In 1997, twenty years before Donald J. Trump became the 45th President of the United States, he published his third book titled “Trump The Art of the Comeback,” in which he chronicled how he fell into a $975 million hole during the early 1990’s—before re-negotiating hundreds of millions of dollars in debt—that he ultimately used to expand his business portfolio, pay off every single last one of his creditors, and cement himself as one of the richest men on the planet.
Of course, when the Democrat Party and the legacy media weren’t spewing baseless conspiracy theories during Trump’s presidency about him colluding with the Russian government to “steal” the 2016 election or attempting to remove him from office for non-impeachable offenses, they suggested that he didn’t build a great company and was merely a corrupt businessman who was using his office in the White House to cash in—something they continue to do to this very day.
Yes, according to House Democrats—who released a 156-page report in January titled “White House For Sale,” if foreign nationals choose to stay at any Trump hotel or property, including ones where they signed a long-term lease years prior to his presidency, or if a foreign entity decides to book a stay at a Trump resort through a third party—well, then it must be proof that some type of nefarious activity is taking place. Evidently, if you own a vast real estate empire, all revenue streams must cease to exist during and after your presidency—including for your son-in-law, who no longer works in government and just announced his firm is investing in major real estate deals in Albania and Serbia—causing the usual partisan hacks at the New York Times to meltdown.
That sort of logic would be slightly more laughable if the media didn’t turn the other cheek every single time more evidence comes out about just how corrupt the Biden family is.
And apparently, Trump missing the cutoff for The Forbes 400 rankings by $300 million last year is proof positive that his estimated net worth of $2.6 billion isn’t much of an accomplishment.
Sorry leftist media, whether Trump’s assets are valued at $3 billion or $10 million, it’s still far greater than the combined net worth of the Bidens, the Obamas, the Clintons, and the Pelosis. And the best part is he didn’t have to sell our country out or enlist his stripper canoodling crackhead son to shakedown Chinese Communist Party affiliates in order to amass his fortune.
Nor did he enlist members of his family to set up shell corporations so he could extort millions from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Kazakhstan. He didn’t have to convince Netflix to pay him $65 million to produce racist, anti-white garbage that mocks God-fearing Americans and conservatives. He didn’t green-light the transfer of control of over one-fifth of our country’s uranium-mining capacity to Putin—so that the Kremlin would pour tens of millions of dollars into a pay-for-play foundation that serves as the Clintons personal piggy bank. Nor did he tell his spouse to purchase millions of dollars worth of semiconductor stocks—mere days before that corrupt institution we call Congress decided to appropriate $52 million to the industry.
Nope, Trump just decided to amass a personal fortune the old-fashioned way—of the sort where people write you a check for providing tangible goods and services that people actually want and benefit from—without using the government to personally enrich your family and promoting policies that do nothing to make life better for American citizens.
But while Trump’s reversal of his financial fortunes may have been an impressive feat, it is safe to say without hyperbole that if Trump were elected as the 47th President of the United States on November 5th, it would be the greatest comeback of all time—not just in politics but in any field—at any point in American history.
To be sure, there have been other impressive political comebacks.
In 1884, Grover Cleveland was elected as the first Democrat president following the Civil War—only to lose his re-election in 1888, before subsequently running again in 1892 and winning. To this day, Cleveland remains the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms—meaning if Trump were to win in November, he would achieve something that hasn’t been done for 132 years.
Richard Nixon “lost” the 1960 election to JFK under highly dubious circumstances, then unsuccessfully ran for Governor of California in 1962—famously declaring to the press after his defeat, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” before returning to the political arena and winning the presidency in 1968 and 1972.
The sports and entertainment world has also seen its share of great comebacks.
In 1967, Muhammed Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title, convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to up to five years in prison, fined $10,000, and banned from boxing for three years. He would return to the ring in 1970 and reclaim the heavyweight title soon thereafter.
After winning his third straight NBA championship in 1993 and still reeling from the death of his father, Michael Jordan decided to play baseball with the Chicago White Sox Double-A affiliate—the Birmingham Barons, where he batted just 202—before hanging up his cleats and returning to the Bulls in 1995, winning three more consecutive championships.
Elvis Presley took a seven-year hiatus from performing, opting to pursue his acting career, before famously returning with his ‘68 Comeback Special, which drew a staggering 42 percent of the total TV-viewing audience in what was NBC’s highest-rated show of the year, firmly cementing Elvis’ rightful title as the King of Rock.
After Marlon Brando was cast in a series of box-office failures throughout the 1960’s, executives at Paramount Pictures refused to even consider him for a role in The Godfather—that is, until the film’s director Francis Ford Coppola was able to convince the studio that Brando was the right choice to bring the “quiet force and irony” to Don Corleone’s character. It’s a good thing they listened. The Godfather would go on to win Best Picture in 1973, and Brando took home an Oscar for Best Actor.
But while those comebacks were certainly of historic proportions, they pale in comparison to what Trump’s reclaiming of the White House would mean. Those former presidents, athletes, and entertainers were dealing with defeats at the ballot box and internal struggles, including self-doubt, loss of motivation, addiction, and failing to sacrifice principles—not rogue Democrat prosecutors that have no regard for the rule of law and are attempting to bankrupt the former president, seize all of his assets, and ultimately put him in jail in perpetuity—using legal theories that have never been tried to convict any citizen, let alone the former commander in chief and the current Republican nominee.
And yet, under the watchful eye of the leftist propagandists in the media who continue to work overtime to destroy the 45th president’s life, his family members, and his associates, while distorting everything he says and accusing him of bearing responsibility for every vile misdeed under the sun, Trump miraculously continues to press onward and somehow might just find himself back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, come January 2025.
Now that would be the ultimate art of the comeback.
David Keltz is a writer who previously published under the pseudonym “Carpe Diem.”