WAPO Book review: DJT's financial failures are stunning. 'Lucky Loser' has the receipts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/09/17/lucky-loser-donald-trump-finances-susanne-craig-russ-buettner-review/Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner’s book, which builds on their Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, is much more than an excavation of the former president’s tax returns.
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September 17, 2024 at 10:47 a.m. EDT
If you tell someone who is not a fan of former president Donald Trump that he is essentially a fraud — that his claim that he’s “really rich” due to his own business acumen is simply not true — they will almost certainly say, “Of course. I already know that.” That this has been documented is in large part because of the work of New York Times reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, and other colleagues, who in 2016 published a bombshell article based on Trump’s 1995 tax returns, which showed that he had lost almost a billion dollars that year.
Their source, Mary Trump — Donald’s niece — eventually turned over about 100,000 pages of “audited financial statements, tax returns, bank records, general ledgers, and legal papers.” The Times published pieces, for which the reporters won a Pulitzer, during Trump’s presidency revealing that contrary to his claims of getting just a $1 million loan from his father, he had received the equivalent of more than $400 million as an inheritance.
Now, Craig and Buettner have written a book, “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.” It shows in meticulously documented detail how “even when Trump appeared to be at his best, he was failing,” with massive losses on his core business. The authors prove that without his father’s support, Trump would have been nothing. The book also raises a bigger question about the “fake it till you make it” ethos of modern America. In a world that conflates the “trappings of wealth with expertise and ability,” where “fame, detached from any other marketable talent or skill,” is “a highly compensated vocation,” does it even matter if you never actually make it?
The heartbreaking thing about reading Buettner and Craig’s work is realizing how many passes Trump has gotten over the years, how thoroughly he is a creation of the media, which as the authors write, “rarely revisited his claims and afforded credibility to everything he said.” As it turns out, unfortunately, what the media giveth the media cannot taketh away. There might be no amount of hard reporting that will make a Trump believer into a disbeliever.
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...though I'm sure the authors included it in the book. The history of Trump Shuttle is just unbelievable--he took what should have been a turnkey operation and flew the whole damn thing straight into the ground. Instead of letting the thing run itself, Trump micromanaged it into bankruptcy, including renovating the lavatories with marble and gold fixtures for the requisite Trump bling-bling. It was only the hard reality of physics that nixed that idea--the engineers told Trump that his planes--obsolete '60s-vintage 727s--would never get off the ground with all that weight. Instead, Trump settled for shag carpeting that made it nearly impossible to move drink carts through the aisles.
Let's not forget this is the guy who bankrupted multiple casinos. He even lost his shirt in a real estate deal to Merv Griffin, for God's sake. 
https://democraticunderground.com/100219433986#post3
