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.
A new book just out by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Russ Buettner and Suzanne Craig conducts 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, says the Random House press release.
I first wrote about this in 2016 when Trump first became President: his multiple bankruptcies of the Trump Casinos when other Atlantic City Casinos were successful, Trump University charged as a criminal enterprise (under RICO), and the fact that he had to rely on Russian Oligarchs to finance his real estate empire when U.S. banks would no longer lend to him, are just the tip of the iceberg of business incompetence.
“This is a page turner, with spectacular anecdotes,” said a review by Washington Post’s Bethany McLean . . . “[Lucky Loser] shows in meticulously documented detail how ‘even when Trump appeared to be at his best, he was failing,’ with massive losses on his core business.
Buettner and Craig first revealed his real financial condition in a 2016 NYTimes article.
“The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.”
It heightens the absurdity of Republicans allowing Trump’s MAGA movement to take over the Republican Party.
These are the acts of a bully, rather than leader, I said then, which is why he seems to have so much in common with V Putin, Marine Le Pen, and other demagogues. Acting tough can be a plus when dealing with North Korea, or even Russia, but not when dealing with Americans who don’t like him or his very anti-American policies.
Fortune Magazine also reported in 2016 before becoming the Republican candidate for president on candidate Trump’s negotiating tactics: “The legal actions provide clues to the leadership style the billionaire businessman would bring to bear as commander in chief. He sometimes responds to even small disputes with overwhelming legal force. He doesn’t hesitate to deploy his wealth and legal firepower against adversaries with limited resources, such as homeowners. He sometimes refuses to pay real estate brokers, lawyers and other vendors.”
And, “As he campaigns, Trump often touts his skills as a negotiator,” said Fortune. “The analysis shows that lawsuits are one of his primary negotiating tools. He turns to litigation to distance himself from failing projects that relied on the Trump brand to secure investments.
“The authors prove that without his father’s support, Trump would have been nothing,” continues Washington Post’s McLean. “The book also raises a bigger question about the ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ ethos of modern America. In a world that conflates the ‘trappings of wealth with expertise and ability,’ where ‘fame, detached from any other marketable talent or skill,’ is ‘a highly compensated vocation,’ does it even matter if you never actually make it?”
This probably tells us best why he was able to take over the Republican Party that has drifted so far from conservative values and was once the environmental party when Republican President Nixon first signed the USEPA into law in 1972.
Republicans had learned to “fake it ‘til you make it”, as was proved by the Trump administrations record in breaking up the USEPA so that Trump’s call to “Drill Baby Drill” for more fossil fuels can continue, and preserving tax cuts first enacted under Trump what will further increase the national debt.
Buettner and Craig’s book will hopefully uncover the truth of Trump’s MAGA policies before it is too late, as most of the modern media has failed to do.
Buettner and Craig’s work exposes how many passes Trump has gotten over the years, how thoroughly he is a creation of the medial that has chased fame over blame, which as the authors write, ‘rarely revisited his claims and afforded credibility to everything he said,” concludes McLean’s review.
And now recognizing more signs of Trump’s mental deterioration as he ages makes it even more important that we in the media tell it like it is.
Harlan Green © 2024
Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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