I’ve heard people describe Donald Trump as a self-made man. He is, in fact, the opposite of a self-made man. He inherited a huge real-estate fortune. If he had sold all his real-estate holdings and invested the proceeds in an S&P 500 index fund, he would be much richer today than he is, according to the Washington Post.
All that Trump’s ballyhooed deal-making has accomplished is to lose himself $3 billion, relative to what a passive investor could have obtained. (That’s according to Forbes’s numbers. According to Trump’s own numbers, he’s only lost $2 billion.)
And in order to get himself that terrific -$3 billion return, he has had to employ strategic bankruptcies, abuse eminent domain, and exploit taxpayer funds. If business acumen is an important quality for President of the United States, Donald Trump is disqualified.
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