The Former Guy has fallen off the list of Forbes’ richest Americans, dropping to only $2.5 billion, $400 million off the cutoff level for the prestigious list.
This is the first time in 25 years that Trump has not been on the Forbes 400 list.
Forbes said there was no one to blame but Trump himself.
Five years ago, he had a golden opportunity to diversify his fortune. Fresh off the 2016 election, federal ethics officials were pushing Trump to divest his real estate assets. That would have allowed him to reinvest the proceeds into broad-based index funds and assume office free of conflicts of interest.
Hanging onto his assets cost the Former Guy bigly. Choosing to not divest cost the bigly guy $2 billion, by conservative estimates. If Trump had managed to avoid capital gains taxes, he might have been able to invest $3.5 billion and been worth $7 billion by now.
The pandemic also crushed Trump’s big-city property values, which make up the bulk of the big guy’s bigly wealth.
