Trump Rails Against Forbes for Calling Him Slightly Less Rich

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Donald Trump has been indicted four times in recent months, and now he’s on trial for financial fraud. The judge in the civil case, brought by New York attorney general Letitia James, has already ruled that Trump and other defendants fraudulently exaggerated the value of Trump’s real-estate assets for years. The trial could cost Trump hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and lead to portions of his business empire being stripped from his control.

But more importantly, a magazine made a list of the wealthiest Americans, and Trump wasn’t on it.

It was announced on October 3 that Trump did not make the annual Forbes 400 list, falling $300 million short of the cutoff. Apparently, Trump only caught wind of this grievous insult a week later, lashing out at the magazine in a Monday morning Truth Social tirade. Among his allegations: Forbes is colluding with James, it knows less about him than his throwback nemeses Stormy Daniels and Rosie O’Donnell, and he should be much higher on the irrelevant publication’s “discredited” list:

Trump’s “So much for Forbes!” kiss-off was undercut by the fact that he was still stewing about the list 13 hours later, when he posted this follow-up “truth”:

In Trump’s defense, the Forbes piece explaining why he didn’t make the cut had a pretty sassy tone:

Donald Trump is no longer rich enough for the country’s most exclusive club. With an estimated $2.6 billion fortune, he is $300 million shy of the cutoff for The Forbes 400 ranking of America’s richest people, the annual measurement that Trump has obsessed over for decades, relentlessly lying to reporters to try to vault himself higher on the list.

The story went on to explain that this is the second time in three years that Trump has dropped off the list:

Trump has weathered storms in the past, and this is not the first time he has gotten kicked out of The Forbes 400. He conned his way into sharing a spot on the inaugural list in 1982 with his father, Fred Trump, by convincing a reporter that he held a larger percentage of Fred’s fortune than he actually did. Trump secured massive loans that led to massive bankruptcies, and he fell off the list in 1990, when Forbes exposed deep problems with his debt-fueled empire, ultimately putting his net worth “within hailing distance of zero.” But Trump emerged from those troubles and regained a legitimate spot on the 400. He remained on the list from 1996 until 2021, when six years of polarization and one year of Covid finally caught up to him, dropping him from the ranks once again.

It’s ironic that Trump chose Truth Social as the venue for his attack on Forbes, as the story cites the social platform’s plummeting value as the biggest reason for his drop from the list. At least now we have an answer to that age-old question: If the guy who failed to make the Forbes 400 attacks a “very badly failing” magazine from his own failing social-media site, does it make a sound?