The Big Cheat
How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family
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4.1 • 14 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and dean of Trumpologists David Cay Johnston reveals years of eye-popping financial misdeeds by Donald Trump and his family.
While the world watched Donald Trump’s presidency in horror or delight, few noticed that his lifelong grifting quietly continued. Less than forty minutes after taking the oath of office, Trump began turning the White House into a money machine for himself, his family, and his courtiers.
More than $1.7 billion flowed into Donald Trump’s bank accounts during his four years as president. Foreign governments rented out whole floors of his hotel five blocks from the White House while lobbyists conducted business in the hotel’s restaurants. Payday lenders and other trade groups moved their annual conventions to Trump golf resorts. And individual favor seekers joined his private Mar-a-Lago club with its $200,000 admission fee in hopes of getting a few minutes with the President. Despite earning more than $1 million every day he was in office, Trump left the White House as he arrived—hard up for cash. More than $400 million in debt comes due by 2024, and Trump still lacks the resources to pay it back.
“Few people are as well positioned to write an exposé of the former president as Johnston” (The Washington Post), and The Big Cheat offers a guided tour of how money flowed in and out of Trump’s hundreds of enterprises, showing in simple terms how a corrupt president used our government for his benefit, even putting national security at risk. Johnston details the four most recent years of the corruption that has defined the Trump family since 1885 and reveals the costs of Trump’s extravagant lifestyle for American taxpayers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Johnston (It's Even Worse Than You Think) delivers a damning portrait of how "Donald Trump, his extended family, and his cronies... used his presidency to get richer, to set up lucrative future opportunities, and to escape their own financial quagmires." Alleging that Trump's modus operandi is to "promise the moon, the sky, and the stars, and then deliver rocks and sand, if that," Johnston documents the stiffing of contractors and business partners; the suspicious awarding of tax breaks, building permits, and other "goodies" to Trump Organization development projects in the Dominican Republic and India; and the surreptitious overcharging of supporters who thought they were making one-time contributions to Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Most of the details are well-known to followers of the news, but Johnston weaves them into a cogent account of endemic corruption within the Trump Organization and the Trump administration, and he unearths a handful of new and telling episodes, including the story of how Trump got thrown out of New York City mayor Abe Beame's office in 1977 for physically threatening Beame over the Commodore Hotel project. The result is a devastating roundup of malfeasance.
