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Donald Trump did not take the stand during his criminal trial, but prosecutors used plenty of his own words against him. They mined his books for examples of how he micromanaged the Trump Organization, how he was motivated by revenge, and how he saw sexual potential in encounters with women.
In so doing they sought to show the jury that he monitored every cent coming in and out of his business, bolstering their case that he must have known that hush money payments to Stormy Daniels were being hidden as legal expenses. Trump denied 34 charges of falsifying business records.
His defense team tried to show he was a busy executive who left handling invoices, ledger entries and check cutting to lower level managers. His own books offered a different image of Trump. In ‘Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,’ he makes a virtue of pennypinching, even describing how when Spy magazine ran a feature called ‘Who is the cheapest millionaire’ he was sent a check for 50 cents as a test.
He said he was proud that the Trump Organization deposited it. ‘They may call that cheap; I call it watching the bottom line,’ he wrote. ‘Every dollar counts in business, and for that matter every dime. Penny-pinching? ‘You bet. I’m all for it.’
Although many of the headlines have focused on Trump’s alleged affair with Stormy Daniels, the meat of the case against him is more prosaic: The 34 invoices, ledger entries and checks that were labeled as legal expenses, rather than a reimbursement to fixer Michael Cohen for paying off Stormy Daniels. And his books suggest Trump is an executive with a meticulous approach to money.
‘As I said before, I always sign my checks, so I know where my money’s going,’ he wrote in “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire.” ‘In the same spirit, I also always try to read my bills to make sure I’m not being overcharged.’ Jurors heard the text read aloud by Sally Franklin, a witness who is an executive and editor at Penguin Random House.
Throughout, Trump hammers the point that he stays on top of every financial aspect of his business. ‘If you don’t know every aspect of what you’re doing, down to the paper clips, you’re setting yourself up for some unwelcome surprises,’ he wrote. There were two other themes to the excerpts.
‘All the women on “The Apprentice” flirted with me—consciously or unconsciously,’ he wrote in Trump: How to Get Rich,’ also published in 2004. ‘That’s to be expected. ‘A sexual dynamic is always present between people, unless you are asexual.’ And another passage from the same book laid out how he views his enemies.
‘For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back,’ he wrote. ‘When somebody hurts you, you just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.’ Prosecutors hoped the lines would help convince the jury that Trump was a tight-fisted and vindictive manager, who simply could not have been blind to an effort by his staff to buy and bill damaging stories.
