“Speaking of lies,” Stephen Colbert said midway through his Late Show monologue on Tuesday night, taking a break from Brett Kavanaugh to pivot towards the president of the United States.
“Donald Trump has always sold himself as something of a self-made man who built an empire out of nothing but a dream and hard work, and a loan from his dad,” the host continued, noting that the “small loan,” as Trump called it, was only $1 million (according to Trump). “That's barely enough to silence eight porn stars,” Colbert joked.
“Well, after years of lying about how much money he has, now we’ve found out Trump has been lying about how little money he started with,” he added. Because according to a bombshell report from The New York Times earlier on Tuesday, Trump “received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire.”
“According to tax records obtained by the Times, Trump and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents,” Colbert told viewers. “For some reason, the IRS missed the clue when Trump filed the paperwork for, ‘Thanks dad, I mean, thanks, Business Partners, LLC.’”
And because patriarch Fred Trump “had been funneling money to his children for years,” Donald Trump was “earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his real estate empire” from the time he was three years old.
“So let me get this straight,” Colbert said. “At one point, Donald Trump was an extraordinarily wealthy toddler. And today, he is still that.”