‘The Apprentice’ Producers Were Shocked by Trump’s ‘Musty Carpet’

Frederick Foresight said:
Really? The carpet thing was your takeaway? And you are, what? Twelve?
More...

He or she is OK with your "dirty politics" and refers to it as a full-contact sport because someone tried to assassinate Trump although he failed to mention that the someone was a Republican and he failed to mention that Trump lawyers (Republicans) from the 2020 administration are taking plea deals to testify against Trump so that they can stay out of prison involving the remaining criminal trials that will go full steam ahead after the November 2024 election.

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Yet, I believe porn star Stormy Daniels talked about the best "dirt" on Trump when she went into extreme detail about their sexual encounter while under oath in front of the jury in the New York Hush Money trial...

For example when she stated she spanked Trump with a magazine...he then replied she reminds him of his daughter Ivanka. Trump's lawyers in cross-examination disputed the name of the magazine (Forbes magazine or Trump magazine?) to cross her up in her memory of the night with Trump at the 2006 Golf Tournament.

Trump supporters said, "This isn't the first time Trump has reportedly compared women he has had intimate relationships with to his daughter". :p :D :rolleyes:

https://www.businessinsider.com/stormy-daniels-trump-ivanka-daughter-2018-3

#weird

wrbtrader
 
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The book, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, written by two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, is already the #1 bestseller on Amazon on the first day.
 
Of course I had to place my order for the book just now. As a rule I don't rubberneck when I drive by an horrific accident, but this is just too irresistible to pass up.
 
The Washington Post book review of Lucky Loser:

Donald Trump’s financial failures are stunning. ‘Lucky Loser’ has the receipts.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/book...-finances-susanne-craig-russ-buettner-review/

Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner’s book, which builds on their Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting, is much more than an excavation of the former president’s tax returns.

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If you tell someone who is not a fan of former president Donald Trump that he is essentially a fraud — that his claim that he’s “really rich” due to his own business acumen is simply not true — they will almost certainly say, Of course. I already know that. That this has been documented is in large part because of the work of New York Times reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, and other colleagues, who in 2016 published a bombshell article based on Trump’s 1995 tax returns, which showed that he had lost almost a billion dollars that year.

It was just before the election. Obviously, it didn’t matter, at least not in the big picture.

Their source, Mary Trump — Donald’s niece — eventually turned over about 100,000 pages of “audited financial statements, tax returns, bank records, general ledgers, and legal papers.” The Times published pieces, for which the reporters won a Pulitzer, during Trump’s presidency revealing that contrary to his claims of getting just a $1 million loan from his father, he had received the equivalent of more than $400 million as an inheritance.

Now, Craig and Buettner have written a book, “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success.” It 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. In the decade that ended in 1995, a decade in which Trump was supposedly a huge success, he recorded more than $1.1 billion in business losses on his tax returns, which the authors call a “failure of historical proportions.” He used those losses to avoid paying taxes in subsequent years. The news in their book lies not in one specific detail, but rather in the sheer accumulation of damning facts.

But the book is also much more than an excavation of tax returns. Buettner and Craig also delve into all the aspects of Trump’s life to show how he was able to create the facade that he did. This is a page turner, with spectacular anecdotes. For instance: Trump was able to salvage at least the construction of his first casino project, a Harrah’s in Atlantic City, by bringing in Holiday Inns Inc. (which owned Harrah’s at the time) as a partner. But before it would get on board, the company wanted to know that construction was underway. So Trump faked it. He had his construction manager rent every piece of earth-moving equipment he could find so that on the day the casino’s team visited, “dozens of bulldozers and backhoes pointlessly pushed mounds of earth around the 2.6-acre site in an elaborate ruse with no purpose other than to fool his new business partner.”

The most important character in Donald Trump’s life was his father, Fred Trump, who seems to have regarded him as a golden child, incapable of wrongdoing or mistakes. Fred offered his son, but only this son, “almost endless collateral for loans, connections in banking and politics, and a reliable wellspring of cash to pursue dreams and fame.” He even paid for Donald’s flashy Cadillac. While Fred Trump wasn’t always a paragon of ethics — he made his money taking advantage of government programs for homeowners in ways that, at a minimum, skirted the rules — he was a man of his word, a penurious, detail-oriented businessman who built a real estate empire that was ultimately worth almost $1 billion. Everything about him stood in sharp contrast to his son, who became “a black hole for Fred Trump’s cash.” That’s a fact Donald has never acknowledged. Indeed, he diminished his father whenever possible, telling people: “My father, he could never do something like this.”

Craig and Buettner point out the incongruity of a man like Fred offering such unquestioning support of his son — but they don’t explain it. Maybe there is no way to explain it.

The book also demonstrates in convincing detail that Donald Trump has always been exactly as he is. Craig and Buettner write that even his early career was marked by the same traits he later exhibited as president. He constantly sought attention for accomplishments he hadn’t achieved and often never would. He was driven only by instinct. He complained that he was the one being persecuted, and would file senseless lawsuits just to inflict pain on others. He’d fly into a rage and blame others for mistakes that were properly his, and only his. And of course, he was also granted a kind of absolution from tough questions by the media, in which he was repeatedly credited as a superstar real estate developer with a billion-dollar empire, when the only way that was close to true was due to his father’s fortune. (Back in 1973, a gushing profile in the New York Times even compared his looks to Robert Redford’s.)

In an odd premonition, in 1980, NBC’s Rona Barrett asked the then 34-year-old Trump if he would consider running for president, given all his accomplishments. Trump said no, “because I think it’s a very mean life.” Indeed.

Though many of his highly touted deals were utter failures, from his casinos in Atlantic City to the United States Football League, Trump did have a few successes. One was his early development of the old Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt, but even that was only possible with his father’s political connections — which helped with a tax break that the Wall Street Journal called “the tax deal of the century.” Another was Trump Tower. Other deals were successes only by accident — and again, his father’s connections. Early on, Trump lost control of the redevelopment of the West Side Yards, but it landed back in his lap after Fred Trump’s primary banker at Chase foreclosed on the loan and gave it back to Donald without any bidding. Even then, Trump was forced to cede control, through his own ineptitude, to the Chinese developer Henry Cheng, whose involvement, the authors write, made Trump money despite himself.

By June 1990, Trump was heavily in debt. He owed banks and bondholders $3.4 billion, “nearly all of it high-interest debt.” His father’s money helped bail him out. And then came “The Apprentice.” Buettner and Craig detail how everyone involved knew they were creating fiction — even the conference rooms at Trump Tower were so dilapidated that they had to be faked — but to millions of Americans, the fiction became more real than the truth. And because of an accidental strategy of integrating the marketing of various products into the show, Trump actually did make a fortune.

But that was then. “The Apprentice” is no more. Major Trump projects since, like a hotel and condominium in Chicago, have been a disaster. His golf courses in Scotland and Ireland are hemorrhaging cash. Maybe, Buettner and Craig write, he’ll be bailed out yet again, this time by his investment in the social media SPAC Truth Social, which at the time this book went to press was worth $4 billion — but Trump wasn’t able to sell his shares, and as of the writing of this review, the value of his stake has shrunk dramatically.

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.” As it turns out, unfortunately, what the media giveth the media cannot taketh away. There might be no amount of hard reporting that will make a Trump believer into a disbeliever.

Buettner and Craig write that when Trump ran for president, he was finally “held up to real metrics and historical norms, his claims of accomplishment examined with a level of seriousness commensurate with the job he sought.” They say that that “process remains ongoing, and, we hope, has been advanced by the creation of this book.” It does. It has. But it probably doesn’t matter. Those who already doubt Trump will find corroboration in “Lucky Loser,” such that they need it. The others aren’t going to read it.

 
The Financial Times book review:

https://ig.ft.com/sites/business-bo...cky-loser-by-russ-buettner-and-susanne-craig/

Soon after announcing his first campaign for the U.S. presidency, Donald J. Trump declared life has ‘not been easy for me’. He spun a fable of how he turned a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar empire, and argued this made him singularly qualified to lead the country.

Except none of it was true.

Born to a rich father, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today.

The story of Trump’s finances is one of rises and falls, of squandering fortunes on money-losing businesses to be saved by blind luck. He tacks his name to buildings while taking out huge loans he’ll never repay. He obsesses over appearances while ignoring threats to the bottom line and mounting costly lawsuits. He tarnishes the value of the Trump name by allowing anyone with a big enough check to use it. He makes side deals to cut out the television producer who not only rescued him from bankruptcy but casts him as a business guru – the image that carries him to the White House.

Here, for the first time, in a meticulous masterpiece of narrative reporting filled with scoops, 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 millionaire.
 
Trump Was ‘So Bad’ at Picking Who to Fire on ‘The Apprentice,’ Producers Edited to Keep Him From Looking ‘Like a Complete Moron’

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/trump-bad-picking-fire-apprentice-032816888.html

Donald Trump didn’t always make the best decisions as head of the reality series “The Apprentice,” CNN anchor Erin Burnett said during her discussion with the authors of “Lucky Loser” on Tuesday night. “I remember judging some of these tasks, you know,” she explained. “It was supposed to be who did the worst on the tasks. But that he sometimes would be so bad about his choice about who he fired that they’d have to go back and edit it to make that person look bad.”

“Lucky Loser” co-author Russ Buettner confirmed the story and used the experience of “Apprentice” contestant David Gould as an example. “A lot of the producers thought he was going to win that whole series that season, he would just run the whole gauntlet,” Buettner said, “But Trump fired him on the very first episode. And people in the control room, the producers were like, ‘Oh my God, what do we do with this now?'”

“But they had this other moment because it was entertainment, not reality. ‘Oh my gosh, this is really great because this is so unpredictable,'” Buettner continued. “So that quality that was really bad for him in business was solid gold on the show. And then they would just re-edit everything to make David Gould look [bad].”


Buettner’s co-author Susanna Craig talked about the fact that Trump used the fake name “John Barron” to plant media stories for years. Burnett agreed with how wild this fact is, telling her, “This is something I’ve been just fascinated by for years.”

“This kind of alter ego bizarre thing,” Burnett continued. “He would pretend to be a guy named John Barron. And he would do it when he was talking about affairs or about, you know, how rich he was. Because he wanted people to think he was richer than he was and get put on the Forbes list and all of these things. He pretended to be this guy, John Barron.”

Burnett then played a clip from a conversation in which Trump took on the role of “John Barron.” “I mean, they didn’t even try to use a voice changer, which a 6-year-old would try to do,” Burnett said, before Craig cut in to add, “He even named his son Barron… I don’t even want to go there.”

Craig noted that the pair have always wondered why Trump chose that particular name — and they eventually found a trail that provided an origin for where “John Barron” came from. “We’ve always sort of wondered why John Barron … we went back to old newspapers and we found the name John Barron where there were classified ads where he would be selling things.”

“And it went back to the exchange number for the Trump house. So it was Donald, he was using it as a pseudonym either because they wanted to hire a maintenance worker,” she continued. “So it was just this crazy origin story of John Barron that we’ve always wondered where it came from. And we found it in the classified ads of old newspapers in New York. I mean, it is really incredible.”
 
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