Book Review: ‘Lucky Loser,’ by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig

Trump likes to rail against the lazy falsehoods of the “fake news media,” and he should know: Reporters have been repeating his lies for decades. In 1985, with little evidence, “60 Minutes” called him a billionaire. Two years later, following the “Black Monday” stock market collapse, The Wall Street Journal’s Randall Smith, rushing toward a deadline, took Trump at his word when he claimed that he had liquidated his stock portfolio ahead of the crash. It would have been a smart move, only Trump never made it. Trump “saw his shares tumble by millions,” Buettner and Craig write, but what prevailed in the popular imagination was the myth of a financial genius.

Not everyone was duped. “Donald Trump is driving 100 miles per hour toward a brick wall, and he has no brakes,” a banker told a reporter at The Journal in 1990 as Trump moved more deeply into debt developing casinos. Forbes put his net worth at $500 million. Gambling regulators, who presumably knew a thing or two about the scope of human avarice, took a more accurate measure of the man, pegging his fortune at $205.7 million. “His businesses were failing, but the appearance was becoming his business,” the authors write.

Trump may have turned out to be nothing more than another cautionary tale of 1980s hubris, had it not been for the television producer Mark Burnett, who in 2003 decided to make Trump the star of “The Apprentice,” his heavily scripted reality show. The production team labored to disguise their star’s eternal confusion and incompetence. “Our job then was to reverse-engineer the show and to make him not look like a complete moron,” one member of the production team tells Buettner and Craig.

By the time “The Apprentice” had become a cash cow, the headlines about Trump’s failed marriages and casinos had long faded. A new generation of Americans saw a ruthless executive, a steely-eyed billionaire who knew what it took to make it because he had supposedly made it himself.

Finally, under the glare of the presidency, the facade became too difficult to maintain. Of course, we now know, thanks to Buettner, Craig and their colleague David Barstow, that Donald’s empire had been sustained by $413 million courtesy of Fred’s business, much of it transferred from Fred to Donald through elaborate tax evasion schemes.