Susanne Craig, one of three reporters who worked 18 months on the 14,000-word investigation.
It was a journalistic bombshell, exposing the foundational lie of Donald Trump’s biography: Last month, the New York Times published a 14,000-word investigation revealing both that the U.S. President received hundreds of millions of dollars from his real estate developer father, Fred – puncturing the mythology that he was “self-made” – and that he participated in tax fraud. Susanne Craig, one of three reporters who worked 18 months on the investigation (and a Globe and Mail alumnus) will be in Toronto on Thursday for a discussion sponsored by the Canadian Journalism Foundation. The Globe spoke with her late last week by phone.
In 2016, you were anonymously mailed three pages of Trump’s 1995 tax returns. How do you go from that to scoring the tens of thousands of pages of documents upon which this story was based?
As we began to report and understand Fred Trump’s world, we got to know the people, and we did a lot of door-knocking and sourcing, and I have to tell you, we were never the first person at the door of the person that we went to. A lot of reporters had been there before, but I think what gave us an advantage was that we really understood this world.
You mean you knew the questions to ask?
And we knew the people really well. We had spent a long time understanding Fred Trump’s life and his organization and his business, so when we came to the door we spoke a language that they did, and they invited us in. And ultimately, after building a lot of trust, we got an incredible trove of documents. But it took patience and the willingness to understand his business and his world so that we could speak the language.
How do you analyze tens of thousands of pages?
It’s a great question, because it was a bit of a hot mess when we got it all in. Just the scanning of the documents took three to four weeks, so we could word-search them. Some things initially really stood out: The valuations that we were seeing in public documents, that they were crazy, and then we started to look for issues like that in the tax returns. We spent months and months trying to understand different parts of the tax codes from different years, but also going to experts to understand what was way out of bounds. We went to lawyers not unlike those the Trumps would hire, for stress-testing.
When the story was published, it dominated the news – but then seemed to disappear. The media critic Jack Shafer suggested that’s because it wasn’t “sexy” – as he said, “no mistress payoffs … no stolen elections.” Why didn’t it get more traction?
I just think the news cycle – how long does it sustain anything in this day and age? I would say that it did get a lot of attention. I haven’t looked at the recent numbers, but we were over five million page views at one point. I think also this story will take a little while to soak into the bloodstream. And then I think it will also set a new foundation for his biography going forward.
People are easily distracted.
That plays into it. And I also think, just the state of politics, [Congress is] controlled by the Republicans, so there wasn’t going to be an immediate hearing. The [Internal Revenue Service] wasn’t going to immediately come out and say: ‘Yup, we want back taxes.’ I think, too, if [on Tuesday] the House of Representatives flips, it becomes Democratic, I think you’re going to see a call for an inquiry.
There was also a sense that the story fit a general belief about Donald Trump: Oh, sure, he lies. Does it bother you, personally, that the public seems to shrug off what should be appalling revelations?
I think, for journalists, that’s the challenge writ large. You always want to write something that goes against the narrative, that’s surprising. And it’s hard when you now cover somebody, who you find out lied or committed fraud, that actually is not surprising people. Because, as a journalist, it’s pretty big to find out that not only did the President lie about the origins of his wealth, but he committed tax fraud. And to be able to say that very powerfully on the front page of The New York Times.
And, as you say, certainly this will reframe his biography.
But I have to say, in the stories that I’m looking at going forward, it does become a challenge, because you look at a lot of things and you see behaviour that is pretty untoward and you’re looking at it and saying, “Well, what’s the thing that’s going to surprise readers?”
What? That’s crazy!
And it’s disappointing when you’re saying that time and time again, because it fits a narrative that people already think low of him, that he would commit tax fraud and that he would lie. Yeah.
Do you think about doing your job differently now – not just reporting but also writing and presenting stories differently, in an era when even bulletproof stories are dismissed as “fake news?”
In this case, we framed it so that people knew, coming in, that we had the goods. It was an authoritative piece and we wanted to be transparent with people. We attached documents to all of it along the way. So that people could look at them and ask questions. This idea of “fake news,” it’s out there, for better or for worse, and nobody walked away from that story thinking it was fake news.
You’ll be up in Canada for this CJF event. Would you ever consider moving back?
I love Canada. I think about coming back all the time. I also have a job [in New York] that I love. It’s a hard thing, I really do miss Canada. I was born there and it’s in my blood. Hopefully they’ll have me back, if I decide to come back.
Well, depending on how things go politically, they may just kick you out down there.
Yes, they may!
Susanne Craig will be in conversation with Julian Sher in Toronto on Nov. 8 at 6:30 p.m. Details and tickets: cjf-fjc.ca.
Simon Houpt