By Pamela Paul / The New York Times
There are lists of Donald Trump’s lies and lists of his alleged crimes. But the catalog of all the good things that have happened to the former president is equally unnerving. Every dog has its day, but Trump — no fan of dogs, BTW — has had far more good luck than the average mutt.
Of course, the man was born lucky — into a life of wealth and privilege and with looks that some women apparently find attractive. Like many indulged heirs, he quickly dispensed with those gifts, wasting away his fortune like a 20th century tristate re-creation of “A Rake’s Progress.” It could have easily curdled into squalor from there.
But one fateful day, along came “The Apprentice,” visiting the sulky developer in his moldering office. As my colleagues Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig document in their new book, aptly titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” it was this improbable TV show that offered Trump a golden ticket out of bankruptcy and irrelevance, transforming him into a successful billionaire by pretending he actually was one.
His lucky streak was only getting started.
In the last eight years alone, the period in which Donald Trump, Presidential Candidate, morphed from a complete joke into no joke at all, Trump has been visited by strokes of chance that would light up the eyes of even the most disillusioned gambler.
Judging by the way political sex scandals had operated since time immemorial, any seasoned bettor would have sworn that Trump’s then-nascent political career was over on Oct. 7, 2016, when The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape baring the Donald in all his grubbery.
But Trump lucked out. The “Access Hollywood” scandal flamed bright and fast and died out just as quickly. About a half-hour after the tape was published, WikiLeaks conveniently began posting emails Russian hackers had stolen from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair. The news cycle swiveled away.
Lady Luck intervened yet again in the form of James Comey, who reopened the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s emails over a new cache of messages, just two weeks shy of Election Day. The renewed investigation found nothing, Russian agents were later indicted on a charge of hacking Democratic computers, the reporter who spoke to Trump on the “Access Hollywood” tape got fired and Trump got elected president.
Decades ago, Ronald Reagan was called the Teflon president because nothing foul, be it the soaring deficit or the Iran-Contra affair, could sully his sunny persona. Of what denatured compound, then, is Trump composed? Time after time, he manages to elude the fallout from events that would crush any other candidate.
The recent dishonor of his grinning campaign photos at Arlington National Cemetery, and his former chief of staff saying Trump called slain soldiers “losers,” merely echoed his insult of John McCain — “I like people who weren’t captured” — from which he also sallied forth unscathed.
Consider his other infractions without consequence: twice impeached by Congress, declared politically dead after an attempted insurrection and found liable for both sexual abuse and defamation. Yet 10 months after that verdict, his nomination as the Republican candidate sailed through a third time, as if E. Jean Carroll had never vividly described to jurors being raped by Trump in a department store.
Eight years ago, Trump, who has been convicted of 34 felony charges in Manhattan and has been indicted in three other cases, told a rally full of acolytes, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” It is fortuitous, then, that he was able to appoint three justices to the Supreme Court who created the possibility for him to be granted immunity in the three remaining cases against him.
It’s impossible to attribute all of this to strategy or intelligence or even mere cunning. In the same way the mask-averse Trump contracted what we now know was a serious case of covid, at age 74 and seriously overweight, miraculously bounced back with the benefit of cutting-edge treatment that did not include injecting disinfectant, these things happened independent of Trump’s own actions and inclinations.
Now here we are, with Trump crediting the outcome of two failed assassination attempts to divine intervention.
Maybe it’s the luck of the devil or maybe it’s dumb luck. Either way, Trump, both a fan of and a failure at gambling, must know that everyone’s luck eventually runs out. The rest of us could certainly use a lucky break.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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