Donald Trump has attacked Ted Cruz roughly a billion times over the last week for having taken out loans from Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Like most everything Trump says, his attacks are short on facts and even shorter on making sense. He claims somehow that Cruz attempted to hide the loans, even though he openly disclosed them on public filings (just not the right ones).
Here he is, in fact, saying that Cruz is “worse than Hillary, if you think about it,” because of the loans:
More specifically, Trump has repeatedly reiterated the claim (at the beginning of the clip) that “they own him” because he has taken out loans from them. He’s made the nonsensical claim repeatedly that Ted Cruz can’t “protect people” from Citibank or Goldman Sachs or whoever, because he has taken out loans from them or personally guaranteed loans to his campaign from them.
I don’t know, I don’t feel like I have ever needed protection from Citibank or Goldman Sachs, but I digress. Because if that claim is true about Ted Cruz, it is also true about Donald Trump. I mean, of course it is. There is absolutely no way that a guy who has spent his life as a real estate mogul has not at one time taken out huge, major loans from every major investment bank in the country. UPDATE: A poster on twitter has pointed out that Donald Trump is “owned” by almost literally everyone according to his most recent financial disclosures. He has billions (with a “B”) of dollars of outstanding loans from virtually every major Wall Street bank, including Capital One, Deutsche Bank, ISB, UBS, and Merrill Lynch.
Citibank, in particular, played a major role in one of the Trump’s organization’s more notorious bankruptcies, when the Trump Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City was underwater and Trump owed over $550 million on it to various creditors, with Citibank at the head. In order to restructure his debt, Trump gave Citibank and other creditors a 49% ownership interest in the hotel.
As for Goldman Sachs, Trump is himself a shareholder in Goldman Sachs, which means he has a direct financial interest in its success. One would think that would make Trump even less enthusiastic about protecting me from Goldman Sachs (whatever that means) than Cruz would.
There is essentially not a major Wall Street entity that Donald Trump or his companies have not taken out loans from or received financing from. In fact, that’s more or less his entire business model. This lengthy ABC piece details how each and every one of them has at one time been circling Trump or his companies as they have been left holding the bag for all or part of loans he took out from them.
If Ted Cruz is owned by Citibank and Goldman Sachs just because he once took out a loan from them, then what that means is that he is owned by a several fewer banks than Donald Trump is.
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