Now Donald Trump was taking this idea to the next level, using a grab-bag of gimmicks (renumbered floors, biggest ballroom) to seize attention and bump up profits. His father, Fred Trump, had built a real estate empire in Brooklyn and Queens with far more modest signature touches like an extra closet and a garage underneath each row house. But now, his main tactic has left him open to a civil suit that threatens to unravel his empire. His flair for tall tales would be his MO for more than four decades and arguably catapulted him to the presidency. In that book, Trump (or, more likely, his co-author, journalist Tony Schwartz) called his aggressive salesmanship “truthful hyperbole,” which was explained as “an innocent form of exaggeration - and a very effective form of promotion.” The reason, Trump (or Schwartz) said, was that “people want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” and Trump was more than willing to oblige them. James termed these financial manipulations “the art of the steal,” a play on the title of Trump’s 1987 bestselling memoir The Art of the Deal. The result, she said, was a “staggering” and “astounding” scheme that yielded an estimated $250 million in ill-gotten gains. On Wednesday, September 21, New York State Attorney General Letitia James filed a 220-page lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court accusing Donald Trump and three of his children of using wildly inaccurate evaluations of Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago and multiple other properties to defraud lenders and cheat on taxes.
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