Fake News: Washington Post tries to do a hit job on a non-woke bank that loaned to Trump
President Trump has had a lot of ups and downs in his real estate career, which means his relations with banks and credit can be pretty dicey. The matter was made worse for him in the wake of the January 6 protests, where wokester banks outright cut him off.
His Trump Organization financial operation, however, did find a bank that would loan to his organization, a relatively small bank in San Diego called Axos Bank, and that set the Washington Post scrambling to look for some seedy Biden-style corruption.
The Post found nothing.
Its reporters must have spent some time on this, however, because they ran a story and had to satisfy themselves with innuendo that maybe something could be wrong.
Their story began with this drumroll:
SAN DIEGO — As Donald Trump considered another White House run last year, his company's finances were at risk of spiraling into crisis.
The former president's longtime lender and several banks with his deposits had cut ties in the days around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by his supporters, at a time when Trump had hundreds of millions in loans coming due. In February 2022, the accounting firm that had worked for him for two decades dropped Trump and advised against relying on his "statement of financial condition," a metric banks use to evaluate the risks of a loan.
Unless he found a new lender, Trump's business empire could have been in jeopardy.
Then a new partner came to the rescue: a little known, online-only financial firm headquartered in a suburban San Diego office park.
Nope, that's a very busy urban area of San Diego of all new buildings at the edge of the pricey urban sprawl of La Jolla. It's across the street from the giant Westfield UTC shopping mall, and abuts a recently constructed overhead Trolley line in the environs of the huge UCSD medical complex. I've been in that cool, spacious, quiet building myself, which is on a busy throughway from a highway turnoff. It's no suburban office park in some obscure place. It's right out there in a high-visibility crossroads, where anyone can find it.
After reading the whole long story, any objective reader would be able to see that they beat a dead horse, and their efforts to make this look like some sweetheart deal falls flat.
They said the significance of their story was that the loans helped keep Trump afloat and ready for his presidential run, which was what was really bothering them.
Yet there was no sign of anything untoward in their account of the Trump Organization's $225-million refinancing loans from Axos Bank at all.
The real story was that wokester banks had shut Trump out from loans for political reasons, and Axos Bank, which was run by a Republican named Gregory Garrabrants, didn't put political terms on bank loans, so once the bank was satisfied that the Trumps could repay, the Trump loans went through, and the bank said it made money.
One day after the warning by Trump's accounting firm became public, Axos's blunt-spoken president and CEO — a Republican donor named Gregory Garrabrants — signed off on a $100 million loan for Trump Tower, the 58-story Manhattan skyscraper that had long been Trump's home and base of operations, according to the bank.
Three months later, Garrabrants approved a second deal that provided $125 million for Trump's Doral resort, a sprawling golf course complex in Miami-Dade County he had owned since 2012. Axos also financed part of a loan that helped facilitate the $375 million purchase of Trump's D.C. hotel by a group of investors.
Before making the loans, he subjected the Trump Organization to more paperwork than usual to avoid charges of sweetheart dealing because he knew that the Democrats would be full of scrutiny. The bank chief also personally inspected the buildings and demanded tougher-than-average loan conditions based on the Trump Organization's credit profile, and then they loaned their loans at a market rate at market conditions.
That doesn't sound like corruption — that sounds like banking the way banking used to be done — for profit to the bank, without regard for the political orientation of the customer.
Garrabrants, in fact, came off as one tough bastard — just look at that picture of him that the Post ran to start.
Unlike a lot of bankers, he was out front with the Post and answered all their questions face to face with no slinking around, the way a corrupt bank might do.
His statements are even more entertainingly tough-minded (emphasis added):
Garrabrants declined to discuss some details of the loans, including the long-term interest rate or how they are secured, while saying they were done on "market terms." The Trump loans, which represent about 1 percent of the bank's $20 billion in assets, are structured to guarantee profits for Axos, Garrabrants said.
"It wouldn't matter if I was friends with someone, I'm not going to make a loan that's no good," he said. "I don't like anyone that much."
(Based on his pic, he doesn't look as though he likes much of anyone, actually.) People with things to hide tend to slink around from reporters, but this guy didn't.
He also was a tough lender, personally inspecting Trump's buildings before making the loans, including even the mechanical room in one building, which he said "was clean as a whistle."
Garrabrants told The Post his bank had verified Trump's information by its own methodology and was at the head of the line for repayment. He also discounted the value of statements of financial condition in general, saying, "I've never run into a borrower who thinks their property is worth what I think it's worth.
It was impressive that he was an unapologetic Republican, given that the Post noted that he would likely be under more scrutiny for making the loans from Congress should Trump get re-elected, and he said he knew that, so he made the terms of the loans tougher than most.
"So what we wanted to make sure we did was structure the loan in a manner that was even at a higher bar than it normally would be, because I expected that there would be folks who would be interested in it," he said.
He signed off on the loans personally, which to my mind looked like a move to protect his bank employees from politicized prosecutors now going after Trump, which was another gutsy move.
What's more, the loans are being repaid:
Trump's Axos loans are being repaid on schedule, Garrabrants said.
Corrupt banks in sweetheart deals don't require those kinds of things.
Garrabrants also has a reputation as a very good banker from a profit perspective. Having weathered the 2008 financial crisis, he said he never wanted to his bank be "on the wrong side of the tsunami" again. His bank, despite the current downturn, remains "investment-grade rated" and it has a reputation of profitability. And he was able to take advantage of the pandemic lockdowns to draw in new customers to his largely online bank operation.
Obviously, this is a banker who does things the normal way, and to the Post, that's abnormal. That's reason for suspicion and scrutiny. We see no sweetheart deals here — just tougher lending terms owing to political exposure. We also see no lost money, which is what you see in corruption cases. All we see is profit for the bank. And we see a tough, direct guy who isn't afraid of lending to Trump, or anyone who can pay back his loans, nor is he afraid of talking to reporters. In all, this looks like a pretty impressive bank of the non-wokester kind that we don't see much of anymore. That should have been the story.
But the Post's reporters tried to smear this as a political deal. Yet based on their reporting, which to their credit is honest reporting, they couldn't find any evidence of it. That leaves the rest of us here to be able to see what is going on here and draw our own conclusions.
Image: Pixabay via FreeIMG, Pixabay License.