It appears that White House aides may be playing the president short.
On Monday morning, during the president’s allotted Speak ‘N Spell time in which the president was given strict instructions to only work on his rhyming words, it appears that the president found a way to hook the Texas Instrument up to Wi-Fi, because he was up early rage-tweeting at the New York Times, claiming that a report about his relationship with Russia’s favorite financial institution, Deutsche Bank, is....you guessed it, fake news.
According to the Times, employees at the German bank were suspicious of activity in accounts belonging to the president and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in 2016 and 2017. The Times notes that bank executives kept employees from reporting the fishy transactions and even had one employee fired for asking questions about the differences in the way the bank treats certain clients’ foo-foo ass transactions.
The president didn’t just claim that the story was fake news, he also claimed another four years in office.
“The Failing New York Times (it will pass away when I leave office in 6 years), and others of the Fake News Media, keep writing phony stories about how I didn’t use many banks because they didn’t want to do business with me,” Trump tweeted, kicking off a flurry of posts. “WRONG! It is because I didn’t need money. Very old fashioned, but true. When you don’t need or want money, you don’t need or want banks. Banks have always been available to me, they want to make money,” Politico reports.
Trump also appeared to criticize reporting from a year ago that claimed he used cash for real estate purchases.
“Now the new big story is that Trump made a lot of money and buys everything for cash, he doesn’t need banks,” he claimed in a subsequent tweet, before offering praise for Deutsche Bank’s service. “But where did he get all of that cash? Could it be Russia? No, I built a great business and don’t need banks, but if I did they would be there...and Deutsche Bank was very good and highly professional to deal with - and if for any reason I didn’t like them, I would have gone elsewhere....there was always plenty of money around and banks to choose from. They would be very happy to take my money.”
Politico notes that David Enrich, who authored the Times story, pushed back on Trump’s denial.
“This is not true. I have spent a long time looking into this, and @DeutscheBank was the only bank willing to lend to @realDonaldTrump for 20 years because of his pattern of defaults and the bank’s hunger for growth in the US,” he wrote in a tweet.
The Times stands by its story.
Trump’s history with the foreign bank has become the focus of many Democrats in Congress as the president refuses to release his financial records and tax returns.
“Last month, Trump and his family sued Deutsche Bank and Capital One to block them from turning over those records in response to congressional subpoenas,” Politico reports.
Don’t mind that lawsuit, as it’s totally normal for someone who has nothing to hide to file a lawsuit to keep America from seeing that there is nothing to hide. I believed this is called the “Keeping your phone locked around your wife” defense.