
For years, Donald Trump has boasted that he's the "king of debt" and routinely uses financing to make lots of money.
"Nobody knows debt better than me. I've made a fortune by using debt," he said on CBS This Morning in 2016.
"There’s nothing like doing things with other people's money," he said during a 2016 campaign rally.
But new evidence suggests Trump abandoned his own playbook for debt-backed business deals a long time ago.
The Washington Post reports that in the nine years before he ran for president, Trump’s company spent about $400 million on properties including golf courses, mansions and a winery — and in most of those transactions, he didn’t use other people’s money at all. He paid cash.
Given the now-president’s history with debt, those deals don’t make a lot of sense and leave a lot of unanswered questions about where the Trump Organization got all that cash.
This week on Money Talking, Trump Inc. podcast host Ilya Marritz speaks with Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold and business and economics reporter for The New Yorker, Adam Davidson, who tweeted about Fahrenthold’s reporting: "This could well be the single most important story ever on Trump."
To hear the segment, click "Listen" above. And to hear an extended version of the conversation, visit TrumpIncPodcast.org.