Donald Trump Says He ‘Called’ the ’08 Crash. Here’s What Really Happened

Politico describes Donald Trump Says He ‘Called’ the ’08 Crash. Here’s What Really Happened

A review of his behavior around the worst financial crisis of this generation shows that Trump didn’t ‘call it,’ didn’t see the recession coming—or at least didn’t say so in public—and he didn’t really benefit from it, either. He wasn’t a seer. Like a lot of Americans, he got hit by the downturn and was just looking to survive. Trump weathered the crisis, and was able to do that because of what he and his businesses had become—and he did it using tactics he had perfected over decades to rescue himself from precarious financial situations. He bragged, he exaggerated, and—when backed into a corner—he sued, using brash and antagonistic legal strategies to buy himself time on the obligations he couldn’t meet."

Most of his failing positions were licensing, but Trump Tower Chicago was different, he was building it and on the hook financially for it.

In spite of his stated assurances that he was cash-flush—“I was in a very strong financial position,” he told POLITICO this week, declining to elaborate—he sued Deutsche Bank to try to get out of a $40-million portion of the construction loan [for Trump Tower Chicago] that he had personally guaranteed, invoking a force majeure clause in the contract...In other words, some six weeks after Trump had gone on TV and said he had predicted the recession, he filed a lawsuit clamoring for relief—arguing, essentially, that the American real estate bust was an unforeseeable act of God.

And he was just another failed mortgage who got a loan from the bank that he shouldn't have.

Molo looked beyond the blunt-force gall and braggadocio and saw something more basic—something that made Trump no different from thousands of average homeowners with underwater mortgages. “He clearly,” the Deutsche Bank attorney said in an interview this week, “was in a ‘work-out situation’”—meaning he couldn’t pay what he owed when he owed it and needed to find a way to work it out. He needed to renegotiate. Or else.