Lucky Loser

2018 年，《纽约时报》爆料特朗普财务状况的普利策奖获奖记者对唐纳德·特朗普的财富历史进行了一次爆炸性调查，揭示了美国颇大的商业失败者之一是如何通过谎言进入白宫的

唐纳德·J·特朗普在宣布首次竞选后不久，对全国电视观众说，“生活对我来说并不容易。对我来说并不容易。”他以几十年来一直在讲述的故事为基础，编造了一个艰苦奋斗的寓言，讲述了他如何利用父亲的一笔小额贷款打造出价值数十亿美元的商业和房地产帝国。他认为，这一壮举使他具备领导国家的独特资格。但事实并非如此。特朗普生于一个富裕的家庭，他的父亲使他成为自己高利润投资的受益者，他通过不需要任何商业专业知识的手段获得了相当于今天 5 亿多美元的财富。

《纽约时报》调查记者 Russ Buettner 和 Susanne Craig 利用特朗普 20 多年的机密税务信息（包括他试图隐瞒的纳税申报单）、商业记录和对特朗普内部人士的采访，追踪了特朗普的财务起起落落。几十年来，他把自己的财富挥霍在亏损的企业上，最终又一次被财务上的意外之财拯救了。他把自己的名字贴在每一栋建筑的门上，同时却借了永远也还不清的巨额贷款。他痴迷于外表，却无视对利润的威胁，对市政府官员提起了代价高昂的诉讼。他允许任何有足够大额支票的人使用自己的名声，从而玷污了自己的名声，并欺骗了电视制片人，后者不仅拯救了他免于破产，还把他塑造成一个商业专家——这个公众形象将把他带入白宫。

《幸运失败者》是一部叙事报道的杰作，它对近一个世纪进行了细致的调查，充满了来自特朗普大厦、海湖庄园、大西洋城和《学徒》片场的新闻。在特朗普与成功和权力的联系比以往任何时候都更加不稳定的时刻，这是第1次对特朗普和他的金钱进行的真实描述——他拥有什么，失去了什么，还剩下什么——以及对白手起家的亿万富翁特朗普神话的最终解释。

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.