An Instant New York Times Bestseller “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 then-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 US 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 multi-billion-dollar
business and real estate empire. This feat he argued made him singularly qualified to lead
the country. Except: None of it was true. Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of
his own highly lucrative investments Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million
today via means that required no business expertise whatsoever. Drawing on over 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. For decades he squanders his fortunes on money losing businesses only to be saved
yet again by financial serendipity. He tacks his name above the door of every building while
taking out huge loans he’ll never repay. He obsesses over appearances while ignoring threats
to the bottom line and mounting costly lawsuits against city officials. He tarnishes the value
of his name by allowing anyone with a big enough check to use it and cheats the television
producer who not only rescues him from bankruptcy but casts him as a business savant – the
public image that will carry him to the White House. 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 . At a moment when
Trump’s tether to success and power is more precarious than ever 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 final word on the myth of Trump the self-made billionaire.
