https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/23/1692640/-The-Village-Voice-did-a-profile-on-Donald-Trump-back-in-1979-nothing-s-changed-he-s-always-lied
"The story had taken Barrett months to research and put together. At the time Barrett was 33. He’s now 70, and the Village Voice is revisiting this past profile or our current unpopular president. Barrett’s series was the first to take a fine-tooth comb to Trump’s business practices. The reporter focused on two prominent development projects — the Hyatt Hotel in midtown and a proposed convention center on the West Side — and plumbed them in meticulous detail. As the article points out, Trump has boasted of these old successes since he began campaigning in 2015, even though he hasn’t built anything but a name brand since. And as Barrett explains—he didn’t really build those buildings the way he said he did either. But Barrett’s reporting paints a picture of Trump’s background that’s somewhat at odds with the one he paints for himself. Far from that of a self-made billionaire, the image of Trump that emerges from Barrett’s reporting is that of a scion of a wealthy family who got ahead, in large part, thanks to family connections — many of them political. Far from an independent capitalist, Barrett showed, Trump was a businessman who relied heavily on government largesse. “This is a guy whose wealth has been created by political connections,” Barrett says today. And at the time the story was published, even Trump’s political connections came secondhand, through his father. The idea that Trump is a business-world antidote to the world of political entanglement, as he often implies, is “ludicrous,” as Barrett puts it. Trump would go on to be a business failure by 1991, when Trump filed his first of six bankruptcies that he would file through 2009."
