“John Barron” Turns 40 While Trump Remains a 6-Year Old Colbert, Trevor Noah & Seth Meyers make similar point in hilarious roasts of Trump's notorious alias scam

Posted on April 29, 2024 by Jonathan Greenberg

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In the make believe world of Donald Trump’s alternative reality, John Barron turned 40 years old on May 17th, the very same day that the son he named after his fictitious spokesman graduated from high school.

Meanwhile, as President Biden recently observed the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner: “Age is an issue. I’m a grown man running against a 6-year-old.”

May 17, 1984 was the day that Trump’s secretary had arranged for me to do an extensive phone interview the Trump Organization’s new Vice President of Finance, John Barron.

During the two previous years, I had met with and spoken directly with Trump as Forbes magazine’s lead real estate analyst for the Forbes 400 wealth lists. This time, I was told, Trump was busy, and wanted me to do a phone interview with John Barron.

I discovered my tape of that phone call decades later, and wrote a widely read Washington Post exposé about how Trump scammed me, and Forbes, for years, into inflating his net worth to get onto the Forbes 400.

Late night comedy had a field day with the fictitious John Barron. For the 40th birthday of Trump’s most outrageous scam, I present these three hilarious videos, in one place, for the first time:

Stephen Colbert, May 10, 2019. “Trump Spent Years Posing As His Own Spokesman”

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. April 23, 2018. “Trump Bullshitted His Way Onto the Forbes 400 List”

Seth Myers: A Closer Look, May 9, 2019.

Of course, Trump’s intention to create a fascist, Putin-style dictatorship should he win or steal this November’s presidential election is no laughing mater.

That’s why I started and seed funded the new Stop Trump Dictatorship Project. Our purpose is to create and market opinion-shifting short YouTube video ads to voters in swing states who are unaware or indifferent to the historic threat to American democracy posed by a Trump dictatorship. The two minute video below describes our strategy of deploying the most cost efficient Biden-boosting awareness building campaign possible. Every $100 donated, over Act Blue here, will allow our impactful videos to reach 3,000 adults in swing states.

More than 70% of Republican voters believe, to this day, Trump’s easily disproven lie that he won the 2020 election. Reaching them, and independent voters, with facts that busts Trump’s Big Lie of a stolen election, is going to be necessary if our nation is going to stop Trump’s Putin-style dictatorship. Our new video, below, focuses on doing that:

Jonathan Greenberg

Jonathan Greenberg is the editor and publisher of the award winning Sonoma Independent, which he founded in 2015 to serve the public interest with insight, solutions and advocacy.

In January, 2024, Jonathan launched the StopTrumpDictatorship.com Project to create and market compelling YouTube ads, as well as the Progressive Source PAC to fund them. The effort’s first project was the Dems Vote Haley in SC video, which was viewed 400,000 times in blue counties, contributing to Haley outperforming polls by 10 points.

Jonathan has been an investigative legal and financial journalist with 40 years of experience contributing to national publications. During the past six years, Jonathan wrote four of the most widely-read exposes in the Washington Post about Donald Trump. Jonathan has known Trump longer than any journalist writing today. He was head of research for the first Forbes 400 when Trump conned him into putting him on the list. The notorious phone calls Trump taped pretending to be John Barron was the subject of monologues on Colbert, the Daily Show and Seth Meyers. Jonathan has appeared live on more than a dozen major news shows, including on CNN with Erin Burnett, Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, on MSNBC with Ari Berber and Ali Velshi, and NPR's On the Media.

Jonathan was a Web 1.0 pioneer. In 1996 he started Gist Communications, a disruptive new media company that competed successfully with News Corp’s TV Guide Online. In 1997, Gist was one of just 14 websites in the world to be named a winner of the First Annual Webby Awards in San Francisco. Following Gist and the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Jonathan served, in 2002 and 2003, as Policy Director for the New York City Council’s Select Committee on Lower Manhattan Redevelopment, where he directed media and public policy campaigns and was the city council’s lead analyst for federal relief programs.

In 2007, Jonathan founded Progressive Source Communications, a public interest digital advocacy company that has created scores of impactful videos and campaigns to build awareness of solutions that serve the common good. Progressive Source owns the Sonoma Independent.

Jonathan is a graduate of Yale Law School's Masters Degree in Law fellowship program. A fuller bio and links to Jonathan's work can be found at JonathanGreenberg.com.