Sam Stein and Susanne Craig: Look Beyond the Polls

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We've got a double dip today. Up in part two will be Suzanne Craig, author of Lucky Loser, I bet you can guess who, an investigative journalist in New York Times, the great Suzanne Craig.
But first, my buddy Sam Stein, managing editor of The Bulwark, and he's managing it quite well. I don't know if you've been to thebulwark.com

lately, but we've got a lot of good stuff. Make sure you're signed up.
Thebulwark.com

slash free trial if you want to be a Bulwark Plus member. How are you doing, Sam?

Oh, good. That's the first compliment you've paid me since I've come to The Bulwark, so

this feels like a good start to the podcast. Thanks.

Well, I've got to do it live. I can't pump you up too much in person.
I'm going to make you work for it. It's been wonderful having you.
I want to start with, we have pole mania this morning. We woke up to pole mania.
Oh my God. Too much.
Yeah, Amy Walter was on on Tuesday. And Amy was, who I just bumped, I'm in D.C.
right now, I just bumped into Amy Walter on the sidewalk. That's what happens in D.C.
We're everywhere. We were just talking.

Her point on Tuesday, which I think is right,

is that it's basically a 50-50 race.

You can call it a 60-40 race if you want.

But if you're a data nerd, what's really the difference?

I press her on that a little bit.

I'm a little bit more bullish than she is, I think,

which is unusual for me.

But then these polls come out this morning,

and all my emotions start to get wrapped up in them.

I'm going to run through them very fast.

We have Marist, has Harris plus five in Michigan,

plus one in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania tied. If you don't like that, the New York Times has Pennsylvania plus four and the national tied.
And if you don't like that, SNM, is it SNM? No,

FNM, SNM, something else. Pennsylvania, Franklin and Marshall.
Yeah, there you go. Thank you.

Pennsylvania has Harris plus three. Okay.
Not SNM. Yeah.
That's a different one. That's nice.
Emerson. We don't like Emerson right now.
Emerson has Trump plus two in Georgia and Wisconsin, plus one in Arizona. Pennsylvania, Nevada, North Carolina tied.
Harris plus one in Michigan. And the Washington Post has Pennsylvania tied.
And Signal has North Carolina tied. And the Maryland Senate race, Angela also Brooks 50, St.
Larry Hogan 33. I just added that one in for Sarah Longwell.
Sam, what's your main takeaway? How do you sum all that up? You don't get too emotionally tied to polls. I want to be emotionally tied, though.
It's not healthy for you. I feel like you should not check the internet early in the morning.
It's like these things, what are we talking about here?

A percentage point here, a percentage point there.

How do you know which one's correct?

I just feel like ultimately it's such a close race.

I keep coming back to a couple of things that are not in the polls,

which is if you want to be closing well down the stretch,

you want to have a lot of money and you want to have a lot of organization.

And which campaign has that? It's Harris's campaign. I mean, it's not momentum, debates, stuff like that.
I saw an interesting thought on Twitter this morning. It's like, well, everyone's looking to see if this slight improvement that she's had since the debate is tied to her debate performance.
Maybe. But it could be the fact that she's just drowning him in ads and people are getting a ton of exposure to Harris that they've never gotten before.
And that will continue from now on through November. So it's really impossible to know.
What we do know is that she has more money, she has more on the ground operations, there probably will not be another debate. And so those are the main factors here.
And I think in that case, she's in a nice position. I don't think it's like a lock or anything, but she's in a nice position.
I agree with that. For those reasons is why I was a little bit more bullish than Amy was.
And also, I think the pool of undecideds is more Harris-friendly. It's not completely Harris.
It's not like 100%. But the types of people that are either undecided between the two or undecided between showing up or not, I think Harris is a bigger pool to fish in there for the most part.

Well, that's what Sarah was saying.

Sarah Longwell has basically been on this train for a while,

which is that this pool of undecided voters just needs to know

what Harris is about, and they don't know her that well.

And they know Trump.

I mean, look at those polls from this morning.

Again, he's talked about this every time.

Trump's at like 46, 46, 47, 48, 46.

It's like that dude is just capped. And really, Harris just can grow, and that's where the money comes in.
If you can spend a lot of money advertising and so on and so forth, you can reach those undecided voters. I did a YouTube video on the abortion ad they did yesterday, which I just thought was so powerful.
I can see it on the YouTube feed. Just one more, just summing up the polls.
Nate Cohn basically breaks it down with, if you just kind of average out the good polls, she's about plus three in Wisconsin and Michigan and plus two in Pennsylvania and nationally. And that's the ballgame.
What's your take on the Nates? We have a lot of Nates out there. There's a lot of people that are triggered by Nate Silver.
I don't really understand why. He's kind of a contrarian prick on Twitter, so I get why that rubs some people the wrong way.
Who isn't? It's like a Nate conspiracy theory out there that's like Peter Thiel and the Russians are paying him. And he's betting on this stuff.
And I'm like, I don't actually know what the conspiracy is. I guess that it helps Trump for him to say that Trump has a better chance to win.
I'm not sure that actually helps Trump because Nate is saying basically the same thing that the Harris campaign is saying. I don't get that conspiracy.
Nate Cohen, on the other hand, I think does a very good job and I have professional respect for him, but I remain triggered. He triggers people too.
I'm me. By the needle.
The needle still haunts my dreams. He's caused a lot of harm, that guy.
Not deliberately, but he inflicts emotional damage on a whole swath of the Upper West Side of New York City. Yeah, my child came down the other night, had a nightmare, and came into my room and I said, what was the problem? Nicole, the needle.
She was like, it was a caterpillar. And I'm like, caterpillars aren't scary.
She's like, it was a scary caterpillar.

That's kind of how I feel about the needle.

I wake up about once a month, and I'm like, it's the needle.

The needle.

And move towards Trump.

Basically summed up slightly for Harris, too close for comfort.

Here's the one thing that jumped out at me at all these polls underneath.

And it is a group that you and I know a little something about.

College-educated whites. What did you say, Jews? Yeah, Jews.
I know a lot about Jews from my a little something about. College-educated whites.

What did you say, Jews?

Yeah, Jews. I know a lot about Jews from my time at George Washington.
College-educated whites. Gotcha.
College-educated whites. Hello, fellow college-educated whites.
Trump is down at 36% with them. That's men and women? Yeah.
Wow. Yeah, I know.
The movement post-debate in the New York Times poll, at least, was significantly due to the Harris gains among college-educated whites. There was a group of our people that I think were maybe nervous about her, watched the debate, and were like, okay, she's got this, and moved into her camp.
So that is somewhat encouraging. I have another fact about college-educated whites I want to share.
In Verona, New Jersey, which I know nothing about because I've never been there, but I know the demographics because I can Google. 80% white, 150K median income, 63% with college degrees.
In 2020, Biden won this district 59 to 40. In a special election Tuesday night, the Democrat won 68 to 31, a nine point move, 18 point move, really, in the Democrats direction.
So in the one hand, some people responded to that and they're like, great news for Democrats. Me being rain cloud, I look at that and I'm like, am I in a bubble again? Is it just the college educated whites that are for Harris and I'm missing what's happening elsewhere in elsewhere in the world.
Anyway, how do you respond to that data? It can be both, right? I feel like it could be both. I too saw the tweet about the special election with that data, and I was like, that's interesting.
I've never really paid attention to that district. Hello, New Jersey 10 residents.
We see you. We love you.
We definitely care. On the one hand, I like these special election results because they are real-life examples of what elections can be and maybe foreshadow some larger elections.
I know you're not supposed to read too much into them, but if you get enough data points, that's helpful. And through the past year or two, we've had a successive number of special elections that have really broken the Democratic Party's favor.
So that's interesting. Two is the college-educated stuff.
That seems very true. The real fault line has been education levels in this country.
The partisan fault line has been education levels in this country ever since Trump burst onto the scene. That can work in two ways, though.
I think the news yesterday that shocked me and you, according to our Slack conversations, was the Teamsters, international Teamsters, deciding to not endorse. But it wasn't just that.
It was the poll. I know there's some question about the methodology of the poll, but whatever.
The poll showed that they had gone from something like plus 8 for Biden to minus 17 for Harris. And that to me is like, whoa, white working class, predominantly white, not exclusively white, working class men who are not sold on her.
And is that sort of the canary in the coal mine here? Is that the thing that Harris is really going to end up losing those marginal gains that Biden made? And we know that Trump's really invested in turning out those people. That's the game for him.
So yeah, reason to be optimistic, reason to be pessimistic. There's just tons of data points.
It's just the thing that worries me. It's a bad trade.
It's a good trade for Democrats in special elections and midterms. This trade of, just to stereotype, your median teamster versus your median suburban Verona, New Jersey,

150,000 media income, college-educated white.

The Verona, New Jersey person votes more often in these weird elections, right?

But there's a bigger pool of the non-college.

So it's not a great trade for the general election.

And that's the thing that worries me a little bit.

Okay, Trump rallied last night.

I didn't get to watch it.

I was on my plane to DC.

You watched it, though.

And I would like to hear, I want you to tell me everything. Isn't your job to just tune into every single rally? Isn't that why we pay you? I watch an insane amount of Donald Trump.
I've watched too much ever since I started here. Real America's Voice.
You have no idea how many hours I've logged on Real America's Voice. Last night, we had no internet on the flight.
You'd be that guy who's watching with the screen. I had to read a book last night.
I was reading Joan Didion last night. It was very refreshing, actually.
I was like, there's no internet on this flight? Amazing. What a contrast.
Didion versus Trump. Both great with words.
So the rally last night was like, I was talking to Caput about this on the YouTube channel. It's funny to see him in his element a little bit.
He can go to these rallies where he clearly, I mean, they're his people. Obviously, they love him, but he just feels a little bit uncomfortable in those settings.
But Nassau County, New York is his people. He's a Queens guy.
It's just outside of Queens. Yeah, Nassau County Republicans are his people.
It's not the Rome, Georgia Republicans. The Rome, Georgia Republicans, he's faking it a little bit.
Yeah, he's not. The hawk in the Bible, as you can tell, his heart's not into it.
But talking about the New York subways, yeah, he's into it. I remember when he did this rally in 2016, he was talking about all the guys in the crowd who probably slept in their car overnight to go play Beth Page Black, which is the famous golf course out there in Long Island.
And you knew when he was telling that anecdote, this guy gets those guys and vice versa.

The white working class New Yorker type,

he was in his element. He was just bringing it.

He made up this conversation with Melania

where apparently she tells him,

oh baby, you were on top of it last night

and you were great. He's like, I'm talking about my

speeches. I was like, oh man,

too much. You were on top of it?

Yeah, we can pull the audio.

Sam, it's too early for this. I'm not pulling the audio.
When does this podcast come out? The other thing he mentioned was he's going out to Springfield in Aurora. He's going to do this in two weeks.
He says he's going to go to Springfield, Ohio to mend fences. It's going to be like a beer summit kind of like Obama did with Gates.
He's going to sit down with the Haitians and the Republican mayor of the town,

and Miss Sassy the cat, they're all going to have a meeting together?

Or is he going to go there to demagogue?

If Sassy showed up with Trump on the stage,

I'm pretty sure he's going to go to demagogue.

And then the last but not least was Rudy opened for him.

And I was just like, Rudy is on another planet at this point.

He's just screaming into the microphone.

I have the Rudy sound. Let's listen to that.
No more attacks! No more attacks! No more! Stop it! If there's anybody behind it, I'll find them! I did it to the mafia! I can do it to them! If you're're behind it i'm looking at you and i'm gonna get you it was very intense it was loud well who is he going to get there that's the assassin's rudy is gonna go to rudy's doing kind of a born identity thing now a disbarred rudy giuliani with absolutely no liquid to do anything well he's got some liquid going down the gullet. Yeah, different type of liquid.
No finances is going to go and track down the assassins in their network, apparently. I've got some other audio.
I can't decide if I want to do funny first or angry. What do you want to do, funny or angry? What do you want to get first? Do you want to get angry first?

Let's listen to J.D. Vance.
This guy is running the most disgusting campaign I think that I've ever witnessed. And that is not hyperbole.
Let's just listen to this. Now, the media loves to say that the Haitian migrants, hundreds of thousands of them, by the way, 20,000 in Springfield, but hundreds of thousands of them all across our country, they are here legally.
And what they mean is that kamala harris used two separate programs mass parole and temporary protective status she used two programs to wave a wand and to say we're not going to deport those people here well if kamala harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally i'm still going to call them an illegal alien fuck you jd vance yeah like i'm still gonna call these people an illegal alien just because because i don't agree with tps like what like his kids are mixed race i just don't understand how he lives with himself i just like what would jd vance do if somebody went up to him was like you know what jd i hear you that usha came here legally but i'm still gonna call her an illegal alien because to me, whatever the system was, it wasn't right. And I'm freelancing and I think that she's an illegal alien.
So that's what I'm going to call her. This one really sucks to watch.
Honestly, it sucks because you know that the people who are on the receiving end of this are probably some of the most disadvantaged people on the globe. I mean, they come from a country, one of the most impoverished countries in the world that was hit with a devastating earthquake.
They came to this country legally. They didn't sneak in.
They came legally. They came looking for work.
All they want is an opportunity. And for this person to use the stage he's been granted and the power that he has been bequeathed to stigmatize, to demagogue, to make their lives harder, not easier, really shows you something about both the priorities.
But also I would just add, and I know this is not a terribly unique insight, it's offensive to the Republican electorate that he plays down to this type of politics for them. He's made the calculation that they too want to stigmatize and demagogue and go after this Haitian community.
And he believes it's a political winner. And it's just an offensive calculation to the electorate itself.
So yes, it makes me angry, honestly. And it's un-American.
It's like the fundamentally American story. Does the disadvantaged people come here? They followed the rules, the rules as they were when Joe Biden was president.
You can say you disagree with the rules, you're going to change the rules. I would also disagree with that.
You can say, hey, when we're in there, we're not going to let anybody that's suffering from violence into this country. We're not going to do it with TPS anymore.
Okay. Also, he's created a straw man, too, where if you're for treating this community with dignity and offering help to them, that therefore you are against the people of Springfield.
They are the people of Springfield now, too. They are, who were there before the Haitian community arrived.
And I just think that's a real idiotic dichotomy. You can be for both of these people.
You don't have to be for one or the other, but he has turned them against each other. And these are his constituents.
I mean, keep that in mind. These are his constituents that he's turned against each other, all for political opportunism.
Also, just as a matter of fact, Kamala Harris was the vice president. She didn't wave any wands.
Just as a factual matter, it's also wrong. He fucking sucks.
I don't know that I've had a personal disdain for a candidate to the degree of J.D. Vance ever, actually.
So it's hard for me to get past. It's weird.
Yeah, I've been trying to think of a figure who's had this kind of trajectory in recent times. And it's hard to think of someone.
This isn't Palin. Palin came on the scene and we were like, who is this person? I challenge people to go listen to Sarah Palin interviews and compare them to J.D.
Vance interviews. She's downright humane and she's not prepared, but her rhetoric is actually trying to appeal to John McCain.
Anyway, I already did this twice this week. He drives me so crazy.
Let's laugh a little bit more. Trump on Gutfeld last night.
Let's listen to Donald Trump on Gutfeld exclamation point to the comedy show on Fox News, which I also suffer through for you. And they didn't correct her once.
And they corrected me everything I said practically. I think nine times or 11 times.
And the audience was absolutely they went crazy. And and the real I thought it was I walked off.
I said that was a great debate. I loved it.
You know, you got a lot of people watching.

I guess we had 75 million people watching, something like that.

And you have to do well.

You can't do badly.

The audience went crazy.

What audience went crazy?

It was an emitter.

Did he just have like a cheering section in his brain?

There was no audience.

Women were fainting.

Men were crying. What is happening there? Do you think that he, is this just a narcissistic sociopath? What is happening? I've come to some, not complete conviction, but I've concluded that he's got these tics in that he, like, no matter the story, he'll be like, you know, people are going crazy.
Or like, you know, he'll throw out like 20%. And then he'll always, every sentence one, and make America great again make America great again.
He's got these routines, and there's these rhetorical tics that he relies on. He even admitted it the other day where he was talking about how everyone accuses him of rambling, but he puts the dots together.
He said, if people are leaving my rally, I'll just say, and make America great again, and they'll come right back in. So he sort of knows it.
I don't know. I think we could use the professional therapist, though.
There's something deeply... Narcissistic? Yeah.
And there's some deep issues you've got to work through if one of your tics is, and people were cheering for me. You don't do that in the morning? I look in the mirror in the morning, I'm like, and people were cheering.
And people were cheering. Me and Sam, guys, I'm going to say this when I'm on this panel this afternoon, and me and Sam taped this podcast this morning, and it was so great.
And the audience was cheering for us. The audience was going crazy.
You could hear it. You could hear them chanting our name.
I saved one last thing for you. Just a little palate cleanser i didn't tell you it was coming oh good is it rfk it's not rfk we we do have a little special thing you and i with rfk next time next time we'll do a whole segment on rfk but this is something that's a little bit better than that let's listen why do i stand proudly behind my nude modeling work the The more pressing question is,

why has the media chosen to scrutinize my celebration

of the human forum in a fashion photo shoot?

Are we no longer able to appreciate the beauty of the human body?

Throughout history, master artists have revered the human shape,

evoking profound emotions and admiration. We should honor our bodies and embrace the timeless tradition of using art as a powerful means of self-expression.
Do we need to listen to it again? You're laughing pretty loud. I don't want to.
Do you want to hear it again? Let's just play five more seconds. Jason put it back on for five more seconds.
I want to hear five more seconds of it. Why do I stand proudly behind my nude modeling work? The more pressing question is...
This came out today. This came out today.
Or yesterday, I guess. Yesterday.
50 days from the election. And the first lady to be, wannabe, put out a video about her nude modeling work and how proud...
And by way she looks great she looks great i agree with that it's the messaging and kind of the timing i find interesting i have no issue i mean i think she should do nude modeling work now whatever makes her happy i support that i'm pro i am body positive over here this is a blog podcast body positive and we do not kink shame it's a a safe space. Politically speaking, it's an interesting question.
Did they ran that by Susie Wiles in Las Evitas? It's like, hey, we're leaking out a little bit from the book here. We're going to do the nude modeling section.
Well, like Melania, I too celebrate my naked form. Does Mrs.
Stein celebrate your naked form still, or is that past? This is a kid's podcast. Let's not go there.
Come on. The thing about the audio, you can't see it, but there's a video component to it.
This is the thing that kind of struck me was I was watching it. I was like, she's going through all these like famous artistic depictions of the naked body, and there's like the Michelangelo David there.
I'm like, did she just compare nude shoots to the David?

She did.

It's pretty bold.

I guess we are celebrating the human form

and all of its variations,

but I just don't think Maxim magazine and the David

are on the same plane.

None of the video pictures were full-bodied people.

You know what I mean?

It was not actually celebrating all of the human form.

It was comparing herself to the most pristine human form

Thank you. pictures were like, you know, full-bodied people.
You know what I mean? It was not actually celebrating all of the human form. It was comparing herself to like the most pristine human forms in world history.
All these like sculptures with like, you know, rock hard abs. That's not real.
Let's be honest, Melania. Maybe this was part of the youth male outreach.
That's the only logical explanation. I will say 46 days from the election and like, you know're wondering, Doug Amhoff's out there talking about anti-Semitism and going to Texas and trying to flip Florida, and she's like, the nude body needs to be celebrated.
Which one has got more appeal? I think she's going to actually win this one, though. I think this will get some votes from a subset of the electorate.
It's something. Something's happening there.

Sam Stein, I'm glad we could listen to that together.

I hope everyone that was listening in Carpool Line enjoyed that, enjoyed thinking about Sam's form.

And we'll be seeing him back here soon.

Up next, my with Suzanne Craig, investigative reporter at the New York Times. She's co-author of the brand new book, Lucky Loser, how Donald Trump squandered his father's fortune and created the illusion of success.
Hey, Suzanne, how are you doing? Good, how are you? You've been working on this thing for a while. I was paging through it yesterday.
And man, this is not one of those Donald Trump books. It's like, Orange Man Bad, which he has 200 pages and we're out.
This is deep, deep research about his finances. And so I just kind of want to hear from you story, why you felt like this was worth the effort to really dig through his financials over the course of decades.
Right. I should have started by saying I'm a bit tired because I've been at this for coming on nine, ten years now.
This all started, the thing I love about reporting, and maybe I hate it some days, talk about that. But you wake up in the morning, you don't really know what you're going to do.
Something happens and you're sort of dispatched to it. And what happened to me in 2015 and what got both myself and Russ Butner, my colleague who wrote the book with me, is Donald Trump was running for president.
Nobody at that point suspected he would stay in the race, but he was in early 2016 know was having some success in in early 2016 in the primaries and i remember i got the call from the boss saying hey he could be out in a couple months but we'd like you to come back um i was running the city hall bureau for the times i had just started and can you do one big story kind of looking at what he owns in new york what he doesn't own you know his name's on buildings and people didn't know if he owned that and sort of what sort of player is he in New York so I said sure and I did that story and then Donald Trump kept winning and I never went back to City Hall and I'm still writing about the guy so that's like nine years of crazy town and same thing happened to us's important, you know, back then, I just put people back then. He started by saying, I'm in a release, my tax returns.
And that was important because he's got a complicated business empire. He was running for president and people want to know what influences are on the guy, you know, who's pulling the strings behind the curtain and what what his finances look like so he had said he was going to release his tax returns well big surprise he lied about that he didn't release his tax returns and in 2016 there was in particular there was just a massive search on for a lot of things about donald trump because he came from nowhere in politics to running for president.
So, so much was not known about him. But my corner of the world, and it was a big one, was his finances.
And everybody was looking for his tax returns. We were tearing through courthouses and anywhere you can imagine, regulatory filings.
And then I had an incredible thing happened to me in september of 2016 which was much of my mailbox one afternoon uh friday afternoon and uh there was i love mail and and so i was excited mail this story is inspiring me because i hate going in my mailbox there's always bills you know right right camera tickets magazines you don't want to read but But I always check it i don't know it's the thing and there was a manila envelope addressed to me when i opened it and uh inside was what looked like we weren't sure three pages of donald trump's 1995 tax returns and i was like whoa this is great if it's true you know we looked at the tax return and he had what was shocking about it was a billion dollars in accumulated losses for 1995 like this successful billionaire guy who was running on that in 1995 his losses had looked like they did you know if it was true it clocked a billion dollars and it was true we confirmed the tax return took us working around the clock for 10 days but we got that to press and that was kind of the first big was the first big story about anybody had got about his taxes and that sort of set us on a journey for the next however many years where we did a lot more on fred trump and what he inherited from his father how he enhanced it with tax fraud. This was cool.
It won a great story. And we were lucky enough to have won a Pulitzer with that.
And then we got 20 plus years of his corporate and personal tax returns in 2020. All of that gave us this incredible, I think, skeleton for a story.
But Russ and I, we wanted to tell the sweeping narrative that we saw in those numbers, a story about family and power struggles, and about Donnell's business career, about how he was born into this fortune, got another fortune from Mark Burnett for hosting The Apprentice, and how that was structured, and then how the loser in him, he put all of that money, he invested it in himself and that he invested it in businesses that he didn't run very well. And we could see through his taxes, most of them lost money.
So I was a liberal arts major. My dad wanted me to go to business school and I didn't listen to him.
Same, same, same. So, okay.
How do you lose $900 million in a year and also have a plane? Can you explain to me like what like how he was structuring this like how did it even work yeah no he he those were accumulated losses his casinos were losing huge amounts of money but he was also borrowing money and you know the banks were willing to loan him money and they kept doing it and and part of the the magic of the casinos it was structured within a public corporation but he would buy the accoutrements of wealth it was it's a really good observation and he looked wealthy and the banks kept betting on him he bought like planes and yachts this is how he got on like lifestyles of the rich and famous like they just loved they loved it because he had all these toys that they could film and then it all came crashing down at one point and then he sold the apprentice on this you know that he'd come back from from this wreckage right so but yeah so talk about that period because that's what i don't quite understand right like i get the apprentice money but after the failures after the bankruptcies he has his story right which is whatever rebuilding comeback famous man right what does the numbers show like how did he live his lifestyle in the bankruptcy period he was sort of almost too big to fail so there was sort of a structured plan for him coming out of that and then he actually you know it's interesting that period before the apprentice he kept up the appearances and there was a lot of big talk. But he wasn't, you know, he was pretty stagnant at that point.
He was building a couple projects included. He started the tower in Chicago that he built.
That was his last construction project. That wasn't doing well.
And he, in 2003, 2004 era, he structured or engineered the sale of his father's empire. His father died in 1999.
Fred wanted to keep that in the family, but Donald convinced his siblings to sell. And he got, you know, almost 200 million from that, I think around $177 million from that.
He always, lucky, it's an apt title, he found a wellspring of money. But but he was trying to get what was interesting about that period that Russ and I found is he was trying to get licensing deals during that period and other things to bring in cash because he still had you know the Trump name it was all over the buildings there was a value he saw in that and he was really having trouble he was not cutting deals at all with the on the licensing side and then the apprentice came around and it turned everything around mark burnett shakes my fist how mark structured that it still is one of the craziest things that we found once we got into the reporting on this because you think tv host right like how much could a tv host make he was being paid and there's fifty thousand dollars an episode like this is good money but it's not life-changing magic money but what what happened which was incredible and we were able to get not only his taxes through the reporting in the book.
I got a lot of the financials of the actual television show. And what Mark did, which was incredible, was it was incredible.
Let me premise that for Donald Trump and for Mark Burnett. They both made a huge amount of money out of it.
NBC was so keen to lock not Donald Trump down, but Mark Burnett down on The Apprentice because he was red hot at that point coming off of Survivor the reality tv show that was just a monster hit and NBC really wanted to get into the reality tv space so Jeff Zucker was well he goes on to be the head of CNN and and you know another big figure in Donald Trump's life he at that point signed an agreement with mark burnett on the apprentice where nbc would retain the money from the commercials which is really good money but mark burnett would get the product placement money and what that means is you know on survivor if if there was a competition between the two teams and they were fighting over a bag of Doritos, Doritos would pay or whoever owns Doritos, the potato chip maker. And Mark Burnett would keep that money.
So at that point, that meant something. But NBC was willing to let it go because they didn't see it as sort of this big money maker.
And then The Apprentice comes on the first year. Pretty much there wasn't a lot of product placement they had like a net jets type marquee jets came on and and they got some advertising but they just agreed to fly the contestants from the show somewhere it wasn't like they were they were paying a lot to be on the show but after the first year madison avenue loved the show and all of a sudden all these corporations are clamoring to get on the show because it's essentially a 40 45 minute ad for their product like if a toothpaste company comes on and the two teams are battling to create an ad campaign for the toothpaste company that's 45 minutes of that's an ad for the toothpaste that's an advertisement for the toothpaste company and we saw the second third fourth season companies were paying up to four million dollars four or five million dollars to be on the show and mark burnett agreed to give half of the product placement money to donald trump so he got a check every time for half of whatever that company was paying.
Mark Burnett was sitting over there creating TV magic, including rehabilitating Donald Trump's image. And like Donald Trump was the host.
So he didn't have anything to do with that. He would show up for the boardroom scene.
If you've seen the show, meet the contestants and walk away with half of all the product placement money. And then he got licensing deals off of it, right, with all these companies.
Like he was separately doing a ton of licensing deals. While you mention Survivor, I should mention some breaking Survivor news that might be of interest to some of our audience.
Fellow podcast host John Lovett lost in the very first episode of Survivor on last night's show. Tough break to John Lovett.
Happy trails to you, but glad you're back in the podcast game. Thanks for that.
That was great. That was great.
We love him. I just had to tease him.
You mentioned Survivor and I was like, oh, I feel like we need to tease John a little bit. It was a good try.
It was a good try. One episode is pretty good.
So the Mark Burnett is kind of the second inheritance that Donald Trump gets, kind of a second daddy figure. The first one was a point of contention at the debate.
And so I want to play what Kamala Harris and Donald Trump said at the debate about his inheritance and then have you, since you've actually seen the data, be our podcast fact checker. Let's listen.
As it relates to my values, let me tell you, I grew up a middle class kid raised by a hardworking mother who worked and saved and was able to buy our first home when I was a teenager. The values I bring to the importance of home ownership, knowing not everybody got handed $400 million on a silver platter and then filed bankruptcy six times is a value that I bring to my work to say we are going to work with the private sector and home builders to increase three million homes, increase by three million homes by the end of my first term.
First of all, I wasn't given $400 million. I wish I was.
My father was a Brooklyn builder, Brooklyn, Queens, and a great father. And I learned a lot from him.
But I was given a fraction of that, a tiny fraction, and I built it into many, many billions of dollars, many, many billions. All right, Suzanne, what so what is the truth of this? You know, it's something that he's been saying, you know, he just gets a little bit of help, and he's been saying this for years now, and then she drops the $400 million figure, which I guess is what matches what your reporting showed.
So talk to us about how you came to that figure. Right, and we did a lot of work to get to that figure.
It was in that 2018 story that I mentioned. We were able to get to that figure because as part of the reporting for that story, Mary Trump, who is Donald Trump's niece, provided us with more than 100,000 pages of documents that, I mean, just opened up a door that we never thought we would, a room we would ever get into, into Fred Trump's wealth.
And she had all this information. It's interesting when we started on that story and we wanted to understand more about Fred Trump when we started on that story that ran in 2018, it ultimately showed he inherited hundreds of millions of dollars and it was enhanced through tax fraud.
But it started with a simple question was, we knew who Fred Trump was, but we really didn't. And Donald Trump had been saying he was some kind of Mickey Mouse outer borough builder for a long time.
He said it was a small builder and he inherited a million dollars. And we just started looking first into the property records in New York City just to understand what he owned.
It's great. There's a system, it's a public system, and you can put in someone's name and see what they owned.
And we started just basically to build a map of everything. And in doing that, Mary Trump's name and her brother's name, a lot of other names came up, and we just started building a big source list.
But Mary Trump and Fred Trump, her brother brother had owned some of the properties that we were bumping up against so and we realized and it had been written about she was in litigation with Donald Trump at one point and it was over her her grandfather's estate we knew it importantly that that that litigation had gone to discovery and discovery is like kind of the magic reporter word so we knew knew, we knew there was something there. We thought there would be some records.
We didn't really know how much we'd done some digging around. And I just decided one day, it was important enough.
We didn't want to call. I wanted to go to her door.
I mean, she was pretty apprehensive at first about talking to me, but you know, we kind of kept an open line and eventually she sat down with me and she said i have really not

any idea what's in the litigation but uh the boxes should still be over at the lawyer's office that i

hired why don't i call him and i'll go and get everything for you and the short of it is she did she went and rented a van and it was great and she loaded it up and came back to her house and i'm i met her there with my colleagues who were working on the story and we transported all of the information to kind of this is crazy the secret locked room at the new york times and starting digging through it all it took us a year or more to get through it but we saw through that do you have good snacks in that room or like a good was the temperature control we did we had some scotch and uh we did we we didn't even let the cleaners in so we had to clean it but that was fine we were you know we sort of had some rules it's kind of a reality show of its own sort of you know it's like a big brother situation you guys the reporters in a room with Donald Trump's tax and so so the short of it then you get to the 400 million it's just buildings. So it's not all cash, right? It's like the buildings and then some of what Mary and Fred, we had Fred Jr.
on the pod and sort of what they got schemed out of. And that is really where the number comes from.
Right. And we can see how much it was worth because he sold it a few years later.
And then some of this becomes public record. So you sort of can see how much he got you know through it all but we were able to trace it through the documents through other public records and put it all together and his claim that he got a small loan you know i think he's come to believe it and and he just keeps repeating it and it was even bigger because it was a kind of true at the beginning is one of those things where it was like at the very beginning it was kind of true and then his dad not really yeah well he got some loans from his dad some of them he didn't pay back but that million dollar loan we actually looked into it and it never existed like he got loans some of them you know like i said weren't paid back but no i mean he got a ton of money and he's still george costanza situation like if you believe it it becomes true type of thing with trump right and that's donald trump's magic right a lie repeated over and over he hopes becomes fact and he's still you know stare at city is a the public housing project that fred trump owned a piece of that recently paid out money for donald trump he continues to get money from the smart investments his father made like you know it's still going on there's no there's no small time builder here there's no oh I just got a small loan and it was all me Donald Trump he got so much money from his father but he also got contacts from his father his father co-signed loans for him what drives me crazy about it is why don't just acknowledge that your dad was a great builder like I don't know just like let it go man it has to be him right got to be him, megalomania.
You also got into a little bit of the stormy and some of the finances around that. What have you found out about the stormy situation? We did.
Actually, it was fun. It wasn't actually anything financial, but we called a ton of people.
This came from an unexpected source. I was talking to a fellow over in the UK.
He was, his name's Neil Hobday. He was a great guy.
And he had been involved in the project management of some of the golf courses that Donald Trump has built overseas. So most of his interaction with Donald Trump was overseas, but occasionally he'd come to HQ in New York to visit, to visit, you know, the Trump Tower and see the, see Alan Weisselberg and Donald Trump.
And he came one day flew over in February of 2007, which we came to learn through Stormy Daniels book and through the trial that just happened that Stormy Daniels had was at Trump tower at that time. So he comes in for a meeting and he he's walking in to see Donald Trump.
And there's this blonde haired, kind of very well endowed woman in the office talking to Donald Trump. He doesn't know who it is, but he comes into the office, says hello to the woman.
And she says goodbye and sort of leaves. And Donald Trump's all excited.
And he's holding a pack of playing cards. and on the playing cards on the front of them are all pictures of this woman.
She's naked in various sexual positions. And he's all excited showing Neil these playing cards.
And then he's like, Oh, yeah, look at this. And this woman was she was here because she was pitching me on a pornographic evangelical television program.
And Neil's just like, what the hell is going on here? And then they started started on with their conversation but Neil was telling me about this and he goes I realized later the woman was Stormy Daniels and then we got a hold of Stormy Daniels and she's like I totally remember that and I remember the playing cards and I gave them to Donald like it was just this crazy story that goes to like how batshit Donald Trump's life was during this period you know during that period in particular, but kind of all the time. You know, you laugh.
And in 2007, that seems like a ridiculous pitch, a pornographic evangelical television show. It feels like a, you know, contradiction in terms.
But now in 2024, they were ahead of the game, maybe I bet that would have crushed. I don't know.
It seems like, you like you know i mean evangelism is more of like a like a lifestyle brand now you know right so you can add a little pornography on top of it if you're gonna have trump as the as your david yeah it sounds less crazy today right yeah yeah definitely yeah yeah what else anything else and you're so you spent a year there you're going through all this stuff i mean do you have any other favorite kind of anecdotes favorite little factoids about the trump the trump business that jumped out at you you know there there's one that i just i really like it it's an apprentice anecdote and it's again it just sort of goes to donald trump and the ego that he developed during this period and just to promise that just this is another story before i tell the main story but even but even during the filming of the apprentice, you know how you have, you put an X where people are supposed to stand when you're on a TV set, he would insist that there was a T we actually have photos of this. Somebody on their show showed us cause they, they kept it cause it was so crazy.
So one of the stories that, that we heard, we heard so many stories from, I phoned all the marketing officers from every company that appeared on the show to talk to them about their interactions with Donald Trump, because some of them were insulted on air by him. And I was just like, these guys have got to just have great stories and a lot.
Nobody called them. So it was great.
One of the ones was, so QVC is the shopping network, and they did an episode on The Apprentice.

And then after this, because Donald Trump's always cutting side deals, he got a deal where he could come out to QVC to sell whatever his latest book was at the time. And so he has to go out to QVC to their campus in Pennsylvania.
and normally when people when celebrities come in because a lot of celebrities go out there to

they fly into brandywine air to their campus in Pennsylvania. And normally when people, when celebrities come in,

because a lot of celebrities go out there to hawk stuff,

they fly into Brandywine Airport.

Well, Donald Trump didn't want to do that.

So the chief marketing officer

and the people from Mark Burnett Show,

they agreed to create some makeshift

helicopter landing pad in the big field that's at QVC.

And so they go out there that day

and they're waiting for Donald Trump to come and they see the helicopter and it's descending down and it's about to land not far from where it's supposed to land. All of a sudden it redirects and it lands in the middle of the employee parking lot and stones go flying everywhere.
They hit cars. There was insurance claims filed because of this.
And he lands, he gets out. And Dan Gill, one of the people who was working for Mark Burnett, looks at Donald Trump's bodyguard, Keith Schiller, and says, Keith, what just happened? They were furious.
There's a lot of words I don't want to repeat that were said. I'm sure Donald Trump covered everybody, paid for all the insurance, all the cars and everything, all the damage.
Yeah, exactly. He covered them.
Yeah, he was very concerned. And the comment came back, Donald Trump didn't want to get his shoes muddy.
Oh my God. So he just landed in the employee parking lot.
What a trash person. There's so much there.
There's so much in the book. You can kind of just, I mean, it's a narrative.
You can do the beginning of the end. You can also just page through it and just like read these crazy anecdotes like this from the various phases of his life of losing and debauchery and bankruptcy.
So the book is Lucky Loser. Hopefully, hopefully two months from now, we have the loser and not the luck.
And hopefully the luck is ours. But we'll see how it goes.
Suzanne Craig, thanks. Thanks so much for coming on the Borg podcast.
We'll see you around 30 Rock soon,

I'm sure. And we'll do it again soon.
Appreciate all the work you put in on this.

Everybody else, we'll be back tomorrow for the Friday weekend edition of the Borg podcast.

We'll see you all then. Peace.
Like the legend of the phoenix All ends with beginnings What keeps the planet spinning? The force, I'm up all night to get lucky We're up all night to the sun, we're up all night to get sun We're up all night for good fun, we're up all night to get sun We're up all night for good fun, we're up all night to get sun We're up all night to the sun, we're up all night to get sun We're up all night for good fun, we're up all night to get lucky The Board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

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