“If we don’t win, this will be the single greatest waste of time, energy and money in my life,” Donald Trump lamented at his final, midnight campaign rally of the 2016 election in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
This is normally not how people who lose elections talk about their experiences, even if they contributed significant sums of their own money to their campaigns along the way. But set aside the pathological selfishness of Trump’s comment and keep in mind that one of the biggest bombshells of the campaign was the revelation that Donald Trump claimed a nearly $1 billion deduction on his personal income taxes in 1995. He has donated less than $100 million to his presidential campaign since he announced.
I can see no other way to interpret this than as a not-at-all-figurative admission that, as many have surmised, the $917 million loss he claimed was of other people’s money.