WASHINGTON (AP) — In the January 2004 pilot of “The Apprentice," Donald Trump said something he would never admit today.
“It wasn’t always so easy,” he intones via voice-over, noting that by the late 1980s, “I was seriously in trouble" and "billions of dollars in debt.”
It is one of the few times Trump has ever publicly acknowledged failure. Even then, he was reading a script meant to promote against-the-odds credentials for viewers, previewing the combative
charisma that propelled his political career a decade later.
“I fought back,” Trump said. “And I won. Big league.”
Trump never loses. At least in his telling.
He declared victory within days of the Iran war starting, and repeated it constantly, even as Tehran struck U.S. and allied targets and choked off the Strait of Hormuz, spreading economic pain around the globe.
With a ceasefire now in place, Trump says the United States has accomplished its goals.
The president is extolling a change in rule after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed. But he was replaced by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who is seen as more hard-line. Trump says Iran will not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, but Tehran has stockpiles of enriched uranium. The strait is reopening — under Iranian military control.
When The Wall Street Journal's editorial board wrote that Trump had claimed a premature win in Iran, the president responded in a social media post Thursday, “Actually, it is a Victory."
On Saturday he posted that news outlets “love saying that Iran is ‘winning’ when, in fact, everyone knows that they are LOSING, and LOSING BIG!” Asked later in the day about the state of negotiations with Iran, Trump responded, “Regardless what happens, we win."
Claiming the winner's mantle has been part of Trump's psyche since he was a young man and a New York real estate developer. It has persisted on matters great and small.
The golf tournaments at his clubs, where he is the perennial champion. The adverse court rulings where he insists things went his way. The deals he announces that are never consummated.
“He has this fictional narrative in his head" and is "like a screenwriter,” said David Cay Johnston, author of “The Making of Donald Trump.” “When you need to change the narrative, you just change it. ”
No example is as stark as Trump’s rejection of his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election, an outcome affirmed in 60-plus 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 the world of Trump — pitchman and president, shaper of his story and others', sloganeering his way through his second term. One baseball cap he wears and hawks encapsulates the approach in five words: “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”
“It's much 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 like to hang around losers, actually, because it makes me feel better."
“People follow you if you win,” Trump added.
White Houses for decades have tried to cast bad news as good in hopes of softening unfavorable assessments of politics, policy and even war. But Trump has made always winning a core of his presidency.
The Supreme Court strikes down his signature tariffs? Trump vows to work around the ruling so his import taxes can be “used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty.” If promised investments in the U.S. that he's promoted don't actually materialize, he just says they did while sometimes inflating their fictitious value.
His Department of Justice stops appealing court rulings blocking executive orders meant to punish big law firms, then it reverses course because non-appeals might look like admitting 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 “has 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 accomplished.”
Sarah Matthews, a former first-term Trump White House deputy press secretary who resigned when a mob of Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, said the president's “ego won’t allow him to acknowledge defeat” and that “reality just kind of bends” to it.
“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 back then, there was "always a way to find an excuse to justify that loss and defend his position.”
More recently, Trump's second-term White House marked his first year back in office by listing “365 wins” over the same number of days. Those included some repetitive and exaggerated claims and also touted rising stock markets, falling gas prices and strong job creation that are mostly no longer true since the Iran war began.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle said Trump “proudly projects the unmatched greatness of our country consistently in his public comments.”
John Bolton was one of Trump’s first-term national security advisers and an early supporter of the U.S. and Israel striking Iran. But he said that Trump's declaration of victory over Iran was always “baked in the cake” regardless of the actual outcome.
“The world for him is divided into winners and losers," Bolton said. "And he’s always a winner.”
In 1973, federal authorities sued Trump and his father, alleging racial discrimination in renting apartments their company built in Brooklyn and Queens, two New York City boroughs. Urging the Trumps to countersue was Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer who aggressively promoted Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist “red scare” hearings of the 1950s.
The case was settled 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 had been no admission of guilt — despite the Justice Department calling the settlement “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.”
Trump first met Cohn in 1973 at Manhattan’s exclusive Le Club, and Cohn is credited with imparting key rules, including never admitting you are wrong or admitting defeat and attacking anyone who attacks you.
Cohn “taught Donald, you never concede as much as a comma," Johnston said.
“Whatever position you’ve taken, that’s the position, and anybody who challenges you, they’re wrong. They’re disgusting. They’re incompetent. They’re idiotic," Johnston said. "If they’re law enforcement, they’re corrupt."
Through the years, Trump consistently lost money, launching failed lines of namesake products that included steaks, bottled water, vodka, a magazine, an airline, a home mortgage concern and online classes. His Trump Plaza Hotel filed for bankruptcy, his New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League folded and the Tour de Trump cycling race never became the U.S. answer to the Tour de France.
Barbara Res, who worked for Trump at his company for nearly two decades, remembers him being fond of pitting top executives against one another to ensure he remained the most powerful voice, even as losses mounted.
For today's Trump, she said, “Nothing is wrong to him, if it helps him.”
“He wasn’t always like that. He understood the difference before,” said Res, author of “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 so much power. Or because he never really believed it.”
None of that tarnished Trump's self-projected image as 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 that success was built on earlier factors, including the appealing hubris 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 Trump become the “stock character of billionaire," landed him on the likes of “The Jeffersons,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “The Nanny,” and in “Home Alone 2,” Thompson said.
“When you need someone to quickly and efficiently represent ‘American Rich Guy,’ Trump has kind of cast himself in that position," Thompson said, “and everybody goes along with it.”
Trump did not acknowledge his staggering losses. After his three casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, filed for bankruptcy, he insisted to The Associated Press in 2016 that Atlantic City had been "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 relished raucous, made-for-TV events where the wrestler he was backing always won.
Trump also began addressing crowds, honing the “sketch and the rhythm” that would later become his strength as a politician, Thompson said: “The rallies are born in wrestling,” he said.
“Winning is an attitude, not a collection of facts," Thompson said. "Winning is, in this case, always defined by the person doing the winning.”
Trump carried that can't-lose view into his political career.
After he lost the 2016 Republican Iowa caucus, he posted that the winner, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, “illegally stole it.” Trump claimed to have won the popular vote against Democrat Hillary Clinton that November, “if you deduct millions of people who voted illegally.” In addition to his false claims that the 2020 race was stolen, he alleged widespread wrongdoing in the 2024 election, despite capturing all key swing states.
Russell Muirhead, a Dartmouth College professor who has written about Trump’s chaotic governing style, said the president has been at the practice long enough “to live in a world where you make your own reality” and there is no real world "outside your own mind.”
Even the way Trump plays golf means racking up wins — at least at his own properties.
Trump says he has won 38 times at golf clubs he owns. That includes a 2018 tournament in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he did not play but beat the winner in a subsequent match, one where he missed the first round and another during which he posted a final-round 67 — a score even some professional golfers would envy.
Matthews said that when she worked for him at the White House, she could not recall Trump ever admitting being wrong, even in private.
“When it’s obvious that it looks like a loss on paper, you have to kind of spin this somehow into a victory,” she said. “Because that’s what Trump would want.”
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Will Weissert has covered politics for The Associated Press since 2011 and the White House since 2022.
