Reporters reveal new, behind-the-scenes details about Trump’s firings on “The Apprentice”

Also new tonight, Trump squanders $15 million. This is money loaned to him from his dad, who bailed him out. Two Pulitzer Prize winning reporters from the New York Times uncovering a trove of secret business records and tax returns, which show never before known reasons why Trump is so sensitive to questions about his wealth.

I grew up a middle class kid, raised by a hard working 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 homeownership, knowing not everybody got handed $400 million on a silver platter and then.

Filed bankruptcy six times. I wasn't given $400 million. I wish I was.

My father was a Brooklyn build, a Brooklyn, Queens, and a great father, and I learned a lot from it. But I was given a fraction of that, a tiny fraction, and have built it into many, many billions of dollars, many, many billions. And when people see it, they are even surprised.

So we don't have to talk about that. Prosecutor and Suzanne Craig are now out front. They are the authors of Lucky Loser.

How Donald Trump squandered his father's fortune and created the illusion of success, which is out today. And I am excited to have have a copy of it right now. So all right, I've spoken to each of you over the years is an incredible reported piece of work that you are now releasing for everyone to see.

So you reveal Trump's father, Fred repeatedly bankrolled his son, and we know, you know, he had been given money. But you guys document all the different ways it happened, including a $15 million loan, right. That you revealed Donald Trump never paid back 15 million.

Tell me more. So that was to help him with the construction of Trump Tower every week as it built up construction costs. He was having problems paying his bills, and so his father was loaning money over those that period of time.

And then that just stayed. He was supposed to pay interest back on that. He never did that.

But then years later, when Donald Trump started another building called Trump Plaza, they rolled that money into an investment into Trump Plaza. Well, Trump Plaza was really ill advised. It was built right as the real estate market was collapsing.

Everyone around him thought, this is not a good idea. You're not going to make your money back. He went forth.

Guess what? He didn't make his money back. And his father declared on his tax returns a $15 million loss to write off other income that his father made.

His father made a lot of money. So that was actually an illegal tax return. They somehow converted that $15 million with a low Trump tower into a tax loss, reduced his income on another building.

All right. So that's fraud on one level. On another very basic level, that's Trump taking $15 million and turning it into zero, which is another thing that goes totally against the entire ethos and brand that he's put out there.

Suzanne, you know, what I found fascinating about this as well, though, is, you know, you lay all this out, but you also talk about how he he talks about he's this real estate mogul and yet and that's actually how, you know, he gets The Apprentice. And yet it turns out from your reporting the apprentice, that you got tax returns, you got confidential business documents that no one's ever seen before, that reveal, he got, what, $400 million in The Apprentice? That that could be his biggest success.

It's incredible. When we look at the title, this lucky loser, because he lived a life. He was born lucky, he was born into a wealthy family.

And he also had a father with connections in the real estate industry. He went into it and he inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father. So that's just luck right there.

The second piece of luck that we write a lot about in the book is The Apprentice. It's a meeting of Mark Burnett, and at the time that he met Mark Burnett, Mark Burnett was looking to do another reality TV show. He had just come off.

Survivor was red hot, and he was looking to do sort of the the survivor in the city, and he wanted to do The Apprentice. And Donald Trump was having a lot of things going wrong financially. The casinos, this one of them, he was not doing well.

And Mark Burnett actually looked at some moguls that were quite wealthy, including people like Jack Walsh. They didn't want to do it. And the people that he liked either didn't want to do it because they didn't have time or they were, you know, not photogenic, telegenic.

But there was Donald Trump. So he was sort of not doing well. And Mark Burnett tapped him for the show.

And that show you think you're, you're you're you're a host of a reality TV show. How could you make so much money? But the genius of it was Mark Burnett had negotiated with NBC that NBC could keep all the money from the commercials, but that they don't.

Mark Burnett would get the product placement money. So there's a Coke can on the table if Coca-Cola has paid for that. Mark Burnett gets the money, and The Apprentice was this runaway hit with Madison Avenue, and all of these corporations were paying huge money, and we got huge money.

We got the financials not just of Donald Trump's tax returns, but of the show. They were paying two, three, $4 million an episode to be on that show. And Donald Trump got half of all of that.

So he got that rush. And then he got all these licensing deals after it. It was incredible.

So much money and this incredible sort of moment of failure when things are going to go down and then all of a sudden this happens and it becomes, I mean, more than $400 million. I mean, it's impossible to truly kind of comprehend that what that happened, you know? And yet, as part of this big event right on The Apprentice was, who's going to get fired, right?

So tune in to see who going to get fired each week. it was moments like this. David, on the complete opposite side, I don't see that you stepped up at all.

David, I'm going to ask you to take the down elevator. You're fired. Jason, this is a tough one.

You're fired. Heidi. You're fired.

In this case, Omarosa has to leave. You're fired. So once you learned that Trump was so unpredictable with who he was going to fire and that it was not based on sort of how they perform, they were tasks.

I remember judging some of these tasks, you know, there were this is it was supposed to be who did the worst on the tasks, but that he sometimes would be so bad about his choice about who he fired that they'd have to go back and edit it to make that person look bad. That's exactly right. The first face you showed there was David Gould, who had an MBA.

He was a medical doctor, I think, as well. The really amazing guy who a lot of the producers thought was going to win that whole series that season. He would just run the whole gantlet.

But Trump fired him on the very first episode, and people in the control and producers were like, oh my God, what do we do with this now? But they had this other moment because it was entertainment, not reality that, oh my gosh, this is really great because this is so unpredictable. So there was that quality that was really bad for him, and business was solid gold on the show.

And then they would just reedit everything to make the David Gould look. Back to the title. Lucky loser.

All right. this isn't Trump would call reporters. This is something I've been just fascinated by over the years.

This kind of alter ego, bizarre thing, when he would pretend to be a guy named John Baron and he would do it when he was talking about affairs or about, you know, how rich he was because he wanted people to think he was richer than he was and get put on the Forbes list and all of these things, he pretend to be this guy, John Baron. Here's one conversation that was recorded. It was your first down in a long term.

Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr Trump, you know, because you have found Fred Trump. And I'd like to talk to you off the record, if I can, just to make things easier, I think you can really use Donald Trump now. And you can just consolidate.

I think last year somebody showed me the article and I think you had 202 hundred. And really it's been pretty well consolidated now for the most part. I mean, even try I use a voice changer which is six year old, but try to do know it's been nearly done there.

And so I was like, I want to go there. Oh my gosh. Okay, okay.

But you discovered a long and bizarre history to John Baron. And by the way, the Baron Trump may be part of it too, but the history something else. We've always sort of wondered why John Baron and we found out in the book that when Donald Trump was, was and he just had first started working with Fred, we went back to old newspapers and we found, the name John Baron where there was classified ads where he would be selling things.

And it went back to the exchange number for the Trump House. So it was Donald. He was using it as a pseudonym, either because they wanted to hire a maintenance worker or and in one sad case, we actually found an ad for his his brother who died when he was 42, Fred Trump, his boat that the family they were selling and and it was it was John Baron was selling it.

So it was just this crazy origin story of John Baron that we've always wondered where it came from. And we found it in the classified ads of newspapers, old newspapers in New York. I mean, it is really incredible.

And that history and as you point out, that his his son happens to also have that name. All right. Well, thanks so much.

As I said, it's always such a pleasure to talk to both of you with your incredible reporting and this book, Lucky Loser out today. by Russ and Susanne.