Donald Trump started his career at the end of the 1970s, financed by his father Fred Trump. Over the years this transfer of wealth added up to around $500m in today’s money in gifts. My rough calculations say that, had he simply taken the money, leveraged it not imprudently, and passively invested it in Manhattan real estate – gone to parties, womanised, played golf, collected his rent cheques and reinvested them – his fortune could have amounted to more than $80bn by the time he ascended to the presidency in 2017.
And yet Trump was not worth $80bn in 2017. Instead, Forbes pegged him at $2.5bn – which, given the difficulties of valuing and accounting for real estate, is really anything between $5bn (£4bn) and zero (or less). It is in this sense that Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig call Trump a “loser”. He is indeed one of the world’s biggest losers. By trying to run a business, rather than just kicking back and letting the rising tide of his chosen sector lift his wealth beyond the moon, he managed to destroy the vast majority of his potential net worth.
