Bethany McLean writes:

If you tell someone who is not a fan of former president Donald Trump that he is essentially a fraud — that his claim that he’s “really rich” due to his own business acumen is simply not true — they will almost certainly say, “Of course. I already know that.” That this has been documented is in large part because of the work of New York Times reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, and other colleagues, who in 2016 published a bombshell article based on Trump’s 1995 tax returns, which had been provided to them by an anonymous source and showed that he had lost almost a billion dollars that year.

It was just before the election. Obviously, it didn’t matter, at least not in the big picture.

Mary Trump — Donald’s niece — later turned over other material, about 100,000 pages of “audited financial statements, tax returns, bank records, general ledgers, and legal papers.” The Times published pieces, for which the reporters won a Pulitzer, during Trump’s presidency revealing that contrary to his claims of getting just a $1 million loan from his father, he had received the equivalent of more than $400 million as an inheritance.

Now, Craig and Buettner have written a book, “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.” It 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. The authors prove that without his father’s support, Trump would have been nothing. The book also raises a bigger question about the “fake it till 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?

The backbone of the book is the numbers. Because Buettner and Craig have such a trove of documents, they are able to prove the reality under the hype that is Donald Trump in incontrovertible detail. In the decade that ended in 1995, a decade in which Trump was supposedly a huge success, he recorded more than $1.1 billion in business losses on his tax returns, which the authors call a “failure of historical proportions.” He used those losses to avoid paying taxes in subsequent years. The news in their book lies not in one specific detail, but rather in the sheer accumulation of damning facts. [Continue reading…]