LUCKY LOSER: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig
My family took its first steps on American soil on a spring day in 1989. An uncle named Boris who had escaped the Soviet Union years earlier was there to greet us at the airport in Queens, insisting, despite our exhaustion, on a tour of Manhattan. After a winding journey, we emerged from the gritty commercialism of Times Square to find ourselves on 56th Street, at the base of a featureless black obelisk.
In that moment, even though I knew next to nothing about American culture, I understood Donald Trump exactly as he demanded to be understood. Erected on the ruins of the Art Deco Bonwit Teller department store, Trump Tower was as much a symbol as it was a building, a show of authority and strength as evident to a Soviet refugee as to a Staten Island native.
How a failing casino developer could maintain, and grow, an image of soaring success is the subject of “Lucky Loser,” a first-rate financial thriller by the New York Times investigative journalists Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig. Building on the duo’s previous Pulitzer-winning reporting, this long but brisk book charts Trump’s rise from real estate scion and ersatz businessman to the most unlikely of political populists.
Though it arrives on a crowded shelf, “Lucky Loser” is one of those rare Trump books that deserve, even demand, to be read. In good part, that’s because it applies the proper lens through which to view Trump’s career. In this telling, his story lies at the intersection of business and media, with politics arriving only as a secondary concern.
It’s a strength of “Lucky Loser” that the biographical details deepen the portrait as much as they foreshadow the plot. The book is a multigenerational saga that begins with the former president’s grandparents, Frederick and Elizabeth Trump, migrating from Germany at the turn of the century and settling in Queens, where they got into real estate, buying up vacant lots. Their middle child, Fred, joined the business and took advantage of the newly established Federal Housing Administration, which supercharged the market in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Creative only in his dishonesties — his buildings were dull boxes — Fred inflated his construction costs to secure generous F.H.A. loans and then skimped on construction expenses, pocketing the difference and setting high rents based on the original, fictitious projections.
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