In a wholesome family interview with Anderson Cooper last night, Donald Trump perpetuated the fiction that he “started with a million dollar loan, and built a $10 billion company, it’s a phenomenal company.” Check the 4:45 mark of the above video. He has made this claim many times, so many times in fact that he might actually believe it at this point.

“It has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me. I started off in Brooklyn. My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars,” Trump told the Today Show in October of 2015. “I came into Manhattan, and I had to pay him back, and I had to pay him back with interest. But I came into Manhattan and I started buying properties, and I did great.”

“He (Marco Rubio) also said I got $200 million from my father. I wish. I wish. I got a very, very small loan from my father many years ago,” Trump stated at a news conference in February of 2016. “I built that into a massive empire and I paid my father back that loan…The number is wrong by a factor of hundreds of — I mean, by a fortune. I got a small loan. I started a business.”

The truth is that Donald closed his first big deal in Manhattan with a million dollar loan from his father’s company Village Construction Corp. That’s not where the story ends however. Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, had also set up a line of credit for him to use in the building of the hotel, as well guaranteeing the $70 million loan Donald took out for the construction of the hotel in 1978. He was worth about $200 million at this point. This was essential to the deal getting done, but wasn’t mentioned in Trump’s biography “The Art of the Deal.” Trump biographer Wayne Barrett referred to this loan guarantee in his book “The Deals And the Downfall,” saying “no document in the long paper trail attached to the Commodore deal better demonstrated the lack of bank confidence in the Donald or the project, and none made clear the limits of his promoter role.” Donald Trump was also receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from his family, from various trusts and salaries.

Sources:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=004_0gKpPR4
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/03/trumps-false-claim-he-built-his-empire-with-a-small-loan-from-his-father/