WASHINGTON (AP) — In the January 2004 pilot of “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump said something he would never admit today.
“It wasn’t always easy,” he insisted via voice-over, adding that by the late 1980s, “I was in serious trouble” and “billions of dollars in debt.”
It’s one of the few times Trump has publicly admitted failure. Even then, he was reading from a script to promote counter-failed credentials to audiences, previewing the combative charisma that would propel his political career a decade later.
“I fired back,” Trump said. “And I won.” big league.”
Trump never loses. At least in his words.
He declared victory within days of the start of the Iran war, and Tehran repeatedly struck U.S. and allied targets and strangled the Strait of Hormuz, spreading economic pain around the world.
Now that there is a ceasefire, Trump has said that the US has achieved its goal.
The president is praising the change in regime after the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But he was replaced by his son Mojtaba Khamenei, who is considered more radical. Trump has said that he will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, but that Tehran has a stockpile of enriched uranium. The strait is reopening to Iranian military control.
When the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote that Trump claimed a premature victory in Iran, the president responded in a social media post on Thursday, “Actually, it’s a victory.”
On Saturday he posted that news outlets “like to say Iran is ‘winning’ when, in fact, everyone knows they are losing, and losing big!” Asked later in the day about the state of negotiations with Iran, Trump replied, “No matter what happens, we’re going to win.”
Claiming the winner’s mantle has been part of Trump’s mindset since he was a young man and New York real estate developer. He is constantly working on big things.
Golf tournaments at his clubs, where he is the perennial champion. An adverse court decision where he insists that things went his way. The deals he announces are never fulfilled.
“He has this fantasy story in his head” and is “like a screenwriter,” said David K. Johnston, “The Making of Donald Trump.” “When you need to change the story, you change it.”
There is no precedent like Trump’s denial of his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election, an outcome confirmed in more than 60 court cases and by his own attorney general. Although Trump has repeatedly declared victory, his supporters believe him. He knows the power of repetition and volume.
It’s Trump’s world – the pitchman and the president, his story shape and more’, chanting his way into his second term. A baseball cap he wears and Hawkes sums up the view in five words: “Trump was right about everything.”
“It’s a lot easier to lead when you’re successful and you’re winning,” Trump told a recent Saudi investment conference in Florida, where he also noted, “I always want to hang around losers, because it makes me feel good.”
Trump added, “When you win, people follow you.”
For decades, White Houses have tried to cast bad news as good, hoping to soften adverse assessments of politics, policy and war. But Trump has always made the main victory of his presidency.
Supreme Court struck down his signature fee? Trump vows to work around the ruling so that his import tariffs “can be used in a very powerful and abusive way with legal certainty.” If the promised investments in America he promotes do not actually materialize, he says they are sometimes overestimating their fantasy value.
His Justice Department blocks appeals of court decisions blocking executive orders punishing big law firms, then reverses them because non-appeals can appear to concede defeat.
This form of alternative programming has become a governing principle — and a Trump family value.
One of the president’s sons, Eric, said his father “never needed to project a winning image.”
“He is the definition of a winner,” the younger Trump said in a statement, “based on what he has built and achieved.”
‘It was a messaging strategy’
Sarah Matthews, a former first-term Trump White House deputy press secretary who resigned on January 6, 2021 after a mob of Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol, said the president’s “ego won’t allow him to admit defeat” and that “reality just kind of bends.”
“That was the messaging strategy,” Matthews said. “It was, ‘How can we redefine this loss as a victory?'”
She said she regrets it now, but later, “always had a way of finding excuses to justify that defeat and defend my position.”
More recently, Trump’s second term in the White House marked his first year in office by listing “365 wins” in the same number of days. Some of them included repeated and exaggerated claims and included a rising stock market, falling gas prices and strong job creation that have not been true since the start of the Iran war.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said Trump “proudly represents the unparalleled greatness of our country in his public comments.”
John Bolton was one of Trump’s first-term national security advisers and an early supporter of the US and Israel attacking Iran. But he said Trump’s declaration of victory over Iran was always “baked in the cake” regardless of the actual outcome.
“For him the world is divided into winners and losers,” Bolton said. “And he’s always a winner.”
Presenting failure as victory is not new
In 1973, federal authorities sued Trump and his father, accusing them of racial discrimination in renting apartments their company built in the two New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. Urged to counter Trump was Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who aggressively promoted Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s anti-communist “Red Scare” hearings.
The lawsuit was settled two years later after both sides signed an agreement that prohibited Trump from “discriminating against any person.” The future Republican president called it a victory, saying there was no admission of guilt — even as the Justice Department called the deal “one of the most far-reaching negotiations ever.”
Trump first met Cohn at an exclusive Lay Club in Manhattan in 1973, and Cohn is credited with imparting the cardinal rules, including never admitting you’re wrong or giving up and attacking anyone who attacks you.
Cohn “taught Donald, you don’t accept as much as a comma,” Johnston said.
“Whatever position you take, that’s the position, and anyone who challenges you, they’re wrong. They’re disgusting. They’re incompetent. They’re stupid,” Johnston said. “If they’re law enforcement, they’re corrupt.”
The bankruptcy didn’t destroy Trump’s image
Over the years, Trump steadily lost money, launching unsuccessful lines of namesake products that included steaks, bottled water, vodka, magazines, an airline, a home mortgage concern and online classes. His Trump Plaza Hotel filed for bankruptcy, his United States Football League’s New Jersey Generals folded and the Tour de Trump bicycle race never became America’s answer to the Tour de France.
Barbara Reiss, who worked for Trump at his company for nearly two decades, recalls his fondness for pitting top executives against each other to ensure he remained the most powerful voice, even as losses mounted.
As for Trump today, she said, “There’s nothing wrong with him, if it helps him.”
“He wasn’t always like that. He already knew the difference,” Race said in “Tower of Lies: What My Eighteen Years of Working with Donald Trump Reveals About Him.” “I can’t say why he changed. It could be because he has too much power. Or because he never really believed.”
None of that tarnished Trump’s self-projected image as the rich and famous, which was supercharged by the TV hit “The Apprentice.”
But Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of television and popular culture, said the success was built on earlier factors, including Trump’s appeal to hubris in the title of his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal,” his aggressive treatment of media attention and his penchant for naming things after himself.
That helped Trump become a “billionaire stock character,” giving him the likes of “The Jeffersons,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “The Nanny” and “Home Alone 2,” Thompson said.
“When you need someone to represent ‘America’s Richest Boy’ quickly and efficiently, Trump has cast himself in that position,” Thompson said, “and everyone goes along.”
Trump did not accept his stunning defeat. After his three casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, filed for bankruptcy, he insisted to The Associated Press in 2016 that Atlantic City was “a great period for me.”
Starting in 2007, meanwhile, he became a mainstay with WWE executive Vince McMahon, whose wife, Linda, is now Trump’s education secretary. The future president loved made-for-TV events where the wrestler he supported always won.
Trump began to address the crowd, honing the “sketches and rhythms” that would later become his strength as a politician, Thompson said: “Rallies are born of wrestling,” he said.
“Winning is an attitude, not a collection of facts,” Thompson said. “Winning, in this case, is always defined by the person who wins.”
‘You create your own reality’
Trump cannot afford to lose that vision in his political career.
After he lost the 2016 Republican Iowa caucus, he posted that the winner, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, “illegally stole.” Trump claimed to have won the popular vote against Democrat Hillary Clinton in November, “if you cut out the millions of people who voted illegally.” In addition to his false claim that the 2020 race was stolen, he alleged widespread malfeasance in the 2024 election despite capturing all the major swing states.
Dartmouth College professor Russell Muirhead, who has written about Trump’s anarchic governing style, said the president has long practiced “living in a world that you make your own reality” and that there is no real world “outside of your own mind.”
Winning even the way Trump plays golf means at least on his own merits.
Trump has said he has won 38 times at the golf club he owns. These include a 2018 tournament in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he didn’t play but hit a winner in the latter game, one where he missed the first round and another in which he posted a final-round 67 — a score that even some professional golfers would envy.
Matthews said that when she worked for him in the White House, she could not recall Trump ever admitting wrongdoing, even in private.
“When it’s clear that it looks like a loss on paper, you have to somehow turn it into a victory,” she said. “Because that’s what Trump wants.”
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Editor’s note: Will Weissert has covered politics for The Associated Press since 2011 and for the White House since 2022.
