An Instant New York Times Bestseller • A Washington Post Notable Book • A Financial Times Best
Business Book of the Year “A first-rate financial thriller . . . Lucky Loser is one of those
rare Trump books that deserve even demand to be read.” –Alexander Nazaryan The New York
Times From the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporters behind the 2018 bombshell New York Times
exposé of President Trump’s finances an explosive investigation into the history of Donald
Trump’s wealth revealing how one of the country’s biggest business failures lied his way into
the White House Soon after announcing his first campaign for the U.S. presidency Donald J.
Trump told a national television audience that life “has not been easy for me. It has not been
easy for me.” Building on a narrative he had been telling for decades he spun a hardscrabble
fable of how he parlayed a small loan from his father into a multibillion-dollar business and
real estate empire. This feat he argued made him singularly qualified to lead the country.
Except none of it was true. As his wealthy father’s chosen successor Trump received the
equivalent today of more than $500 million in family money. He collected a second windfall
thanks to Mark Burnett the revolutionary television producer who made Trump a star. In truth
Trump’s empire was underwritten and at times saved by the equivalent of more than $1 billion
that came his way without any of the business expertise he claimed. Drawing on more than
twenty years’ worth of Trump’s confidential tax information including the tax returns he tried
to conceal alongside business records and interviews with Trump insiders New York Times
investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig track Trump’s financial rise and fall
and rise and fall again. A masterpiece of narrative reporting Lucky Loser is a meticulous
examination spanning nearly a century filled with scoops from Trump Tower Mar-a-Lago Atlantic
City and the set of The Apprentice . Here for the first time is the definitive true accounting
of Trump and his money—what he had what he lost and what he has left—and the myth of Trump
the self-made billionaire exposed.
