
Trump melted down Monday morning as questions about his shady financial situation intensify.

Trump woke up Monday morning in an apparent panic, firing off a series of tweets begging people to trust him about his shady financial deals in the past.

"But where did he get all of that cash? Could it be Russia? No," Trump wrote, the morning after an investigation showed Trump's businesses engaging in suspicious activities.

An internal investigation by Deutsche Bank, Trump's biggest lender, revealed several bank accounts operated by Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner were suspected of money laundering by bank employees, according to a New York Times report from Sunday.


Trump's tirade contained similar refrains to his numerous other rants, including calling media outlets "fake news" and engaging in the dangerous and authoritarian rhetoric of calling journalists the "enemy of the people."

But the thrust of the five tweets was to defend his own fake persona of a successful businessman. "When you don't need or want money, you don't need or want banks," Trump said. "Banks have always been available to me, they want to make money. Fake Media only says this to disparage, and always uses unnamed sources (because their sources don’t even exist)."

He even went out of his way to praise Deutsche Bank, saying it "was very good and highly professional to deal with — and if for any reason I didn't like them, I would have gone elsewhere....there was always plenty of money around and banks to choose from. They would be very happy to take my money."

Trump's boasts are not backed up by data. In reality, Trump was a terrible businessman and a massive financial risk.

The revelation of Deutsche Bank's investigation was the latest in a series of articles questioning the myth of Trump's business acumen. While Trump tried to sell himself as a successful businessman, a review of his taxes from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s showed he lost more than $1 billion in a decade. One year during that period, 1991, Trump's losses accounted for 1% of all individual taxpayer losses in the entire country.

Trump, who lies roughly 23 times a day, refuses to release his taxes to prove both where his money comes from and how much he has. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has even broken the law in refusing to hand over Trump's taxes to Congress.

Did Trump get a pile of cash from Russia? Who knows, because Trump is fighting against Congress and in court to keep all his financial information secret.

Congress and the American people deserve to know if and how corrupt Trump's previous business transactions were. The newest revelations by Deutsche Bank raise serious questions about Trump, and Trump himself lies so often that his word cannot be trusted.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.