WHITE HOUSE, INC.

Despite his claims, Donald Trump is not a good businessman—but he is adept at using other people’s money, including yours and ours.

This book, writes Forbes senior editor Alexander, represents “the most complete financial investigation of President Trump’s business ever published.” Certainly, its pages of tables are suggestive of a business empire that has both benefited and suffered from its brand name. Though Trump boasts of financial holdings many times greater than reality, his net worth has fallen in office precisely because his “decision to keep hold of his business empire proved to be a bad bet that poisoned his properties and, more important, his presidency.” His nickel-and-dime habits of charging rent to his Secret Service details in New York and Florida are just one symptom of that poison, but they go back a long way, lessons learned from Trump’s father, who gave properties to his children, paid them rent for them, and then recovered the money. “It’s tough to catch every lie,” Alexander writes, but plenty of truths emerge, from Trump’s debut in the press after being sued for discriminating against Black renters to the extraordinary debt load his organization carries. And then there’s that famous double-dealing. Even a simple hamburger at the Trump Hotel in D.C. costs $26, and the boss requires that the substandard products of his Virginia winery be sold exclusively—at $68 for a bottle of bad Chardonnay. The inflated figures are characteristic: Using a couple of industry-standard methods of calculation, Alexander argues that the D.C. hotel is worth about $300 million less than the $500 million Trump is asking for it. The author does give Trump props for his skill at buying and refurbishing distressed golf courses—though again, after the election, bookings at just one of them instantly fell by 100,000 nights.

A revealing autopsy of a business empire that, it appears, may soon conduct its operations far from the White House.