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Summary
Summary
A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who has covered Donald Trump's rise to power for 30 years, mostly for the New York Times, investigates the mogul's rise to power. Included is a thorough look at Trump's numerous ties to organised crime, his history of litigation, his family background including his father's involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, his philandering, a close look at his actual skill in running casinos, constructing buildings and managing real estate, his numerous bankruptcies and the questionable nature of his actual wealth.
Author Notes
David Cay Johnston was born in San Francisco, California on December 24, 1948. He received his education at San Francisco State University, Michigan State University and the University of Chicago. He is a columnist for The Daily Beast, Investopedia, USA Today, NationalMemo.com, Tax Analysts and the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. Johnston is also Distinguished Visiting Lecturer, Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management - The property, tax and regulatory law of the ancient world. David is the Past President, Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) and Board President, InvestigativePost.com Buffalo, NY.
David Cay Johnston is the author of New York Times bestseller The Making of Donald Trump. His other titles include It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America (2018); The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind (2012); Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill), a 2008 New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller; Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and Cheat Everybody Else which was the 2004 Investigative Book of the Year award winner and a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller; Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. To Win Control of the Casino Business (1992).
David Cay Johnston is the Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, an IRE Medal and the George Polk Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
A tour of the president's business career exposes his double-dealing and mob connections but also the complicity of big finance The Making of Donald Trump gives a short tour of the business career of America's 45th president. The narrative is episodic and inconsecutive, but it begins at the beginning, with the example set by Fred Trump, the father of Donald: a mid-century real-estate buccaneer, adroit at political manipulation and statute dodging. The book goes on to recount a few of the scandalous details of the construction of Trump Tower and the purchase, mismanagement and financial collapse of Donald's casino properties in Atlantic City. Various chapters take in the mob connections that Trump aimed to profit from while keeping at two removes (sometimes with the help of an apartment gratis); there are also free-standing anecdotes about friends and associates, and a chapter on Trump's bid for the gambling custom of the high-rolling Japanese real-estate investor Akio Kashiwagi. The book bears the marks of having been put together under pressure to stop the election disaster. Pared down to half its length and distributed to every voter in the contested states, it might have helped to produce a different result. David Cay Johnston, who recently made headlines by releasing a portion of Trump's 2005 tax return, knows whatever can be known about Trump's career, which he covered as a journalist for three decades, and he has the necessary courage for the disagreeable work. Trump's previous biographer -- the Village Voice city reporter Wayne Barrett, who died in January -- gave a definitive account of the president's first two grownup decades in Trump: The Deals and the Downfall (1992). Both biographers acquired an intimate knowledge of Trump's self-protective method, which involves a mixture of flattery, threat and bluster. Trump once called Johnston and told him if he didn't like what he wrote, he would sue him; when Johnston reminded Trump that he was a public figure, Trump said: "I'll sue you anyway." With Barrett, whose book was long in the making and three times the size of Johnston's, the stakes were higher and the approach subtler. Trump said that he couldn't help knowing his biographer lived in a modest apartment in a nothing neighbourhood; and by the way, he, Trump, had some very nice apartments. When this failed to draw a response, Trump told the sad story of another journalist who had written copy he disliked. I took him to court and broke him, said Trump. Johnston moved to Atlantic City in 1988 to report for the Philadelphia Inquirer on the spread of casinos, after a supreme court ruling that Indian tribes had a right to own them. He was convinced the mob would pursue the new market, and "I quickly learned from others in town that [Trump] knew next to nothing about the casino industry, including the rules of the games". On this subject and others, Johnston played the trick of intentionally saying something false in order to get Trump to agree and betray his ignorance. "Net present value" is a precise business term that means "the value of cash expected from an investment minus the value spent to support that investment and then reduced to a lump sum payable today"; under cross-examination in court, Trump (who sued the reporter Tim O'Brien for saying his net present value might be far below the $5-$6bn he claimed) strayed early and began to blow smoke: "Well, to me, the word 'net' is an interesting word. It's really -- the word 'value' is the important word." Trump has been "a party in more than 3,500 lawsuits", remarks Johnston -- an act of hostile sociability as typical of the man as the tweets he emits at 4am. The lawsuit against O'Brien, like all the others presumably, was worth it because of the trouble it cost his enemy: "I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I'm happy about." When Trump became interested in Atlantic City, he summoned the New Jersey attorney general and asked for early action, which would mean short cuts on the background checks. Clear this for me (Trump said in effect) or I won't build in Atlantic City; and by the way, I own space in New York that would be just as good for a casino. The Division of Gaming Enforcement bought his pitch without, it is said, ever notifying the Casino Control Commission that Trump had been the target of federal criminal investigations. Once a Trump success or the appearance of success is given plausibility by banks, and by city or state governments, he has his hooks in the institutions and they can't afford to let him sink. When his Atlantic City casinos went bankrupt, he was judged too big to fail by the state of New Jersey. The punishment was to put him on a monthly allowance of $450,000. If a single story emerges, it is the complicity of financial institutions in every stage of the rise and the resurrection of Trump. For a reader who before 2016 knew him only as a sketchy figure in the world of real estate, fake wrestling and reality TV, the extent of the connivance is shocking. In The Art of the Deal, the book he wrote in 1987 with Tony Schwartz, Trump claimed to have paid $5m in cash for the purchase of Mar-a-Lago, but in court testimony, Johnston says, he later "confirmed that his primary bank, Chase Manhattan, had loaned him the entire purchase price". The transaction had the peculiar legal status of "a non-recorded mortgage". But surely a mortgage needs a guarantor? Trump said he "personally guaranteed" the loan to himself by Chase Manhattan. The next page tightens the analogy between his practices and those that triggered the 2008 financial collapse: "Many banks," Johnston writes, "complained that they were unaware other banks had loaned money to Trump on his personal guarantee with no public record of the obligation." Years before he ran for president, Trump was a human complex derivative. His lesser stratagems have required neither treachery nor the concealment of relevant facts. They exhibit nothing worse than a shameless use of the legal resources for squeezing extra dollars through the tax loopholes available to the very rich (especially the landed rich). Trump could reduce the property tax on his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey almost down to zero by keeping a pen of goats there and having it zoned as "active farmland". More inventively, he gave orders to skip 10th-floor numbers "to inflate the apparent height of his signature building". Much of the remaining 90% of the apparent height of Trump Tower was built by illegal Polish construction workers who were underpaid. This would involve him later in an unpleasant rigmarole of legal discovery and compensation, but when he had money on his mind, his associates have observed, "common sense just never took hold". In the 2016 campaign, he paid himself for the use of his large and small private jets, his helicopter and his office space in Trump Tower. The biggest mistake of the Clinton strategy that lost the 2016 election was to picture Trump as a misogynist, racist and general offender against the international regime of human rights. While Trump can be relied on to pick up any prejudice opportunistically and pat and stroke it as long as it serves his interest, he is not by the standards of the Republican party unusually racist or misogynist. No: the egregious fact is his business record. Yet somehow the Democrats reckoned that the business facts about Trump were already known. Hillary Clinton mentioned now and then that he had stiffed people he hired to work for him. The campaign should have driven that point home in every speech she made and every ad they ran. Trump's conduct in the first four months of his presidency bears out the suspicion that he will treat the legal institutions of the US the way he treated the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. "Mr Trump," the lawyer asked in the net worth trial. "Have you always been completely truthful in your public statements about your net worth of properties?" This curious exchange ensued: "I try," Trump answered. "Have you ever not been truthful?" "My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings, but I try." A while into his presidency, many people have stopped wondering about Trump's fluctuations of policy, and have begun to ask a more unsettling question: who controls his feelings? - David Bromwich.
Booklist Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Johnston first met Donald Trump in 1988 as he looked into how casinos were managed and regulated. He became curious about the mogul's operations and blustery personality and has been on the case ever since, amassing an enormous archive of material, which he carefully mines in this steely inquiry. Determined to present a more complete and accurate account of the Republican nominee for president and his life than the story Trump has polished and promoted with such exceptional skill and determination, Johnston, who maintains a crisply matter-of-fact approach throughout this scrupulously detailed and documented chronicle, focuses on the business dealings Trump heralds as his qualifications for the presidency. Trump came by his appetite for real estate naturally, Johnston explains, following the path set by his German immigrant, rogue entrepreneur grandfather and apprenticing to his stern builder and landlord father, who was investigated for postwar profiteering by diverting housing subsidies and for racist rental practices immortalized in a protest song, Old Man Trump, written by one outraged tenant, the now-legendary Woody Guthrie. Trump learned as much about manipulating the press as about pushing legal limits from his father, then upped the ante by securing a new mentor after his father's death, attorney Roy Cohn, notorious for his part in Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch hunts. Johnston makes it clear that real estate in New York City was a dirty business with the Mob involved in everything from selling concrete to infiltrating labor unions as he recounts the tale of Trump Tower and Trump's gaming the system, beginning with his hiring of illegal Polish immigrants who were so badly treated they sued in what is but one of nearly 3,500 lawsuits launched against Trump to protest swindles crude and shrewd that have wreaked havoc on many lives. Johnston identifies criminals Trump has associated with and meticulously explicates his massive debts and multiple bankruptcies and bailouts, tax-evasion tactics, luxury-development scams, and the federal criminal investigations that have targeted him. By exposing what he argues is Trump's strategic flouting of the law, as well as his belief in revenge as a guiding principle and his strategy of sowing doubt and threatening litigation, Johnston hopes that his book will prompt readers to carefully evaluate the prospect of a Trump presidency. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. vii |
| 1 Family History | p. 3 |
| 2 Family Values | p. 9 |
| 3 Personal Values | p. 21 |
| 4 A Sickly Child | p. 27 |
| 5 Making Friends | p. 33 |
| 6 Trump's Most Important Deals | p. 41 |
| 7 "A Great Lawsuit" | p. 51 |
| 8 Showing Mercy | p. 59 |
| 9 Polish Brigade | p. 69 |
| 10 Feelings and Net Worth | p. 77 |
| 11 Government Rescues Trump | p. 85 |
| 12 Golf and Taxes | p. 95 |
| 13 Income Taxes | p. 103 |
| 14 Empty Boxes | p. 111 |
| 15 "Better Than Harvard" | p. 117 |
| 16 Trump Charities | p. 129 |
| 17 Imaginary Friends | p. 135 |
| 18 Imaginary Lovers | p. 139 |
| 19 Myth Maintenance | p. 147 |
| 20 Collecting Honors | p. 155 |
| 21 Who's That? | p. 161 |
| 22 Down Mexico Way | p. 167 |
| 23 Trump Beaches a Whale | p. 177 |
| 24 Biggest Loser | p. 193 |
| Epilogue | p. 205 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 211 |
| Notes | p. 215 |
| Index | p. 259 |
