Loser takes all

This book was published in September, three months ahead of the US presidential polls, presumably to reveal to voters the dangers of returning Donald Trump to the White House.

- KANIKA DATTA

Since the American people, with ample experience of Trump's toxic first term, chose to vote him back, the deluge of bad publicity from the liberal establishment, this book included, didn't work. That reality does not detract from the fact that Lucky Loser is a very good book. By scrutinising Trump's business and tax returns over decades, Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig offer forensic proof that the man who will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States is little more than a duplicitous chancer.

Buettner and Craig are Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters at the New York Times who have been reporting on Donald Trump's businesses and personal finances since 2016. Some of the stories of his failures in running casinos and golf courses and stunning $915,729,293 losses on his income tax returns in 1995 had made headlines at the height of his first presidential campaign. With this book, the authors comprehensively disprove "Donald Trump's lifelong claim that his father gave him nothing more than a 'small' $1 million loan."

On the contrary, as their investigations revealed, Trump was the quintessential Trust Fund kid, financing his high rolling lifestyle and early business ventures through money that his low-key billionaire father, Fred Trump, sequestered in a trust fund for his five children. In Buettner and Craig's telling, Donald Trump is, in fact, a terrible businessman, choosing investments on a whim and so chronically unable to soberly assess business potential that he almost never made money on any of his marque ventures. Each time he failed it was his father's fortune and political contacts that bailed him out - sometimes illegally.