New bio ‘Trump Revealed’ paints a troubling portrait
No ordinary candidate, no ordinary businessman
For Donald Trump, real estate magnate, casino mogul and reality TV star, it’s clear there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Even so, it’s hard to imagine he will embrace Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power (Scribner, 347 pp., eeeg out of four), The Washington Post’s dive into the Republican presidential nominee’s life and business record.
Any voter who is not already devoted to Trump’s cause will find plenty of reason to think long and hard about whether to support him after reading this book. It’s crammed with court records, financial data, anecdotes and interviews about Trump’s unscrupulous business practices, his liberal use of “truthful hyperbole” and false promises to make himself rich, usually at the expense of others.
Many of the revelations here are not new. Some of the nation’s best investigative reporters have mucked through Trump’s business record to write about his thousands of lawsuits, his string of unpaid bills and multiple business bankruptcies.
But Trump Revealed delivers enough devastating details to disqualify virtually any other candidate. Talented writers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher have taken the work of dozens of Post journalists and woven it into a compelling narrative.
Trump, as we’ve seen, is no ordinary candidate. Kranish and Fisher show he’s also no ordinary businessman.
Trump always cut corners and shaded the truth, they write, but he also had legitimate accomplishments. When people and investors were fleeing New York in the 1970s, he built a hotel in a decaying neighborhood near Grand Central Station. He built Trump Tower in the 1980s and revitalized Central Park’s Wollman ice rink when others wasted time and money.
When the city’s reputation rose, so did Trump’s, and he and the media played ball in a resurgent New York.
Those accomplishments paled, the authors write, beside the series of catastrophic business decisions and bankruptcies that followed — the Trump shuttle airline, the casinos, Trump University and building projects that bear his name but not his attention. “... As happened with some of his U.S. deals, when Trump projects overseas went bust, he still got paid, reaping millions even if his local partners ran into financial problems and went bankrupt,” Kranish and Fisher write.
All of this confirms circus magnate P.T. Barnum’s claim about a sucker being born every minute. Trump seemed to find all of them.
The Post team is not alone in delving into Trump’s story. Longtime investigative reporting icon David Cay Johnston peels apart Trump’s business record in The Making of Donald Trump (Melville House, 210 pp., eeeE). Johnston devastatingly covers ground he broke open as a reporter on the Trump beat in Philadelphia and at The New York Times.
At times, Johnston’s book seems like a clip job of earlier stories, but they were his stories that showed the depth of Trump’s avarice. In both books, the best of investigative reporting is brought to bear on a man who could potentially lead the free world. They paint a sobering portrait that merits inspection. Voters can’t say they weren’t warned.