In 1982, when Donald Trump was 36 years old, he began an annual ritual of lobbying Forbes magazine to include him on its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. Forbes debuted the list that year, and Trump pursued his inclusion with gusto — lying, cajoling and repeatedly jumping on the telephone to make sure that a young reporter at the magazine, Jonathan Greenberg, would accept his inflated claims about how much money he had.
Greenberg taped a few of those phone calls and he published them as part of a longer reflection in The Washington Post on April 20 describing what it was like to be conned by Trump.
"It took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had enacted to project an image as one of the richest people in America," Greenberg wrote. "Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn't just poorer than he said he was. Over time, I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all."