Since its release Nov. 5, there hadn’t been much buzz about Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts’ new book, “The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get: An Entrepreneur’s Memoir.”
Enter President Donald Trump, who took the opportunity to cheerlead for the book Sunday — on social media, of course.
Trump, who previously took to Twitter to tout the success of a book written by his son Donald Trump Jr., “Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us,” again used his favorite presidential platform to plug the memoir by Ricketts, the conservative patriarch of the Cubs-owning family. (It later emerged many bulk purchases of Trump Jr.’s book were at least partially responsible for it surging to No. 1 on The New York Times best-sellers list.)
Trump wrote: “Joe Ricketts, one of our Country’s most successful businessmen, including being the owner of the Chicago Cubs, has just written a great new book. … Much can be learned from Joe. Go get the book!”
Joe Ricketts’ book “shares the epic inside story of how a working-class kid from the Nebraska prairie took on Wall Street’s clubby brokerage business, busted it open, and walked away a billionaire,” according to the Amazon.com description.
Portions of the book’s first chapter also are printed on Amazon.com, including this excerpt:
“For me, it’s the getting there. It’s the competition, the problem-solving. It’s being right when no one thought you were right and winning when the stakes are high. Even after I had more money than I could spend, I went on working forty to sixty hours a week. I still wanted to succeed at business, not for the increased buying power that success would earn me, but for the pleasure of making a business succeed.”
Joe Ricketts is the father of Todd Ricketts, a Wilmette resident who is one of the sibling owners of the Cubs and finance chair of the Trump Victory Committee, a joint fundraising venture of the president’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee.
Todd Ricketts co-chaired a Trump fundraiser with other RNC officials last month, which reportedly brought in millions for Trump Victory and notably brought the president to Chicago for the first time since his inauguration. The visit, predictably, wasn’t without controversy. Trump blasted Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson for not attending a meeting of police chiefs where Trump spoke.
The elder Ricketts made headlines after racist and bigoted emails surfaced in February. At the time, both he and Tom Ricketts issued separate statements, essentially condemning “bigoted ideas” contained in emails he mostly received and a few that he sent.
At the time, Tom Ricketts emphasized that his father isn’t involved in the operations of the Cubs, although Joe Ricketts sold 34 million shares of the TD Ameritrade company he founded for about $403 million to cover the equity needed to purchase the Cubs in 2009. (That point is hammered home in the memoir, according to the Amazon.com description.)
“We are aware of the racially insensitive emails in my father’s account that were published by an online media outlet,” Tom Ricketts wrote in his statement.
Trump didn’t always have the love affair he has now with the Cubs-owning Ricketts family.
Months before his election, then-candidate Trump, upset that matriarch Marlene Ricketts had contributed to a political PAC opposing his candidacy, took to Twitter and blasted the family: “I hear the Rickets family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me. They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!”
Trump never explained that, and Cubs Chair Tom Ricketts at the time told reporters: “It’s a little surreal when Donald Trump threatens your mom. The fact is whether it’s my mom or my dad on his Ending Spending (PAC) or my sister (Laura) on (supporting) marriage equality, or my brothers on what they do, or what we do with the team, we’re pretty much an open book.”
“We stand up for what we believe in,” Tom Ricketts said.
