WASHINGTON (AP) — During “The Apprentice” pilot in January 2004, Donald Trump said something he would never admit today.
“It wasn’t always this easy,” he says in voiceover, noting that by the late 1980s, “I was in serious trouble” and “billions of dollars in debt.”
This is one of the few times Trump publicly admitted defeat. Even then, he was reading from a script that was meant to sell surprisingly valuable information to viewers, previewing the combative charisma that would propel his political career a decade later.
“I fought back,” Trump said. “And I won. The big tournament.”
Trump never loses. At least in his telling.
He declared victory within days of the Iran war starting and did so repeatedly, even as Tehran attacked American and allied targets and choked the Strait of Hormuz, sowing economic pain globally.
With the ceasefire now in place, Trump says the United States has accomplished its goal.
The president is hailing a change in administration after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed. But he was replaced by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who is seen as taking a harder line. Trump says Iran will not be allowed to have nuclear weapons, but Tehran has a stockpile of enriched uranium. The strait is reopening – under Iranian military control.
When The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote that Trump had declared an early victory in Iran, the president responded in a social media post on Thursday, “Actually, it was a Victory.”
On Saturday, he posted that news outlets “like to say Iran is ‘winning’ when in reality, everyone knows they are LOSING and LOSING BIG!” When asked later in the day about the status of negotiations with Iran, Trump replied: “No matter what happens, we win.”
Claiming the winner’s mantle has been part of Trump’s mentality since he was a young man and a real estate developer in New York. It perseveres with big and small problems.
Golf tournaments at his club, where he is a perennial champion. Unfavorable court rulings in which he claims everything went his way. The deals he announced were never completed.
“He had this fictional story in his head” and was “like a screenwriter,” said David Cay Johnston, author of “The Making of Donald Trump.” “When you need to change the story, you just change it.”
There is no clearer example than Trump’s rejection of his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election, a result that has been affirmed in more than 60 court cases and by his own attorney general. Yet Trump has declared victory so often that his supporters believe him. He knows the power of repetition and volume.
This is Trump’s world – the salesman and the president, the man who shaped his own narrative and that of others, sloganeering his way through his second term. A baseball cap he wore and a hawk encapsulated this approach in five words: “TRUMP IS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”
“It’s much easier to lead when you’re successful and you’re winning,” Trump said during a recent Saudi investment conference in Florida, where he also noted, “Actually, I always like to hang out with losers, because it makes me feel better.”
“Everyone will be watching you if you win,” Trump added.
The White House has for decades tried to pass off bad news as good news in hopes of softening unfavorable assessments of politics, policy and even war. But Trump has always considered winning the core of his presidency.
Supreme Court strikes down his signature tariffs? Trump vowed to settle the ruling so his import tariffs could “be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty.” If the promised investments in the US that he promotes do not actually materialize, he simply says they did while sometimes inflating their fictitious value.
His Justice Department stopped appealing court rulings blocking executive orders aimed at punishing big law firms, then it reversed course because not appealing could be like admitting defeat.
This form of alternative programming has become the governing principle — and value — of the Trump family.
One of the president’s sons, Eric, said his father “never needed to create 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’s a messaging strategy’
Sarah Matthews, Trump’s former first-term White House deputy press secretary who resigned when a pro-Trump mob rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, said “the president’s ego will not allow him to admit defeat” and that “reality only bends” to that.
“It’s a messaging strategy,” Matthews said. “It was, ‘How can we redefine this loss as a victory?’”
She said she regrets it now, but back then, “there was always a way to find a reason to justify that loss and defend your point of view.”
More recently, the White House during Trump’s second term marked his first year back in office by listing “365 victories” in the same number of days. Those included a number of repeated and exaggerated claims, while encouraging a rising stock market, falling gas prices and strong job creation, that have largely stopped being true since the Iran war began.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said Mr. Trump “proudly displays the unprecedented greatness of our country in his public comments.”
John Bolton was one of Trump’s first term national security advisors and an early supporter of the US and Israel attacking Iran. But he said that Trump’s declaration of victory over Iran is always “baked in the cake” regardless of the actual outcome.
“The world to him was divided into winners and losers,” Bolton said, “And he was always a winner.”
Presenting failures as victories is nothing new
In 1973, the federal government sued Trump and his father, alleging racial discrimination in the rental of apartments their company built in Brooklyn and Queens, two boroughs of New York City. Urging the Trump family to sue was Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer who actively promoted Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings in the 1950s.
The case was resolved after both sides signed an agreement two years later prohibiting the Trumps from “discriminating against any person.” The future Republican president said it was a victory, noting there was no admission of guilt — even though the Justice Department called the settlement “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.”
Trump first met Cohn in 1973 at the exclusive Le Club in Manhattan, and Cohn is credited with imparting important rules, including never admitting you’re wrong or admitting defeat and attacking anyone who attacks you.
Cohn “taught Donald, you should never acknowledge a comma,” Johnston said.
“Whatever position you take, that’s the position, and anyone who challenges you is wrong. They’re disgusting. They’re incompetent. They’re stupid,” Johnston said. “If they are law enforcement, they are corrupt.”
Bankruptcy did not dent Trump’s image
For years, Trump repeatedly lost money launching failed eponymous product lines including steaks, bottled water, vodka, magazines, airlines, home mortgage companies and online classes. His Trump Plaza hotel filed for bankruptcy, the U.S. Soccer Federation’s New Jersey Generals was eliminated and the Tour de Trump bicycle race never became America’s answer to the Tour de France.
Barbara Res, who worked for Trump at his company for nearly two decades, remembers that he liked to pit top executives against each other to ensure he remained the strongest 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 this. He understood the difference before,” said Res, author of the book “Tower of Lies: What 18 Years of Working With Donald Trump Reveals About Him.” “I can’t say why he changed. Maybe it was because he had too much power. Or because he never really believed in it.”
None of that tarnishes Trump’s self-proclaimed image of being rich and famous, which has been boosted by the hit TV series “The Apprentice.”
But Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, said that success was built on earlier factors, including the appealing arrogance built into the title of Trump’s 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” his aggressive courting of media attention and his obsession with naming things after himself.
That helped establish Trump as “the classic billionaire character,” landing him in films like “The Jeffersons,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “The Nanny” and in “Home Alone 2,” Thompson said.
“When you need someone to represent ‘American Rich Guy’ quickly and effectively, Trump puts himself in that position and everyone buys into that,” Thompson said.
Trump refuses to acknowledge his staggering losses. After three of his casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey filed for bankruptcy, he insisted to The Associated Press in 2016 that Atlantic City was “a great time for me.”
Meanwhile, starting in 2007, he became a mainstay for WWE chief executive Vince McMahon, whose wife, Linda, is now Trump’s education secretary. The future president enjoyed noisy made-for-TV events, where the wrestler he supported always won.
Trump also began speaking to crowds, honing the “outline and cadence” that would later become his strength as a politician, Thompson said: “Protests are born in wrestling,” he said.
“Winning is an attitude, not a set of facts,” Thompson said. “In this case, winning is always defined by the person doing the winning.”
‘You create your own reality’
Trump carried that can’t-miss perspective into his political career.
After losing the 2016 Iowa Republican caucus, he posted that the winner, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, “illegally stole it.” Trump claimed to have won the popular vote over Democrat Hillary Clinton that November, “if you subtract the millions of people who voted illegally.” In addition to false claims that the 2020 race was stolen, he has also alleged widespread wrongdoing in the 2024 election, despite capturing all the key swing states.
Russell Muirhead, a Dartmouth College professor who has written about Trump’s chaotic governing style, said the president has been in practice long enough “to live in a world where you create your own reality” and there is no real world “other than your own mind.”
Even the way Trump plays golf is synonymous with winning — at least at his own base.
Trump said he won 38 times at golf clubs he owned. That includes a 2018 tournament in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he didn’t play but beat the winner in a follow-up match, a tournament in which he missed the first round and another in which he shot a 67 in the final round — a score that even some professional golfers would envy.
Matthews said that when she worked for him at the White House, she couldn’t recall Trump ever admitting wrongdoing, even in private.
“When it clearly looks like a loss on paper, you have to somehow turn this into a win,” 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 the White House since 2022.