December 8, 2025

ProPublica really nailed this one. Trump's heinous history of attacking political rivals for mortgage fraud may come back to bite him in his copious butt, and it couldn't happen to a nicer tyrant. Via ProPublica:

In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.

In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.

At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.”

Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.

NEW: The Trump administration has argued that Fed board member Lisa Cook may have committed mortgage fraud by declaring more than one primary residence on her loans.

We found that Trump once did the very thing he claimed could be a crime.

ProPublica (@propublica.org) 2025-12-08T12:00:17.427Z

For months Trump has accused political enemies of mortgage fraud for just this: claiming more than one primary residence. Trump called one who did so “deceitful” and “CROOKED.”

(Experts say having two such mortgages can be valid and even when wrong is rarely prosecuted.)

Justin Elliott (@justinelliott.bsky.social) 2025-12-08T12:54:32.970Z

But Trump’s two mortgages clearly exceed his own standard for “mortgage fraud.”

We found numerous rental listings for the properties.

The listing agent from the ‘90s told us in an interview: “They were rentals from the beginning.” “President Trump never lived there.”

Justin Elliott (@justinelliott.bsky.social) 2025-12-08T12:54:32.971Z

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