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 nearly-century spanning narrative 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.
