Lucky Loser by Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig

[Kendra]

Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success

OK, here we go guys. Warning, I'll likely be pasting highlights from the book in this thread, so if you're not interested in this, just avoid the thread

[Kendra]

“Louie,” Fred quipped back, “it’s not the five bucks. It’s the win.”

That sounds familiar...

Donald once showed up for a friend’s Bar Mitzvah reception in a flashy pinstripe jacket. He left the customary check, from his father, in an envelope. The boy’s mother later dutifully logged the amount of each check so they could customize thank-you notes. Checks for one hundred dollars were not uncommon. The check in the name of Fred Trump, probably the richest father in the group, was just five dollars.

Unlike his siblings, young Donald developed a reputation for misbehaving. A neighbor said he once hurled a large rock through her window, damaging a wall in her room.

[Kendra]

Unlike his slightly built brothers, the stockier Donald seemed to enjoy using his size to his advantage. “He was a bully,” McIntosh said.

Still is a bully.

[RTH10260]

Unlike his siblings, young Donald developed a reputation for misbehaving. A neighbor said he once hurled a large rock through her window, damaging a wall in her room.

Started early with the training to throw ketchup bottles

[Kendra]

Unlike his siblings, young Donald developed a reputation for misbehaving. A neighbor said he once hurled a large rock through her window, damaging a wall in her room.

Started early with the training to throw ketchup bottles

[Kendra]

All except Trump followed the precise movement they had rehearsed for four years that ended with the blades coming to rest on the inside of their shoulders. Witek, facing forward, heard one of his captains tell Donald again to draw his sword. Again, he did not. The photographer snapped the photo. Donald was the only member of the senior staff shown in the yearbook photo with his sword still sheathed. Witek later heard that Trump pointed out the photograph to fellow cadets as a boast of his defiance.

[Kendra]

Like most cadets, he had earned a few medals for good conduct and being neat and orderly. But his friend, Michael Scadron, had a full dozen by their senior year. On the day yearbook portraits were being taken, Donald showed up in Scadron’s barracks room and asked to borrow his dress jacket with the medals attached. Donald wore those medals for the portrait, perplexing some of his fellow cadets.

[Kendra]

On a warm day in June 1964, hundreds of cadets and their families gathered in front of a stage on the quadrangle for the annual graduation commencement ceremony. Fred and Mary made the drive north. If they had been briefed by their son, they might have arrived expecting to see him endlessly feted. In Donald’s mind, he was “a very elite person” and “top of the military heap” at the academy. The list of awards to be handed out to the top performers spanned five pages of the program. There were the top ten cadets—more than 10 percent of the entire class—graduating “with distinction.” None was named Trump. There was the Head Boy Gold Medal, awarded for earning the highest marks in conduct, military, and scholastic work. The recipient was not named Trump. There were more than a dozen medals for accomplishment in individual subjects. The name Trump would not be mentioned.

So. Much. Winning!

[Kendra]

Speaking of Fred Trump...

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrum ... 9318761203

Video at the link.

You are an amazing guy. My father would be proud of you. Thanks for the memories! Donald J. Trump

[neonzx]

Speaking of Fred Trump...

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrum ... 9318761203

Video at the link.

You are an amazing guy. My father would be proud of you. Thanks for the memories! Donald J. Trump

That might be cause the kids were white and not darkies?

[SuzieC]

Like most cadets, he had earned a few medals for good conduct and being neat and orderly. But his friend, Michael Scadron, had a full dozen by their senior year. On the day yearbook portraits were being taken, Donald showed up in Scadron’s barracks room and asked to borrow his dress jacket with the medals attached. Donald wore those medals for the portrait, perplexing some of his fellow cadets.

Stolen valor at an early age.

[Kendra]

Like most cadets, he had earned a few medals for good conduct and being neat and orderly. But his friend, Michael Scadron, had a full dozen by their senior year. On the day yearbook portraits were being taken, Donald showed up in Scadron’s barracks room and asked to borrow his dress jacket with the medals attached. Donald wore those medals for the portrait, perplexing some of his fellow cadets.

Stolen valor at an early age.

Yep.

[Kendra]

Donald’s admiration for military life ended at Fordham. His friends remembered that he participated in Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, during his freshman year, showing up to school each Wednesday in a military uniform. But with the United States’ involvement in Vietnam escalating, he dropped out of ROTC in his sophomore year. The program at the time paid cadets forty dollars a month and required their participation in a summer training program. In exchange, cadets committed to assignment as commissioned officers upon graduation. That meant they could avoid the risk of being drafted as enlisted men, but it almost certainly meant a tour of duty in Vietnam. Donald did not need the money and would prove determined to avoid the draft.

[Kendra]

Walking in and out of Deitrick and onto the main pedestrian artery through campus, Donald Trump remained a ghost for most of his four semesters there. He enrolled in the real estate program, which had fewer than ten students, and disappeared in and out of classes. He did not linger to talk, and few of his classmates remember anything about him other than how rarely they saw him.

[chancery]

The New York Times review, gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/book ... =url-share

[Kendra]

Excellent review, thanks for the link. Ready to read more if I can stay awake

[Rolodex]

Great interview with the authors on Fresh Air this week (check their archives). I bought the book today!

[Kendra]

There was just one more bit of business—avoiding the war in Vietnam. Donald had received two educational deferments from the draft while in college but now found himself fully exposed.

Donald would lie about the exemption for decades to come, claiming he had lucked out by receiving a high draft-lottery number, even though his medical exemption had come years before the draft lottery began.

[Kendra]

As the years passed, Donald would recast his work for his father in these early years, puffing up each event to make it sound like a monumental or magnanimous achievement. He would call the New Jersey senior-citizens building project “our philanthropic endeavor,” even though it had no charitable component. He would claim that he sold the Cincinnati project for $12 million, almost double the actual price of $6.75 million. He claimed that “we” had bought the Cincinnati project, and “we” straightened it out, all of which his father accomplished while he was in high school. The habit of Donald appropriating his father’s accomplishments and wealth to inflate his own image had only begun.

[Kendra]

The judge had initially said that if Fred wanted to offer information, he should be sworn in and do so under oath. But Fred and Donald talked past that suggestion, and unbound by a potential perjury charge, they told a few whoppers.

Donald added, “I can attest to the fact that it is maybe in excess of thirty percent.” But when the Trumps finally turned over the required demographic makeup of their tenants, their own figures showed that at the time Fred and Donald made those comments to the judge, only 11 percent of their tenants at Tysens were Black.

[Kendra]

Fred Trump, the landlord.

By the mid-1970s, it had fallen into disrepair and amassed a stack of housing code violations. Unable to get the Trumps to respond, local officials finally did not renew the license for the Trumps to fill vacancies. Months later, Fred scheduled a meeting with officials at the apartments hoping to resolve the impasse. Instead, he was arrested and taken to the local jail. The local chief of housing code enforcement told The Washington Post that Fred had been “a little upset, to put it mildly.”

[Kendra]

Oh.

Unknown for decades, we discovered that Donald would never repay at least $15 million of the money he borrowed from his father in those years. In essence, his father had given him the capital to launch a business and not received equity in those businesses. In the language of the tax code, Fred had given his son taxable gifts masquerading as loans, a likely tax fraud that went unnoticed.

Twelve years after Donald had begun using the name John Baron in classified ads, he had given his alter ego a law degree and promotion to in-house attorney.

[Kendra]

Res’s salary would be paid by Fred Trump, and Donald told Barbara that his father would not approve any salary above $50,0000 because that’s what he paid his top person in Brooklyn. So he would pay her a salary of $49,000 and another $6,000 as reimbursement for fictional expenses. Donald did not mention that structuring her pay that way meant that payroll taxes—income taxes and Social Security contributions—would not be deducted from her bogus expense reimbursements, a form of tax fraud that Donald would continue to engage in until prosecutors discovered it decades later.

[Kendra]

His screaming and blaming others would become an unpleasant recurring memory for many who would work on Donald Trump projects.

Some things never change, do they?

[SuzieC]

God, it's exhausting. Can this asshole finally be relegated to the trash heap of history where he belongs?