan Greenberg wrote of a 1984 call from Trump employee "John Barron," who told him that Donald Trump, not his father Fred, owned the family business, and that Donald was a billionaire. Greenberg turned on his tape recorder.



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At the time, Greenberg didn’t suspect that he was actually speaking to Trump himself. “No one could imagine the unimaginable,” he told CNN. But these days, the voice on the tape sounds all-too familiar.

Greenberg outlines the extent to which he was misled in his Washington Post article, and has now concluded that Trump should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists. In fact, Trump didn’t own his family business in the early '80s—he had no equity in his father’s company at all. "In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million,” Greenberg wrote, "but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.”

Trump wasn’t desperate to make the list just to sate his ego—his inclusion in a respected publication’s rich list may have helped him become seriously wealthy. Greenberg quotes Tim O’Brien’s 2005 biography of the future president:

In the absence of a functioning balance sheet, the list didn’t just make Trump feel like a winner, according to O’Brien; it may have provided some of the documentation he needed to borrow reckless sums of money — vast loans that he used, for years, to actually make him a winner. “The more often Forbes mentioned him, the more credible Donald’s claim to vast wealth became,” O’Brien said, arguing that Trump and the list were “mutually reinforcing”: “The more credible his claim to vast wealth became, the easier it was for him to get on the Forbes 400 — which became the standard that other media, and apparently some of the country’s biggest banks, used when judging Donald’s riches.

Gabrielle Bruney Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

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