Soon after announcing his first campaign for the US 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 whatsoever. Drawing on over twenty years’ worth of Trump’s confidential tax information, investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig track Trump’s financial rise and fall.