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Suzanne Craig and Ross Butner are investigative reporters for the New York Times that is underselling they're
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amazing investigative reporters for the New York Times they've written a new book based on a lot of their reporting
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they have published this year uh called lucky loser how Donald Trump squandered his father's fortune and created the
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illusion of success Suzanne and Russ welcome thanks for having us thank you yeah thanks for having us so I went to
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your book event here in DC it was really interesting but you've been reporting for people who don't know on Donald
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Trump's an es for years but you go really in depth in the book talk to us about uh what obviously Donald Trump's
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all about talking about money but what does his financial history tell us about him as a businessman let's let's focus
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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
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had done three longer stories in the times that explored different Windows how much money he got from his father
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and how his businesses performed in the 80s and 90s and then again after the 2000s but stringing all that together is
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where you really kind of see the pattern um and I think what you notice is that he's very good at you expect drawing
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attention to himself at selling things when there's things that need to be sold often he's drawing attention to things
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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
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going to do things that never happen but operationally he has difficulties um he
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never seems to be very careful about the finances of projects so he regularly spends far more than what the projects
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bring in he often says that and then he needs money from other sources outside of his business operations to support
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those businesses and what we saw was bit of a Ponzi scheme a little bit you see his inheritance filling in the holes and
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then later the fortune from The Apprentice uh really filling in a lot of holes as well and sort of sustaining
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this image that he's a powerful businessman when he's really having problems that he's hiding from public
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View and Suzanne talk a little bit about how you went about this reporting because you've been doing this for a
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long time right and like Russ said we we had a number of stories at the Times there's kind of three three big ones
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we've been covering him since 2000 it's hard to believe we're coming up on nine years of this but says every journalist
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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
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his corporate and personal tax returns you know we found out in that that he wasn't paying much income tax ever um we
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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
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conversation and and we realized we had a I think you know we call it a skeleton
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for a book but we really saw this as an epic American Tale and we wanted to tell
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it and we wanted to delve further into his father we were really intrigued about his dad from the reporting we did
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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
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had had on his life and then re-explore Donald's life because I think there's just a lot of misconceptions that were
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out there some of them were laid down by him early on and just repeat it over and
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over and over and so you know and we decided Russ and I had a chat and and Russ took had very heavy lifting on the
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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
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of years just full at it every day trying to get this together before I bring said talk about the role the f
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father this is Fred um talk about his role and influence because he was a pretty good business person in this case
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he was as a you know as a not a smalltime developer pretty big- time developer in New York which is a tough
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Market yeah I mean it's it it's an amazing Arc to his career he really was the self-created person businessman that
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Donald Trump's always said that he was um and he started out just building like garages in the upand cominging
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neighborhood in Queens where where he grew up and then over the course of the next like 40 years he really benefited
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from some of the big programs uh the government programs to solve the biggest crisises of the 20th century first the
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Great Depression then finding building housing for soldiers during World War II building more housing for Veterans when
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they got out and then a couple of programs to sort of build up housing for middle- inome people later than that and
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he built up this colossal Empire of 10 to 20,000 sometimes apartments that were rentals he never had one except for a
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couple outside of New York City that didn't make money um and so by the time Donald joins the company Fred owns what
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would be during his lifetime a billion doll Empire of rental apartments it's kicking off tremendous amounts of cash
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it has very little debt and so Donald has this like windfall behind him to do what he wants and Fred it's a really
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interesting relationship to us and it's seminal to Donald's life Fred really puts his full faith in Donald from that
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point there were other siblings two brothers for various reasons Fred the older one falls off the scale doesn't
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get his father's trust becomes an alcoholic and dies very young unfortunately um and the younger one
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never really seems to be taken seriously because Donald's already claimed the helm by then and Fred never challenges
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Donald at all in anything he wants to do and they're entirely different as I said
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Donald starts saying he's going to build things that he doesn't do Donald's not paying attention to the bottom line um
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Donald's taking great risk but it's not really with his money but Fred throughout his life supports him even as
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Donald starts to say I'm way bigger than my father was when he's only built like
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one building with other big Partners but it's really seems to be a seminal relationship in his life I have to say
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Carol though you do see it in in R talked about Fred and in that era where he went into these larger projects they
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came out of government programs and Fred was seen at the time as taking advantage
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of them and exploiting loopholes and you know there's even there was a article in
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the in one of the Brooklyn papers that that ultimately called him a pariah feeding off government large s and
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gouging his tenants so you see shades of sort of what the practices that Donald is accused of yeah racism also yeah in
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in in some respects but but a great Builder so there's contradictions in there right right no always a malevolent
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Force Scott go ahead yeah uh nice to meet you so the data that I've seen is that from the 7s
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through the '90s when his dad ultimately passed away inherited he inherited approximately 4 13 million is the number
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that sticks my mind and if that were invested in just an S&P Index Fund it would be somewhere depending on the
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returns worth today somewhere between 10 and 20 billion and it's very hard to nail
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down his actual net worth but we know it's less than that we know if he just stuck it in an index fund he'd be worth
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more money which businesses have been the most successful and which have been the least successful
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that he's been engaged in since inheriting that money I got to imagine the casinos and the golf courses have
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not paid off but The Apprentice was a big deal what else has made and lost him money it's a great question I'm so happy
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that you remember that number because that was on a spreadsheet on my screen for about a year and a half we were all
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coming up with the numbers to get to that 413 um and and you're right that's the way we've kind of looked at his
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wealth and his General success is that you know if he had just invested it and gone saing he'd probably be infinitely
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more wealthy than he is now um I mean on The Apprentice look all he did was show
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up there Mark brunett had the producer had made this deal with NBC that he would get half or he would get all of
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the product integration money and it wasn't really product integration each show was a commercial for whoever
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sponsored it and they didn't know NBC didn't know at the time what that was going to be worth um it took about a
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year to get it going but pretty soon companies were paying one two three four million dollar to be on each episode and
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brunette in order to persuade Donald to join that effort who he thought was really busy
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promised to give him half of whatever that would would would would raise and so that became just a huge windfall in
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his life about $200 million and then there was a string of Licensing deals that as soon as he became famous flowed
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from that early on the year before he had tried to get licensing deals and he had literally been laughed out of
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offices as soon as The Apprentice starts they just start pouring in the door eventually that goes bad you see Trump
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University and all these developments that don't happen because he's not really doing due diligence but still
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over the course of the years of The Apprentice that generated another $200 million but when you look at the
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businesses that he created in that window um we see a lot of like alligators the Chicago Tower he secretly
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declared worthless on his tax returns while he's telling the world it's hugely successful the retail part of that Tower
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was built below grade so there's no Street traffic it's been empty now for I think 15 years his UK golf courses have
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continued to suck money and require influx of cash the Old Post Office the same problem that right he built that
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thing and and he spent too much on it all his competitors knew he was spending too much on it and we saw his tax
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returns he was having to put 7 to1 millionar a year into it which we presume came from the easy money he was
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getting from The Apprentice and from licensing deals so golf has been a mixed bag real estate's been a mixed bag a
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little bit uh 40 Wall Street for example's been up and down at different times um but overall like the the line
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that's stuck in my head on this is that the less involvement he has in designing
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and operating a business the greater its chances of financial success so talk a little
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about this Suzanne this idea of wealth and success how he put this out as sort of using Creative Accounting using
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various task codes and rules to his Advantage not something other people don't do and he actually brags about it
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why shouldn't I take advantage of it so can you talk a little bit about what how
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he does that and creates these f um faux ideas that he's Rich he just says it right I mean it doesn't well I
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think that what a great yeah because there's there's of course the use of the tax code but I think when I think about
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that question when you first said it I think about just this crazy image that he projects that's not backed up by
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reality you look at one of the things I always remember about the book was when we got um or just the project it was we
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got it before we started the book we got 10 years of tax records from 1985 to '94
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and in that was of course the year he wrote Art of the deal and we were thinking well there maybe going to be
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some good news in there that year he's writing a book saying he's this master deal maker and he lost $45 million do in
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change that year so behind the curtain that's what's going on and in that decade we actually were able to find out
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because we got some anonymized taxpayer data through the national archives in Washington we were able to go in and
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compare his taxes for that decade to a huge number of other taxpayers and in that year it looked like he lost more
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money than any other single American taxpayer but what he did this is like the interesting part of how it started
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is he was able to identify I think really in in the 80s I mean in the 70s he was spinning the story that he was
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richer than he was but then he fell in with not just the Larry Kings of the world who where he was able to get on
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CNN and repeat it but wealth porn sort of took off in the80s and you saw him shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and
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Famous with Robin Leech and and he had he had the accoutrements of success so he's flying around in his helicopter he
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was on his yacht he was losing a lot of money we we know that now from his taxes
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but they loved him and and not a lot of really rich people wanted actually to be
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on that show because it's sort of taky but but he was all in and it and it perpetuated this idea that he was rich
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and then he was getting on the rich lists and all that I mean it really did feed on itself but he started in the
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early 70s by lying about his wealth famously to the New York Times saying he was worth a couple hundred million
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dollars actually his dad was and then it just rolled up and kept the number kept
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getting bigger and bigger one of the things I really appreciate about appreciate about your work is that you
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both really did the work reading through uh some of your work I just can't imagine how much time you were in a
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conference room with bad coffee trying to string together tax filings and really connect the dot really do
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appreciate that you did the work and also that the New York Times would support you or support provide you with
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resources to do that kind of in-depth work my question is around Donald Trump media 80 million shares 23 bucks a share
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you know one whatever is that 1.84 billion worth of of value in those shares my understanding is he hasn't
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sold any and that would come up am of filing if he had sold them but if I were him I would be writing calls I'd be
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doing prepaid variable forwards I would be borrowing on margin like crazy to diversify do you have any sense of or
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any evidence around what he is doing to diversify that Shar monetize that those shares but you left out run by that
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well-known Tech executive uh Devon Nunes but go ahead s let me just tell you this podcast
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makes more money by far than than Trump I think in a story I this is Russ's favorite R this is his favorite thing
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well I think in a story I compare their revenue does not compare favorably to a single Chick-fil-A restaurant right
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they're they're they really or a McDonald's they're it's just not a real store once too yeah it's not a real
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company and they don't really have a business plan that makes sense they're going to stream videos that are
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available for free Elsewhere on their platform because they're risk of being shut down but to answer your question
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Scott I I don't have any Intelligence on other ways he might be trying to monetize those shares at this point I
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think it's an excellent question I don't know that there's any way to certainly no public way to see that right now um
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but you know we'll be trying to watch out that for that and if you see any hint of it please let us know yeah we
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may be sifting through court filings one day looking for what he's done absolutely will be also on the crypto
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the sneakers whatever you have that's one of the great things here so many court filings uh anyway once again the
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book is lucky loser how Donald Trump wandered his father's Fortune created the illusion of success I took it home I
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read it it's so good it's I I love accounting I hate to tell you but I love accounting but this is a really great
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reporting accomplishment that you two have done and I'm I'm excited to see more even though I'm not excited to see
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a grifter continue to grift but you've done a great job