The wood-paneled boardroom featured at the end of an episode of “The Apprentice” helped refine Donald Trump’s image as a powerful businessman who launched his political career.
But in a wood-paneled courtroom last month, the sad reality behind the images was once again revealed.
Witnesses at Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan testified under oath that Trump had affairs with porn stars and Playboy models, gave money to people to cover up those and other infidelities, and then paid the sums back to his lawyers, claiming they were legitimate payments.
Trump has denied all of this and a jury is due to decide next week whether he is guilty of the crimes.
But through their testimony, witnesses also provided valuable insight into how poorly run the Trump Organization was. In one memorable exchange, the defense even tried to highlight some of the mismanagement.
Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen Cohen was on the stand describing various efforts he had made for Trump. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche asked him about attempts to rig online polls for Trump in an attempt to undermine Cohen’s credibility with the jury. Cohen said he initially agreed to pay $50,000 to a company called Redfinch Solutions, but later reduced the amount to $20,000. But when he went to get his money back, he demanded the full $50,000.
In the end, he testified, he was paid more than double that amount through “grossing up,” the practice of increasing payments to cover income taxes.
Blanche asked if Cohen “stole from the Trump Organization,” to which Cohen readily admitted. Trump aides tried to portray this as a negative development for the prosecution, but it certainly didn’t help Cohen’s credibility as a witness. Trump’s son Eric bragged about the admission on social media, saying the trial was “getting interesting.”
But Trump’s son, who is executive vice president of the Trump Organization, should be a little more interested in how Cohen got away with it.
Most Americans have received some sort of expense reimbursement from their boss, whether it was buying a cake for a work birthday party or going out of town for a meeting. If so, you know the first rule: save your receipts. In many cases, you have to scan the receipt, upload it into a cumbersome software program, and fill out lots of fields to explain how you paid, what you paid for, and why it was necessary for your business.
Cohen somehow got five times the amount he spent back, a total of $100,000, also to rig several online polls.
It gets even weirder.
In a 2019 Wall Street Journal article that first reported on the payment, Red Finch Solutions owner John Gager said that when he met with Cohen at his office in Trump Tower to receive the payment, he was handed “a blue Walmart bag containing $12,000 to $13,000 in cash and a pair of boxing gloves that Cohen said belonged to a Brazilian mixed martial artist.” (Cohen denied this account at the time, saying the payment to Gager was made by check.)
The Wall Street Journal also reported that the repayments were made solely based on handwritten notes by Cohen — after all, he didn’t keep receipts.
It’s just the latest instance to undermine the business acumen that Trump has long boasted about. Earlier this year, a New York judge found that the Trump Organization had inflated Trump’s assets on its financial statements to deceive banks and insurance companies, and ordered Trump to pay a $355 million fine (later reduced to $175 million). “The fraud here jumps off the page,” the judge wrote in a scathing 92-page decision.
As a result of the case, the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who was already serving a 100-day jail sentence for tax evasion on $1.7 million in corporate perks, pleaded guilty to two counts of perjury. During the case, a court-appointed independent auditor found that despite its cooperation, the organization still regularly provided documents that “lacked completeness and timeliness” and determined that the company needed to change its procedures and update its financial statements.
Much of this is because the Trump Organization is a privately held conglomerate that isn’t traded on a stock exchange and therefore doesn’t have to meet the SEC’s stringent disclosure requirements. Still, few of the more than 25 million privately held companies in the United States are as poorly run as these various reports suggest.
And that conference room? The one shown on TV was actually a set built by the crew of “The Apprentice” to make filming easier.
In the 2018 documentary, producer Bill Pruitt said the real Trump Tower executive suite wasn’t all that impressive. “If you walked through the real Trump office in Trump Tower, you’d wonder what the wood was chipping and what the smell was,” he said in the film. “It wasn’t an empire that we had to sell to people. We had to spruce it up a little bit, and we did.”
Whatever else it accomplishes, the hush money trial has once again pulled back the curtain on what really goes on in the boardroom, and it’s an unsightly thing.
This article originally appeared on MSNBC.com.
