David Frum: The great illusion of ‘The Apprentice’

He was rarely covered as if he were one of the biggest business failures in America, even in the era when, per the IRS data just reported by The New York Times, “year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer,” and Trump’s “core business losses in 1990 and 1991—more than $250 million each year—were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.”

And no matter how many times he’d been caught being dishonest before, many treated his subsequent claims with the same presumption of legitimacy normally extended to people without a long track record of self-serving mendacity. Archives of media organizations contain countless examples.

To end their grifter-enabling complicity, America’s media institutions should now set the record straight: Each TV station, newspaper, and magazine that broadcast or published ’80s and ’90s coverage of Trump that misled its audience as to his wealth or success should revisit its claims in light of the new information unearthed by The New York Times, publishing updates and corrections. It won’t be easy at these resource-starved institutions, but they owe it to their readers.

And Random House, which published The Art of the Deal, should put out a statement clarifying that the purported author was no great deal maker at the time.

That is how institutions make themselves accountable for spreading untruths, a discipline that can’t help but influence today’s writers and editors to be more careful. Almost no one at the time could’ve anticipated how much misleading claims about Trump, of all people, would matter to the future of the world.

But it all mattered.

Ben Zimmer: Donald Trump and the art of the ‘con’

Let that be a lesson for today’s tabloids, gossip columnists, over-credulous or mercenary journalists, and reality-television producers. It might be tempting to salve your conscience as Tucker Carlson told GQ: “There’s this illusion … that everything is meaningful, everything important,” he said. “It’s not.” A more honorable approach, conveyed with nuance in the novel Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, can be distilled as follows: Strive to act as though everything matters––one never knows what will turn out to be world-changing.

For the public at large, Trump’s old tax returns are a reminder, at least for those of a certain age, of how effectively the man’s lies distorted our image of him and the degree of success that he was ostensibly enjoying in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

In truth, he was secretly flailing, piling up debt at properties that he later left bankrupt. Now he brags that he’s doing a bang-up job running America. Don’t get fooled again.