Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative With the Truth

Indeed, based on the mountain of court records churned out over the span of Mr. Trump’s career, it is hard to find a project he touched that did not produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies or outright fraud.

 .. the small-time contractors who say Mr. Trump concocted complaints about their work to avoid paying them;
.. What also emerges is a nearly reflexive habit of telling his target audience precisely what he thinks it wants to hear — such as promising Trump University students they will learn all his real estate secrets from his “handpicked” instructors. And finally, there is the pattern already deeply familiar to his political opponents — making spurious claims against adversaries under Mr. Trump’s oft-stated theory that the best defense is a scorched-earth offense.
.. In interviews, lawyers who have tangled with Mr. Trump in court cases are sometimes reduced to sputtering, astonished rage, calling him “borderline pathological” and “the Michelangelo of deception” as they attempt to describe the ease with which Mr. Trump weaves his own versions of reality.
.. Mr. Trump was particularly proud of a stratagem he employed in 1982, when he was trying to entice Holiday Inn to invest in a casino he was building in Atlantic City. The board of directors decided to visit Atlantic City, which worried Mr. Trump because he had precious little actual construction to show off. So Mr. Trump ordered his construction supervisor to cram every bulldozer and dump truck he could find into the nearly vacant construction site.
.. A week later, when Mr. Trump escorted the Holiday Inn executives to the site, one board member wanted to know why a worker was filling a hole he had just dug. “This was difficult for me to answer, but fortunately, this board member was more curious than he was skeptical,” Mr. Trump wrote, boasting that weeks later Holiday Inn agreed to invest in his casino.
.. In court cases against Mr. Trump — USA Today counted 3,500 lawsuits involving Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump estimates he has testified more than 100 times
.. in the now-infamous Trump University litigation, Mr. Trump was asked in a deposition about a script that had been prepared for Trump University instructors. According to the script, the instructors were supposed to tell their students the following: “I remember one time Mr. Trump said to us over dinner, he said, ‘Real estate is the only market that, when there’s a sale going on, people run from the store.’ You don’t want to run from the store.”
No such dinners ever took place, Mr. Trump acknowledged. In fact, Mr. Trump struggled to identify a single one of the instructors he claimed to have handpicked, even after he was shown their photographs.
.. “There is something very belligerent about the way he presents facts, as if he thinks nobody will have the balls to stand up to him,” Mr. Seltzer said in an interview. (In dismissing Mr. Trump’s suit against Ms. Corcoran, the judge said the only damages he could identify were to Mr. Trump’s “bruised ego.”)
.. But in case after case, Mr. Trump has displayed a special talent for turning what should be cold hard facts into semantic mush. Perhaps the most famous example of this skill came when Mr. Trump was asked under oath a seemingly straightforward question: Had he ever lied about his net worth? Mr. Trump responded, “My net worth fluctuates and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.”
.. And when he told Larry King he was paid more than $1 million for a speech, it was not his fault if viewers failed to realize he was including not just his $400,000 speaking fee but also the hundreds of thousands of dollars he assumed must have been spent promoting his appearance.
.. Part of what makes Mr. Trump such an elusive target is that his paper trail is often minimal.
.. Mr. Trump is also the beneficiary of miraculously well-timed memory lapses. In suit after suit, the man who claims to possess one of world’s best memories suddenly seems to have chronic memory loss when asked about critical facts or events.
.. Mr. Trump asserted that “TrumpNation” cost him a “deal made in heaven” with a group of Italian investors, men he had met and who were on the brink of signing a business partnership that would have made him hundreds of millions of dollars. Their names? He could not recall. “TrumpNation” also cost him a hotel deal with Russian investors, he said. He could not remember their names, either. He was certain the book also ruined a deal with Turkish investors. Again, he could not recall any names. Polish investors also got cold feet after they read Mr. O’Brien’s book. Their names escaped him, too. The book also scared off investors from Ukraine. Alas, he could not think of their names either.