The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family

by David Cay Johnston

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982178031
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	11/30/2021
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	270,300
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter and bestselling author of The Making of Donald Trump and It’s Even Worse Than You Think. He has lectured on economics, journalism, and tax policy on every continent except Antarctica and is a former president of Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE). Johnston has been a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN, the BBC, ABC World News Tonight, Democracy Now!, and NPR’s Morning Edition, among other shows, and was a consultant for the Netflix series House of Cards.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Original Lie 15

2 Jobs Mirage 25

3 Charity Doghouse 33

4 Off the Books 45

5 Collecting Tribute 55

6 Don't Ask, Don't Know 63

7 Conflicts of Interest 73

8 Tax Scam 85

9 Polishing Apple 101

10 The Koch Papers 111

11 Wall Scam 127

12 Opportunity Knocks 133

13 Dangerous Favors 149

14 Expensive Juice 157

15 The Shipping News 169

16 Russian Money Man 183

17 Promises, Promises 193

18 Family First 199

19 After Trump 215

Epilogue 231

Acknowledgments 235

Notes 239

Index 275

Editorial Reviews

08/23/2021

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. Agent: Alice Martell, the Martell Agency. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Refreshing. . . . Rather than simply tsk-tsking about Trump’s abuses, Johnston offers common-sense solutions for bringing transparency and integrity back to politics and government."

Booklist

★ 2021-08-17
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and longtime Trump-watcher delivers enough charges to fuel a few hundred indictments.

Johnstonopens with a scenario of desperation: In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, great numbers of low-income, poorly informed Americans longed for a savior who “would relieve their financial crisis.” What they got was a “master con artist” who would “cheat them out of what they had, all the while telling them that he was really their friend and helper.” Step 1: Destroy the notion of objective truth. Step 2: Send up a smokescreen of lies. Step 3: Loot the people’s treasury, self-dealing while leaving scraps for other financial predators. Johnston assembles a case that’s full of news and startling incidents. In one, a 29-year-old Trump assaults outgoing New York Mayor Abe Beame to strong-arm a sweetheart deal; though police officers escorted him from Beame’s office, he got what he demanded. The behavioral pattern with the most staying power is not violence, however, but cheating: overstating assets, engaging in phony accounting, not paying taxes. With the power of the presidency, Trump—who, Johnston reminds us, is the only president past or present at the center of a felony investigation—opened the nation’s coffers to his fellow grifters, engaging in “the kind of borrowing that made Trump infamous—money you borrow but never pay back in full and perhaps not at all.” Those fellow grifters are legion, but at the top of the list are daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner as well as former transportation secretary Elaine Chao, poster children “who illustrate the need for strict ethics training and for equally strict enforcement of laws against misusing public office.” Trump’s sole accomplishment, by Johnston’s account, was the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021, because it “testifies to his incompetence” while shining a light on would-be dictators waiting in the wings.

True believers won’t be swayed, but those inclined to despise Trump and Trumpism will find ample reinforcement.

Kirkus Reviews

Few people are as well positioned to write an exposé of the former president as Johnston. . . . The Big Cheat is a guided tour of the Trump circus in 18 colorful vignettes. . . . A good book, full of old-fashioned reporting based on original sources and primary documents, colorfully written and convincingly argued.

The Washington Post - James Kwak

"We know more than ever why Trump should not have been president and why he or any of his minions cannot be president of this democracy again. Johnston’s book is filled with amazing research."

Eugene Weekly