Lucky Loser

“A first-rate financial thriller . . . 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.” —Alexander Nazaryan, The New York Times

“This is a page turner, with spectacular anecdotes . . . [Lucky Loser] 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 ‘til 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, in incontrovertible detail, the reality under the hype that is Donald Trump . . . The heartbreaking thing about reading Buettner and Craig’s work is realizing how many passes Trump has gotten over the years, how thoroughly he is a creation of the media, which as the authors write, ‘rarely revisited his claims and afforded credibility to everything he said.” —Bethany McLean, The Washington Post

“Combining the groundbreaking reporting of its authors with details unearthed throughout the years by other journalists and financial analysts, Lucky Loser is comprehensive, persuasive, and packed with damning anecdotes.” —The New Yorker

“I can’t emphasise this enough: Lucky Loser is a gripping, page-turning read, devastating in its meticulousness and thrilling in its narrative. If the devil is in the detail, this book is as close to Satan’s origin story as we’re ever going to get.” —Emma Brockes, The Guardian

“With scalpel-like precision, they investigate decades of business records and tax returns . . . to paint a detailed portrait of just how much Trump was given to set him up for success in business, and the hundreds of millions of his father’s money he squandered on bad deals.” —The Times (UK)