Trump: How to Get Rich - Donald J. Trump/Meredith McIver

Trump: How to Get Rich
(2004), Donald J. Trump/Meredith McIver

    Fortune-seeking readers must be warned that the title is a misnomer; the book should be called How to Stay Rich. The prerequisite to getting rich and richer is to be rich already.
    And Donald Trump tells you in Six Parts how he stays rich. His busy day, unlike ours, seems to consist of thirty-six hours, and he gives us a detailed accounting of each of them—the hundreds of phone calls, most sidetracked to his loyal staff or to his security team, the multiplicity of worldwide real estate, skyscraper, golf-course, beauty-pageant and casino deals and his successful manipulation of them. You'll know without doubt that in the end The Donald will always come out on top, even after a real estate market crash when, passing a beggar, he reflected that the beggar was $9.2 billion richer than he was.
    Trump is a name-dropper, never mind that the name he drops most frequently is his own. An extensive directory of the rich and famous could be compiled from this book. Most names come with a tag of terrific, wonderful, beautiful, exquisite, the greatest . . . and there are also a few with bastard, scoundrel and sonofabitch appended.
    Many of the ideas in How to Get Rich repeat those in his four or five previous books, and Trump's presentation of them is blunt and straightforward. Whether or not you're already rich, the advice he gives in chapter headings is useful advice in general: Stay Focused, Be Tenacious, Don't Equivocate, Have an Ego—hey, that last admonition slams the reader upside the head! Donald has an ego and he spends a major part of this book polishing it, saying to the reader, "See what a great little (used figuratively, he's BIG) guy I am? See what I've accomplished? See how rich I am? See the outstanding persons and the beautiful women I associate with? Look at me!"
    Trump's unrehearsed NBC show The Apprentice is going into it's seventh successful season, although it's slipped a little in recent ratings. He devotes several pages to the story of how the program came about, and describes one set of contestants, sixteen entrepreneurs successful in their own right who wanted to work in the Trump Organization, although sadly, fifteen of them will have heard Trump's curt dismissal: "You're fired!"
    Trump really gets around. He's appeared and presided at so many events in so many places on so many TV shows, that one begins to suspect he has a double, maybe even a triple. An interesting read for an afternoon, but The Donald doesn't come off as sympatico; the reader is left with a dry mouth. Have a drink!.
                                                                                 - David Koblick