1192 Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig "Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success"

Stand Up! with Pete Dominick

Pete Dominick

News, Politics

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Russ Buettner is an investigative reporter at the New York Times. Since 2016, his reporting has focused on the personal finances of Donald J. Trump, including in-depth articles with Susanne Craig and other Times reporters that revealed the fortune Trump inherited from his father and the record of business failures hidden in twenty years of Trump’s tax returns. Those articles were awarded a Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards. Buettner, who joined the Times in 2006, was also a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for articles with Danny Hakim highlighting abuse and neglect in New York’s care of developmentally disabled people. He previously worked on investigations teams at the Daily News in New York and New York Newsday.

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh yeah we are off and hopefully your day is off to a good start. Thank you very much for
0:08.0	joining me for part of it. I've got a great interview with two, not one, but two Pillitt Surprise winning authors,
0:15.6	investigative reporters at the New York Times about their amazing new book.
0:19.9	And I'm one of the first shows, if not the first show, I think, to actually interview and hopefully
0:24.1	get this interview posted.
0:25.9	It's called Lucky Loser.
0:27.4	How Donald Trump squandered his father's fortune and created the illusion of success.
0:32.5	Now I think I despise Donald Trump as much as, if not more,
0:35.6	than most people because I cover him
0:37.1	and know so much about him and have for such a long time.
0:40.5	But a lot of us feel the same way about the guys
0:42.4	that you would think, well, I don't want to read that book.
0:44.1	Oh this book was real good, real interesting for so many reasons just learning about his
0:50.4	crazy family learning about their insanely illegal fraudulent schemes and
0:56.9	dishonesty over the years from his dad obviously to him and how they did it
1:02.3	and how he's gotten away with it. It's such great reporting. Russ Butner Susanna Craig joined me today for the first time and I'm real excited to have them. That interview begins at 12 minutes if you want to skip the headlines
1:16.8	and clips, but I'm here for you with those almost every day of the week. Get your news
1:22.4	run down and recap from Stand Up with Pete
1:24.8	Dominic. Where most days by midnight or 6 a.m. at the latest I'll rattle off
1:29.7	news stories that impact the most people the most.
1:33.1	That is my editorial standard here.
1:35.0	That's why I generally choose the stories that I choose.
	...

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