Why are they all like this?
Meet Stewart Rahr, a self-proclaimed self-made billionaire who calls himself “Rah Rah” or, if you please, the “No. 1 King of All Fun.”
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen said that Rahr acted as a “straw bidder” for a $60,000 painting of Trump at a 2013 Hamptons auction. The Trump Foundation then reimbursed Rahr for the purchase, Cohen told legislators at a Wednesday House Oversight Committee hearing.
“The objective was to ensure that his portrait, which was going to be auctioned last, would go for the highest price of any portrait that afternoon,” Cohen said. He also provided a New York Daily News article reporting that Rahr was the purchaser.
A bit character in Trumpworld, Rahr manages to out-Trump the President in many ways.
He’s a Queens native who earned a lifetime ban from ritzy Sushi chain Nobu in 2013 after cursing out the manager of one Midtown Manhattan restaurant.
“He called me the C-word and said he would kill me,” the New York Post quoted the unlucky manager as saying, in response to a conflict in which Rahr allegedly confronted restaurant staff after not being able to sit at his favorite table.
Rahr became a billionaire in 2010, after selling his pharmaceutical company Kinray. He reportedly developed his family pharmacy business into a multi-billion dollar empire in part by accumulating large amounts of drugs, waiting for the prices to rise, and then arbitraging the difference between the purchase price and the inflated sale price.
Forbes reported that Rahr was doing his best to spend the $1.3 billion he earned off the sale, in part through private concerts and 7,500 square feet of Trump Tower, as well as splashy charitable donations.
Rahr, according to Forbes, also had a habit of blind-copying hundreds of people on a private email list, including celebrities that ran the gamut from Oprah Winfry to Donald Trump.
At the time of the 2013 article, Rahr was reeling from a divorce that cost him $250 million, and reportedly began furiously sending a sex tape of himself out to various acquaintances.
“I was in France, I was single,” the magazine reported him as saying of the filmed encounter.
TPM was unable to confirm the existence of the alleged Rah-Rah sex tape, or if Trump was a recipient.
Calls to Rahr this morning went unanswered.
