Soon after announcing his first campaign for the U.S. presidency, Donald J. Trump told a national television audience that life “has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me.” Building on a narrative he had been telling for decades, he spun a hardscrabble fable of how he parlayed a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar business and real estate empire. This feat, he argued, made him singularly qualified to lead the country—except none of it was true. Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise. For decades he squandered his fortunes on money-losing businesses only to be saved yet again by financial serendipity. He tacked his name on every building while taking out huge loans he’d never repay. He obsessed over appearances while ignoring threats to the bottom line and mounting costly lawsuits against city officials. He tarnished the value of his name by allowing anyone with a big enough check to use it, and he cheated the television producer who not only rescued him from bankruptcy but also cast him as a business savant—the public image that carried Trump to the White House. Drawing on more than twenty years’ worth of Trump’s confidential tax information—including the tax returns Trump tried to conceal—alongside business records and interviews with Trump insiders, New York Times investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig track Trump's financial rise and fall—and rise and fall again.