Since Donald Trump picked up the keys to the White House nine years back, he has become the subject of a plethora of books written on any number of aspects about him, his presidency, his society life prior to politics, his family, his business dealings, his reality television show, and other areas of his life I’m certain to have overlooked.
While the majority of these books have been penned by journalists, some of them have come from his nephew, Fred, his niece, Mary, and his former lawyer/fixer, Michael Cohen, who went to prison for actions he is alleged to have taken on Trump’s behalf.
It’s all there, no stone unturned, as it were. An entire section at Barnes & Noble could be devoted to them. Here is a partial list of the ones I have read:
Fear by Bob Woodward. The Divider by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Fire and Fury by Michael Wolfe. All in the Family by his nephew, Fred Trump. Too Much and Never Enough by his niece, Mary Trump. Another one from Bob Woodward, Rage. Revenge by Michael Cohen, and A Very Stable Genius by Mike Luckovich.
I’ve recently finished Lucky Loser by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, and I’d love to know what Trump thinks of having the word “loser” refer to him in the title. If there is one thing Donald Trump does not want to be called, it is a loser. His former chief of staff, General John Kelly, alleges that in 2018 at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France, Trump referred to the fallen soldiers as “losers,’ something Trump has recently denied saying.
In Lucky Loser, Buettner and Craig dispel the notion that Trump is a self-made man or the kind of success he claims to be. In great detail, the writers explore Trump’s early days as a protege of his father, Fred, a hugely-successful, true embodiment of a self-made developer of properties in Queens who bypassed his eldest son and namesake to name second son, Donald, to succeed him in the business.
In the early pages of Lucky Loser, the authors write this:
“One drizzly fall evening…Mary (Trump) drove a rented van to her lawyer’s office, filled it with boxes and records, and returned to her home on Long Island where we were waiting. We then transported those boxes back to a secret office at the The Times, where we would spend most of the next year analyzing about one hundred thousand pages of audited financial pages, tax returns, bank records, general ledgers, and legal papers. The resulting story, published in October 2018, revealed for the first time that Donald Trump had received the equivalent of $400 million from his father, much of it from fraudulent tax evasion schemes. The story disproved Donald Trump’s lifelong claim that his father gave him nothing more than a ‘small’ $1 million loan.”
The resulting story in The New York Times won the authors the Pulitzer Prize.
Chapter 1 begins in 1923, very early in the Trump family’s story in America. As the authors point out, Donald Trump’s grandfather very much exemplified the proverbial rags-to-riches tale. Even more impressive is what happened following his death in 1918 during the so-called Spanish flu epidemic. What his grandmother did to pick up the pieces is truly remarkable and set the family on the path toward an impressive real estate and construction future that Donald Trump’s father would, pardon the pun, build upon.
Subsequent chapters examine Donald Trump’s rise in his father’s company, how Trump set his sights on putting Queens in his rearview mirror, and his attempts at making inroads in Manhattan and being taken seriously as a builder and developer there.
According to the authors, Trump engaged in self-promotion on a grand scale and talked a big game that was often not based in fact. From start to finish, Lucky Loser is full of surprising facts about the self-created myth of Donald Trump, the business tycoon. The book’s entire title neatly encapsulates the myth as false narrative.
The pity is, the members of the public who most need to read it likely don’t know it exists and consider The New York Times “fake news.”
