For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.

President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.

But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.

In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.

In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.

At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.”

    • Tilgare@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      And with Trump, he’s stupid AND a narcissist, which is potent. He only knows what he knows, but thinks he’s a genius and has it all figured out - so he accidentally makes a full confession by giving all the details of what he thinks is the same crime everyone else MUST be committing. “They’d be stupid NOT to, right?”

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      7 hours ago

      I’m honestly starting to think my ex is MAGA.

      Neither of us is American. But she has accusations for everyone, particularly me.

      My favourite one (the funniest one, anyway) is that she’s projecting incest. Allow me to elaborate: She made fun of a friend of hers, saying she’d slept with her relative. Said friend knows nothing about it (I told her that the ex was spreading such rumors). HOWEVER I know that one of my ex’s lovers is a man she claimed to be her relative. Also, after we’d broken up, when she essentially moved in with me again without my permission, she said she was going to get an apartment and her dad was going to help her with the down payment. In fact she had to visit her dad several times within a week for this, because he only has cash (that is actually true). But the person that was actually supposed to help her, the person she visited those times was her new boyfriend. Basically any time she wants to hide that she’s sleeping with someone, she calls that person a relative of some sort.

      Most of the other projection is less fun shit, like claiming I’m trying to use our child as a weapon (something she’s been trying to do with both her children against both her baby daddies), accusing me and all her other exes of abuse, etc. But sometimes the accusations truly are entertaining.