How Donald Trump Created a Facade of Success | Pivot

Suzanne Craig and Ross Buettner are investigative reporters for the New York Times. That is underselling it. They're amazing (laughs) investigative reporters for the New York Times. They've written a new book based on a lot of their reporting they have published this year, uh, called Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. Suzanne and Russ, welcome.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us.

So I went to your book event here in, in DC. It was really interesting. But, uh, you've been reporting, for people who don't know, on Donald Trump's finances for years, but you go really in depth in the book. Talk to us about, uh, what... Obviously, Donald Trump's all about talking about money, but what does his financial history tell us about him as a businessman? Let's g- let's focus on that part.

Yeah, I think that was the- our big interest in, uh, in doing this book was to get to the bottom of that. We had done three longer stories in the Times that explored different windows, how much money he got from his father and how his businesses performed in the '80s and '90s and then again after the 2000s. But stringing all that together is where you really kind of see the pattern. Um, and I think what you notice is that he's very good at, as you would expect, drawing attention to himself, at selling things when there's things that need to be sold. Often, he's drawing attention to things he never does. That's one of the themes that runs through the book is he sort of builds up his reputation by saying he's gonna do things that never happen. But operationally, he has difficulties. Um, he never seems to be very careful about the finances of projects, so he regularly spends far more than what the projects bring in. He often says that. And then he needs money from other sources outside of his business operations to support those businesses, and what we saw was-

Right, so it's a bit of a Ponzi scheme is what it looked like.

A little bit. You see his inheritance filling in the holes, and then later the fortune from The Apprentice, uh, really filling in a lot of holes as well and sort of sustaining this image that he's a powerful businessman when he's really having problems that he's hiding from public view.

And, uh, Suzanne, talk a little bit about how you went about this reporting, because you've been doing this for a long time.

Right, and, and like Russ said, we, we had a number of stories at the Times. There's kind of three, three big ones. We've been covering him since 2000. It's hard to believe (laughs) we're coming up on nine years of this, but says every journalist, I think, covering this guy. Um, and then we decided after the 2020 story, it was a big story we had where we got decades of his corporate and personal tax returns. You know, we found out in that, that he wasn't paying much income tax ever. Um, we also got an incredible window into how much he'd made from The Apprentice. So we laid that out, and then Russ and I had a conversation, and, and we realized we had a- a, I think, you know, we call it a skeleton for a book. But we really saw this as an epic American tale, and we wanted to tell it, and we wanted to delve further into his father. We were really intrigued about his dad from the reporting we did, you know, while we were at the paper. Um, and then we wanted to just learn more about Fred and see that impact that it had had on his life and then re-explore Donald's life, because I think there's just a lot of misconceptions that were out there. Some of them were laid down by him early on and just repeated over and over and over. And so, you know, when we decided, Russ and I had a chat, and, and Russ took a- had very heavy lifting (laughs) on the writing. He's a beautiful writer. And, um, we worked together, and I did a lot of the reporting. So we just spent a couple of years just full at it every day trying to get this together.