Free Republic

A pattern emerges. Donald Trump is a habitual liar, and the thing about habitual liars is that they lie habitually. In a testy exchange with former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Trump insisted that he’d never gone bankrupt, and that claims to the contrary are a lie. That’s the Trump magic right there: Lying about your business history is one thing, lying that your critics are lying about it is another. Trump has a peculiar way of speaking about bankruptcy: He has a deep aversion to the word itself. He speaks of “putting a company into a chapter” without ever answering...

In an effort to take out frontrunner Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidates have pelted Trump with criticism over his multiple trips to federal bankruptcy court. That criticism was on full display in CNN's Republican debate Sept. 16. Most notably, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina criticized Trump's history of bankruptcies in his businesses. "You know, there are a lot of us Americans who believe that we are going to have trouble someday paying back the interest on our debt because politicians have run up mountains of debt using other people's money," Fiorina said. "That is in fact precisely the way you...

As I reported yesterday, at various times Donald Trump has had hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from Citibank and Goldman, some of which have been repaid, some of which were discharged in bankruptcy when Trump’s Altantic City casino went belly up. By Trump’s own standard, Citibank and Goldman own him, too.

".... Trump claims that successful businesses file for bankruptcy all the time. At the debate he said "virtually every person that you read about on the front page of the business sections, they've used the [bankruptcy] law." But the facts don't back that comment up. Despite high profile examples, including General Motors (GM), Lehman Brothers and most of the nation's major airlines, fewer than 20% of public companies with assets of $1 billion or more have filed for bankruptcy in the last 30 years, according to data from Bankruptcy.com and S&P Capital IQ. Trump has never filed for personal bankruptcy....