Donald Trump himself and Trump-friendly elements of the US media have long promoted the legend that before turning to politics he was one of America’s greatest entrepreneurs, with a Midas touch in New York’s real estate market. But legend it is, according to the authors of Lucky Loser, rather in the John le Carré sense of false information created to provide a hinterland for an agent in the field.

According to Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters for the New York Times who have been navigating the swamp of Trump’s financial affairs since he first ran for high office in 2016, it was Donald’s father, Fred, who made the fortune Donald claimed to have conjured for himself. It was Fred who bankrolled his favoured son through the succession of high-risk, high-profile property deals that set him on the path to business fame. When Donald himself said, ‘My father gave me a very small loan in 1975, and I built it into a company that’s worth many, many billions of dollars’, both ends of the sentence were untrue. 

Buettner and Craig are relentless in picking apart every Trump misstatement, from the would-be presidential to the relatively trivial. His claim to have had a trial as a pro baseball player alongside ‘a young kid named Willie McCovey’ (later a Major League star playing for the San Francisco Giants)