It’s official: Trump is bad at business. Celebrity Apprentice lied to us!

So Celebrity Apprentice, the US version starring Donald Trump, was a load of old cobblers — perhaps even worse, a fraud on viewers for eight years.

Trump fronted Celebrity Apprentice on the free-to-air network NBC from 2008 to 2015, using it to not only raise his profile but to become a viable political candidate for the 2016 presidential election. In an interview with The Washington Post in April 2016, Trump claimed he made US$213 million from fronting the program. During this rise to prominence, he was aided and abetted by Rupert Murdoch and the late Roger Ailes (a sexual harasser) at Fox News.

Now, nearly three years after Trump lost the 2020 election (and has never stopped lying about its result), New York Judge Arthur Engoron has ruled that the TV host-turned-president committed fraud for years by claiming his real estate empire was expansive, with Trump and his company deceiving banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork.

It is a ruling that shows how little due diligence NBC and the show’s producers, led by Mark Burnett (who created The Apprentice and Survivor, among others), did on Trump and his claimed business ability. They obviously just read the media clippings and took him at face value.

The ruling, which is a massive win for Attorney-General Letitia James, who led the case, was a partial summary judgment that found Trump had made false and misleading valuations for multiple real estate assets in statements to insurers and banks over the course of years.

“Beyond mere bragging about his riches, Trump, his company and key executives repeatedly lied about them on his annual financial statements, reaping rewards such as favourable loan terms and lower insurance premiums,” Engoron wrote in the 35-page judgment.

The judgment details how Trump fraudulently valued his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida; Trump Park Avenue and 40 Wall Street in New York City; his Seven Springs property in Westchester County, New York, and his golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland.

After noting that Trump submitted statements falsely claiming that the Trump Tower apartment in which he resided for decades was nearly three times its actual size, Engoron wrote: “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud.”

As part of his decision, Engoron cancelled the New York business certificates of Trump and the other defendants in the suit in Manhattan Supreme Court. He also ordered that within 10 days, the defendants must recommend no more than three potential independent receivers to manage the dissolution of the corporations which the judge has cancelled business certificates for.

The decision, days before the start of a non-jury trial on Monday in New York, is the strongest repudiation yet of Trump’s carefully built image as a wealthy and shrewd real estate mogul turned political powerhouse. Celebrity Apprentice was part of the construction of that image.

With four major cases in the offing from federal and Georgia authorities concerning the 2020 election result and its aftermath, as well as the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the attorney-general’s case was always thought to be of lesser importance.

But the result strikes at the heart of Trump’s image and story: that he was a far more successful property player than his father was and built an empire of his own. That empire, according to this judgment, was built on fraud and deceit.

If the judge’s decision withstands all the challenges Trump will bring on, the 45th president of the US will go down in history as a business (as well as political) fraudster, up there in New York’s Hall of Shame with the Ponzi scheme king, the late Bernie Madoff.

The defendants include Trump, his sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, company executive Jeff McConney, and corporate entities.

“The documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business,” Engoron wrote. “Defendants respond that: the documents do not say what they say; that there is no such thing as ‘objective’ value; and that, essentially, the court should not believe its own lying eyes.”

Assuming this finding by Engoron survives, how long before state and local authorities in New York, Florida and Scotland come hunting for penalties and other payments for the fraudulent valuations of Trump’s key real estate assets?