Mayer writes: "'The Art of the Deal' made America see Trump as a charmer
with an unfailing knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that myth
- and regrets it."
Donald Trump. (photo: Bill Clark/Roll Call)
Donald Trump's Ghostwriter Tells All
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
19 July 16
The Art of the Deal made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing
knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that mythand regrets it.
Last June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartzs sprawling house, on a leafy
back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up
with the days big news: Donald J. Trump had declared his candidacy for
President. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel
personally implicated.
Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on
Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, We need a leader that
wrote The Art of the Deal. If that was so, Schwartz thought, then he,
not Trump, should be running. Schwartz dashed off a tweet: Many thanks
Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I
wrote The Art of the Deal.
Schwartz had ghostwritten Trumps 1987 breakthrough memoir, earning a joint
byline on the cover, half of the books five-hundred-thousand-dollar
advance, and half of the royalties. The book was a phenomenal success,
spending forty-eight weeks on the Times best-seller list, thirteen of them
at No. 1. More than a million copies have been bought, generating several
million dollars in royalties. The book expanded Trumps renown far beyond
New York City, making him an emblem of the successful tycoon. Edward Kosner,
the former editor and publisher of New York, where Schwartz worked as a
writer at the time, says, Tony created Trump. Hes Dr. Frankenstein.
Starting in late 1985, Schwartz spent eighteen months with Trumpcamping out
in his office, joining him on his helicopter, tagging along at meetings, and
spending weekends with him at his Manhattan apartment and his Florida
estate. During that period, Schwartz felt, he had got to know him better
than almost anyone else outside the Trump family. Until Schwartz posted the
tweet, though, he had not spoken publicly about Trump for decades. It had
never been his ambition to be a ghostwriter, and he had been glad to move
on. But, as he watched a replay of the new candidate holding forth for
forty-five minutes, he noticed something strange: over the decades, Trump
appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz
recalls thinking, If he could lie about that on Day Onewhen it was so
easily refutedhe is likely to lie about anything.
It seemed improbable that Trumps campaign would succeed, so Schwartz told
himself that he neednt worry much. But, as Trump denounced Mexican
immigrants as rapists, near the end of the speech, Schwartz felt anxious.
He had spent hundreds of hours observing Trump firsthand, and felt that he
had an unusually deep understanding of what he regarded as Trumps beguiling
strengths and disqualifying weaknesses. Many Americans, however, saw Trump
as a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for businessa
mythical image that Schwartz had helped create. It pays to trust your
instincts, Trump says in the book, adding that he was set to make hundreds
of millions of dollars after buying a hotel that he hadnt even walked
through.
In the subsequent months, as Trump defied predictions by establishing
himself as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, Schwartzs desire
to set the record straight grew. He had long since left journalism to launch
the Energy Project, a consulting firm that promises to improve employees
productivity by helping them boost their physical, emotional, mental, and
spiritual morale. It was a successful company, with clients such as
Facebook, and Schwartzs colleagues urged him to avoid the political fray.
But the prospect of President Trump terrified him. It wasnt because of
Trumps ideologySchwartz doubted that he had one. The problem was Trumps
personality, which he considered pathologically impulsive and self-centered.
Schwartz thought about publishing an article describing his reservations
about Trump, but he hesitated, knowing that, since hed cashed in on the
flattering Art of the Deal, his credibility and his motives would be seen
as suspect. Yet watching the campaign was excruciating. Schwartz decided
that if he kept mum and Trump was elected hed never forgive himself. In
June, he agreed to break his silence and give his first candid interview
about the Trump he got to know while acting as his Boswell.
I put lipstick on a pig, he said. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I
contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention
and made him more appealing than he is. He went on, I genuinely believe
that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent
possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.
If he were writing The Art of the Deal today, Schwartz said, it would be a
very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call
it, he answered, The Sociopath.
The idea of Trump writing an autobiography didnt originate with either
Trump or Schwartz. It began with Si Newhouse, the media magnate whose
company, Advance Publications, owned Random House at the time, and continues
to own Condé Nast, the parent company of this magazine. It was very
definitely, and almost uniquely, Si Newhouses idea, Peter Osnos, who
edited the book, recalls. GQ, which Condé Nast also owns, had published a
cover story on Trump, and Newhouse noticed that newsstand sales had been
unusually strong.
Newhouse called Trump about the project, then visited him to discuss it.
Random House continued the pursuit with a series of meetings. At one point,
Howard Kaminsky, who ran Random House then, wrapped a thick Russian novel in
a dummy cover that featured a photograph of Trump looking like a conquering
hero; at the top was Trumps name, in large gold block lettering. Kaminsky
recalls that Trump was pleased by the mockup, but had one suggestion:
Please make my name much bigger. After securing the half-million-dollar
advance, Trump signed a contract.
Around this time, Schwartz, who was one of the leading young magazine
writers of the day, stopped by Trumps office, in Trump Tower. Schwartz had
written about Trump before. In 1985, hed published a piece in New York
called A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story, which portrayed him not as
a brilliant mogul but as a ham-fisted thug who had unsuccessfully tried to
evict rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants from a building that he
had bought on Central Park South. Trumps effortswhich included a plan to
house homeless people in the building in order to harass the tenantsbecame
what Schwartz described as a fugue of failure, a farce of fumbling and
bumbling. An accompanying cover portrait depicted Trump as unshaven,
unpleasant-looking, and shiny with sweat. Yet, to Schwartzs amazement,
Trump loved the article. He hung the cover on a wall of his office, and sent
a fan note to Schwartz, on his gold-embossed personal stationery. Everybody
seems to have read it, Trump enthused in the note, which Schwartz has kept.
I was shocked, Schwartz told me. Trump didnt fit any model of human
being Id ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didnt care what
you wrote. He went on, Trump only takes two positions. Either youre a
scummy loser, liar, whatever, or youre the greatest. I became the greatest.
He wanted to be seen as a tough guy, and he loved being on the cover.
Schwartz wrote him back, saying, Of all the people Ive written about over
the years, you are certainly the best sport.
And so Schwartz had returned for more, this time to conduct an interview for
Playboy. But to his frustration Trump kept making cryptic, monosyllabic
statements. He mysteriously wouldnt answer my questions, Schwartz said.
After twenty minutes, he said, Trump explained that he didnt want to reveal
anything new about himselfhe had just signed a lucrative book deal and
needed to save his best material.
What kind of book? Schwartz said.
My autobiography, Trump replied.
Youre only thirty-eightyou dont have one yet! Schwartz joked.
Yeah, I know, Trump said.
If I were you, Schwartz recalls telling him, Id write a book called The
Art of the Deal. Thats something people would be interested in.
Youre right, Trump agreed. Do you want to write it?
Schwartz thought it over for several weeks. He knew that he would be making
a Faustian bargain. A lifelong liberal, he was hardly an admirer of Trumps
ruthless and single-minded pursuit of profit. It was one of a number of
times in my life when I was divided between the Devil and the higher side,
he told me. He had grown up in a bourgeois, intellectual family in
Manhattan, and had attended élite private schools, but he was not as wealthy
as some of his classmatesand, unlike many of them, he had no trust fund. I
grew up privileged, he said. But my parents made it clear: Youre on your
own. Around the time Trump made his offer, Schwartzs wife, Deborah
Pines, became pregnant with their second daughter, and he worried that the
family wouldnt fit into their Manhattan apartment, whose mortgage was
already too high. I was overly worried about money, Schwartz said. I
thought money would keep me safe and secureor that was my rationalization.
At the same time, he knew that if he took Trumps money and adopted Trumps
voice his journalism career would be badly damaged. His heroes were such
literary nonfiction writers as Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, and David Halberstam.
Being a ghostwriter was hackwork. In the end, though, Schwartz had his
price. He told Trump that if he would give him half the advance and half the
books royalties hed take the job.
Such terms are unusually generous for a ghostwriter. Trump, despite having a
reputation as a tough negotiator, agreed on the spot. It was a huge
windfall, Schwartz recalls. But I knew I was selling out. Literally, the
term was invented to describe what I did. Soon Spy was calling him former
journalist Tony Schwartz.
Schwartz thought that The Art of the Deal would be an easy project. The
books structure would be simple: hed chronicle half a dozen or so of
Trumps biggest real-estate deals, dispense some bromides about how to
succeed in business, and fill in Trumps life story. For research, he
planned to interview Trump on a series of Saturday mornings. The first
session didnt go as planned, however. After Trump gave him a tour of his
marble-and-gilt apartment atop Trump Towerwhich, to Schwartz, looked
unlived-in, like the lobby of a hotelthey began to talk. But the discussion
was soon hobbled by what Schwartz regards as one of Trumps most essential
characteristics: He has no attention span.
In those days, Schwartz recalls, Trump was generally affable with reporters,
offering short, amusingly immodest quotes on demand. Trump had been
forthcoming with him during the New York interview, but it hadnt required
much time or deep reflection. For the book, though, Trump needed to provide
him with sustained, thoughtful recollections. He asked Trump to describe his
childhood in detail. After sitting for only a few minutes in his suit and
tie, Trump became impatient and irritable. He looked fidgety, Schwartz
recalls, like a kindergartner who cant sit still in a classroom. Even
when Schwartz pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his
youth, and made it clear that he was bored. Far more quickly than Schwartz
had expected, Trump ended the meeting.
Week after week, the pattern repeated itself. Schwartz tried to limit the
sessions to smaller increments of time, but Trumps contributions remained
oddly truncated and superficial.
Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this
fundamental aspect of who he is doesnt seem to be fully understood,
Schwartz told me. Its implicit in a lot of what people write, but its
never explicitor, at least, I havent seen it. And that is that its
impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own
self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . .
Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trumps
inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. If he had
to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, its impossible to imagine
him paying attention over a long period of time, he said.
In a recent phone interview, Trump told me that, to the contrary, he has the
skill that matters most in a crisis: the ability to forge compromises. The
reason he touted The Art of the Deal in his announcement, he explained,
was that he believes that recent Presidents have lacked his toughness and
finesse: Look at the trade deficit with China. Look at the Iran deal. Ive
made a fortune by making deals. I do that. I do that well. Thats what I
do.
But Schwartz believes that Trumps short attention span has left him with a
stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance. He said,
Thats why he so prefers TV as his first news sourceinformation comes in
easily digestible sound bites. He added, I seriously doubt that Trump has
ever read a book straight through in his adult life. During the eighteen
months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trumps
desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.
Other journalists have noticed Trumps apparent lack of interest in reading.
In May, Megyn Kelly, of Fox News, asked him to name his favorite book, other
than the Bible or The Art of the Deal. Trump picked the 1929 novel All
Quiet on the Western Front. Evidently suspecting that many years had
elapsed since hed read it, Kelly asked Trump to talk about the most recent
book hed read. I read passages, I read areas, Ill read chaptersI dont
have the time, Trump said. As The New Republic noted recently, this
attitude is not shared by most U.S. Presidents, including Barack Obama, a
habitual consumer of current books, and George W. Bush, who reportedly
engaged in a fiercely competitive book-reading contest with his political
adviser Karl Rove.
Trumps first wife, Ivana, famously claimed that Trump kept a copy of Adolf
Hitlers collected speeches, My New Order, in a cabinet beside his bed. In
1990, Trumps friend Marty Davis, who was then an executive at Paramount,
added credence to this story, telling Marie Brenner, of Vanity Fair, that he
had given Trump the book. I thought he would find it interesting, Davis
told her. When Brenner asked Trump about it, however, he mistakenly
identified the volume as a different work by Hitler: Mein Kampf.
Apparently, he had not so much as read the title. If I had these speeches,
and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them, Trump told Brenner.
Growing desperate, Schwartz devised a strategy for trapping Trump into
giving more material. He made plans to spend the weekend with Trump at
Mar-a-Lago, his mansion in Palm Beach, where there would be fewer
distractions. As they chatted in the garden, Ivana icily walked by, clearly
annoyed that Schwartz was competing for her husbands limited free time.
Trump again grew impatient. Long before lunch on Saturday, Schwartz recalls,
Trump essentially threw a fit. He stood up and announced that he couldnt
stand any more questions.
Schwartz went to his room, called his literary agent, Kathy Robbins, and
told her that he couldnt do the book. (Robbins confirms this.) As Schwartz
headed back to New York, though, he came up with another plan. He would
propose eavesdropping on Trumps life by following him around on the job
and, more important, by listening in on his office phone calls. That way,
extracting extended reflections from Trump would not be required. When
Schwartz presented the idea to Trump, he loved it. Almost every day from
then on, Schwartz sat about eight feet away from him in the Trump Tower
office, listening on an extension of Trumps phone line. Schwartz says that
none of the bankers, lawyers, brokers, and reporters who called Trump
realized that they were being monitored. The calls usually didnt last long,
and Trumps assistant facilitated the conversation-hopping. While he was
talking with someone, she often came in with a Post-it note informing him of
the next caller on hold.
He was playing people, Schwartz recalls. On the phone with business
associates, Trump would flatter, bully, and occasionally get mad, but always
in a calculated way. Before the discussion ended, Trump would share the
news of his latest success, Schwartz says. Instead of saying goodbye at the
end of a call, Trump customarily signed off with Youre the greatest!
There was not a single call that Trump deemed too private for Schwartz to
hear. He loved the attention, Schwartz recalls. If he could have had
three hundred thousand people listening in, he would have been even
happier.
This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more
thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve
for after the campaign. There isnt, Schwartz insists. There is no
private Trump. This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on The Art
of the Deal, Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at
Trumps personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for
public attention. All he is is stomp, stomp, stomprecognition from
outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in
particular, he observed, on October 21, 1986. But, as he noted in the
journal a few days later, the book will be far more successful if Trump is
a sympathetic charactereven weirdly sympatheticthan if he is just hateful
or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.
Eavesdropping solved the interview problem, but it presented a new one.
After hearing Trumps discussions about business on the phone, Schwartz
asked him brief follow-up questions. He then tried to amplify the material
he got from Trump by calling others involved in the deals. But their
accounts often directly conflicted with Trumps. Lying is second nature to
him, Schwartz said. More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the
ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment
is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true. Often, Schwartz
said, the lies that Trump told him were about moneyhow much he had paid
for something, or what a building he owned was worth, or how much one of his
casinos was earning when it was actually on its way to bankruptcy. Trump
bragged that he paid only eight million dollars for Mar-a-Lago, but omitted
that he bought a nearby strip of beach for a record sum. After gossip
columns reported, erroneously, that Prince Charles was considering buying
several apartments in Trump Tower, Trump implied that he had no idea where
the rumor had started. (It certainly didnt hurt us, he says, in The Art
of the Deal.) Wayne Barrett, a reporter for the Village Voice, later
revealed that Trump himself had planted the story with journalists. Schwartz
also suspected that Trump engaged in such media tricks, and asked him about
a story making the roundsthat Trump often called up news outlets using a
pseudonym. Trump didnt deny it. As Schwartz recalls, he smirked and said,
You like that, do you?
Schwartz says of Trump, He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of
conscience about it. Since most people are constrained by the truth,
Trumps indifference to it gave him a strange advantage.
When challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double
down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent. This quality was recently on
display after Trump posted on Twitter a derogatory image of Hillary Clinton
that contained a six-pointed star lifted from a white-supremacist Web site.
Campaign staffers took the image down, but two days later Trump angrily
defended it, insisting that there was no anti-Semitic implication. Whenever
the thin veneer of Trumps vanity is challenged, Schwartz says, he
overreactsnot an ideal quality in a head of state.
When Schwartz began writing The Art of the Deal, he realized that he
needed to put an acceptable face on Trumps loose relationship with the
truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trumps voice, he
explained to the reader, I play to peoples fantasies. . . . People want to
believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most
spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. Its an innocent form of
exaggerationand its a very effective form of promotion. Schwartz now
disavows the passage. Deceit, he told me, is never innocent. He added,
Truthful hyperbole is a contradiction in terms. Its a way of saying,
Its a lie, but who cares? Trump, he said, loved the phrase.
In his journal, Schwartz describes the process of trying to make Trumps
voice palatable in the book. It was kind of a trick, he writes, to mimic
Trumps blunt, staccato, no-apologies delivery while making him seem almost
boyishly appealing. One strategy was to make it appear that Trump was just
having fun at the office. I try not to take any of whats happened too
seriously, Trump says in the book. The real excitement is playing the
game.
In his journal, Schwartz wrote, Trump stands for many of the things I
abhor: his willingness to run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic
obsessions, the absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and
money. Looking back at the text now, Schwartz says, I created a character
far more winning than Trump actually is. The first line of the book is an
example. I dont do it for the money, Trump declares. Ive got enough,
much more than Ill ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form.
Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like
making deals, preferably big deals. Thats how I get my kicks. Schwartz now
laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. Of course hes in
it for the money, he said. One of the most deep and basic needs he has is
to prove that Im richer than you. As for the idea that making deals is
a form of poetry, Schwartz says, He was incapable of saying something like
thatit wouldnt even be in his vocabulary. He saw Trump as driven not by a
pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for money, praise, and
celebrity. Often, after spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile
one hugely expensive project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning
plates, Schwartz would go home and tell his wife, Hes a living black
hole!
Schwartz reminded himself that he was being paid to tell Trumps story, not
his own, but the more he worked on the project the more disturbing he found
it. In his journal, he describes the hours he spent with Trump as draining
and deadening. Schwartz told me that Trumps need for attention is
completely compulsive, and that his bid for the Presidency is part of a
continuum. Hes managed to keep increasing the dose for forty years,
Schwartz said. After hed spent decades as a tabloid titan, the only thing
left was running for President. If he could run for emperor of the world, he
would.
Rhetorically, Schwartzs aim in The Art of the Deal was to present Trump
as the hero of every chapter, but, after looking into some of his supposedly
brilliant deals, Schwartz concluded that there were cases in which there was
no way to make Trump look good. So he sidestepped unflattering incidents and
details. I didnt consider it my job to investigate, he says.
Schwartz also tried to avoid the strong whiff of cronyism that hovered over
some deals. In his 1986 journal, he describes what a challenge it was to
put his best foot forward in writing about one of Trumps first triumphs:
his development, starting in 1975, of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, on the site of
the former Commodore Hotel, next to Grand Central Terminal. In order to
afford the hotel, Trump required an extremely large tax abatement. Richard
Ravitch, who was then in charge of the agency that had the authority to
grant such tax breaks to developers, recalls that he declined to grant the
abatement, and Trump got so unpleasant I had to tell him to get out. Trump
got it anyway, largely because key city officials had received years of
donations from his father, Fred Trump, who was a major real-estate developer
in Queens. Wayne Barrett, whose reporting for the Voice informed his
definitive 1991 book, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, says, It was all
Freds political connections that created the abatement. In addition, Trump
snookered rivals into believing that he had an exclusive option from the
city on the project, when he didnt. Trump also deceived his partner in the
deal, Jay Pritzker, the head of the Hyatt Hotel chain. Pritzker had rejected
an unfavorable term proposed by Trump, but at the closing Trump forced it
through, knowing that Pritzker was on a mountain in Nepal and could not be
reached. Schwartz wrote in his journal that almost everything about the
hotel deal had an immoral cast. But as the ghostwriter he was trying hard
to find my way around behavior that he considered if not reprehensible, at
least morally questionable.
Many tall tales that Trump told Schwartz contained a kernel of truth but
made him out to be cleverer than he was. One of Trumps favorite stories was
about how he had tricked the company that owned Holiday Inn into becoming
his partner in an Atlantic City casino. Trump claimed that he had quieted
executives fears of construction delays by ordering his construction
supervisor to make a vacant lot that he owned look like the most active
construction site in the history of the world. As Trump tells it in The
Art of the Deal, there were so many dump trucks and bulldozers pushing
around dirt and filling holes that had just been dug that when Holiday Inn
executives visited the site it looked as if we were in the midst of
building the Grand Coulee Dam. The stunt, Trump claimed, pushed the deal
through. After the book came out, though, a consultant for Trumps casinos,
Al Glasgow, who is now deceased, told Schwartz, It never happened. There
may have been one or two trucks, but not the fleet that made it a great
story.
Schwartz tamped down some of Trumps swagger, but plenty of it remained. The
manuscript that Random House published was, depending on your perspective,
either entertainingly insightful or shamelessly self-aggrandizing. To borrow
a title from Norman Mailer, who frequently attended prizefights at Trumps
Atlantic City hotels, the book could have been called Advertisements for
Myself.
In 2005, Timothy L. OBrien, an award-winning journalist who is currently
the executive editor of Bloomberg View, published Trump Nation, a
meticulous investigative biography. (Trump unsuccessfully sued him for
libel.) OBrien has taken a close look at The Art of the Deal, and he told
me that it might be best characterized as a nonfiction work of fiction.
Trumps life story, as told by Schwartz, honestly chronicled a few setbacks,
such as Trumps disastrous 1983 purchase of the New Jersey Generals, a
football team in the flailing United States Football League. But OBrien
believes that Trump used the book to turn almost every step of his life,
both personal and professional, into a glittering fable.
Some of the falsehoods in The Art of the Deal are minor. Spy upended
Trumps claims that Ivana had been a top model and an alternate on the
Czech Olympic ski team. Barrett notes that in The Art of the Deal Trump
describes his father as having been born in New Jersey to Swedish parents;
in fact, he was born in the Bronx to German parents. (Decades later, Trump
spread falsehoods about Obamas origins, claiming it was possible that the
President was born in Africa.)
In The Art of the Deal, Trump portrays himself as a warm family man with
endless admirers. He praises Ivanas taste and business skillI said you
cant bet against Ivana, and she proved me right. But Schwartz noticed
little warmth or communication between Trump and Ivana, and he later learned
that while The Art of the Deal was being written Trump began an affair
with Marla Maples, who became his second wife. (He divorced Ivana in 1992.)
As far as Schwartz could tell, Trump spent very little time with his family
and had no close friends. In The Art of the Deal, Trump describes Roy
Cohn, his personal lawyer, in the warmest terms, calling him the sort of
guy whod be there at your hospital bed . . . literally standing by you to
the death. Cohn, who in the fifties assisted Senator Joseph McCarthy in his
vicious crusade against Communism, was closeted. He felt abandoned by Trump
when he became fatally ill from AIDS, and said, Donald pisses ice water.
Schwartz says of Trump, Hed like people when they were helpful, and turn
on them when they werent. It wasnt personal. Hes a transactional manit
was all about what you could do for him.
According to Barrett, among the most misleading aspects of The Art of the
Deal was the idea that Trump made it largely on his own, with only minimal
help from his father, Fred. Barrett, in his book, notes that Trump once
declared, The working man likes me because he knows I didnt inherit what
Ive built, and that in The Art of the Deal he derides wealthy heirs as
members of the Lucky Sperm Club.
Trumps self-portrayal as a Horatio Alger figure has buttressed his populist
appeal in 2016. But his origins were hardly humble. Freds fortune, based on
his ownership of middle-income properties, wasnt glamorous, but it was
sizable: in 2003, a few years after Fred died, Trump and his siblings
reportedly sold some of their fathers real-estate holdings for half a
billion dollars. In The Art of the Deal, Trump cites his father as the
most important influence on me, but in his telling his fathers main legacy
was teaching him the importance of toughness. Beyond that, Schwartz says,
Trump barely talked about his fatherhe didnt want his success to be seen
as having anything to do with him. But when Barrett investigated he found
that Trumps father was instrumental in his sons rise, financially and
politically. In the book, Trump says that my energy and my enthusiasm
explain how, as a twenty-nine-year-old with few accomplishments, he acquired
the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Barrett reports, however, that Trumps father had to
co-sign the many contracts that the deal required. He also lent Trump seven
and a half million dollars to get started as a casino owner in Atlantic
City; at one point, when Trump couldnt meet payments on other loans, his
father tried to tide him over by sending a lawyer to buy some three million
dollars worth of gambling chips. Barrett told me, Donald did make some
smart moves himself, particularly in assembling the site for the Trump
Tower. That was a stroke of genius. Nonetheless, he said, The notion that
hes a self-made man is a joke. But I guess they couldnt call the book The
Art of My Fathers Deals.
The other key myth perpetuated by The Art of the Deal was that Trumps
intuitions about business were almost flawless. The book helped fuel the
notion that he couldnt fail, Barrett said. But, unbeknown to Schwartz and
the public, by late 1987, when the book came out, Trump was heading toward
what Barrett calls simultaneous personal and professional
self-destruction. OBrien agrees that during the next several years Trumps
life unravelled. The divorce from Ivana reportedly cost him twenty-five
million dollars. Meanwhile, he was in the midst of what OBrien calls a
crazy shopping spree that resulted in unmanageable debt. He was buying the
Plaza Hotel and also planning to erect the tallest building in the world,
on the former rail yards that he had bought on the West Side. In 1987, the
city denied him permission to construct such a tall skyscraper, but in The
Art of the Deal he brushed off this failure with a one-liner: I can afford
to wait. OBrien says, The reality is that he couldnt afford to wait. He
was telling the media that the carrying costs were three million dollars,
when in fact they were more like twenty million. Trump was also building a
third casino in Atlantic City, the Taj, which he promised would be the
biggest casino in history. He bought the Eastern Air Lines shuttle that
operated out of New York, Boston, and Washington, rechristening it the Trump
Shuttle, and acquired a giant yacht, the Trump Princess. He was on a total
run of complete and utter self-absorption, Barrett says, adding, Its kind
of like now.
Schwartz said that when he was writing the book the greatest percentage of
Trumps assets was in casinos, and he made it sound like each casino was
more successful than the last. But every one of them was failing. He went
on, I think he was just spinning. I dont think he could have believed it
at the time. He was losing millions of dollars a day. He had to have been
terrified.
In 1992, the journalist David Cay Johnston published a book about casinos,
Temples of Chance, and cited a net-worth statement from 1990 that assessed
Trumps personal wealth. It showed that Trump owed nearly three hundred
million dollars more to his creditors than his assets were worth. The next
year, his company was forced into bankruptcythe first of six such
instances. The Trump meteor had crashed.
But in The Art of the Deal, OBrien told me, Trump shrewdly and
unabashedly promoted an image of himself as a dealmaker nonpareil who could
always get the best out of every situationand who can now deliver America
from its malaise. This idealized version was presented to an exponentially
larger audience, OBrien noted, when Mark Burnett, the reality-television
producer, read The Art of the Deal and decided to base a new show on it,
The Apprentice, with Trump as the star. The first season of the show,
which premièred in 2004, opens with Trump in the back of a limousine,
boasting, Ive mastered the art of the deal, and Ive turned the name Trump
into the highest-quality brand. An image of the books cover flashes
onscreen as Trump explains that, as the master, he is now seeking an
apprentice. OBrien said, The Apprentice is mythmaking on steroids.
Theres a straight line from the book to the show to the 2016 campaign.
It took Schwartz a little more than a year to write The Art of the Deal.
In the spring of 1987, he sent the manuscript to Trump, who returned it to
him shortly afterward. There were a few red marks made with a fat-tipped
Magic Marker, most of which deleted criticisms that Trump had made of
powerful individuals he no longer wanted to offend, such as Lee Iacocca.
Otherwise, Schwartz says, Trump changed almost nothing.
In my phone interview with Trump, he initially said of Schwartz, Tony was
very good. He was the co-author. But he dismissed Schwartzs account of the
writing process. He didnt write the book, Trump told me. I wrote the
book. I wrote the book. It was my book. And it was a No. 1 best-seller, and
one of the best-selling business books of all time. Some say it was the
best-selling business book ever. (It is not.) Howard Kaminsky, the former
Random House head, laughed and said, Trump didnt write a postcard for us!
Trump was far more involved in the books promotion. He wooed booksellers
and made one television appearance after another. He publicly promised to
donate his cut of the books royalties to charity. He even made a surprise
trip to New Hampshire, where he stirred additional publicity by floating the
possibility that he might run for President.
In December of 1987, a month after the book was published, Trump hosted an
extravagant book party in the pink marble atrium of Trump Tower. Klieg
lights lit a red carpet outside the building. Inside, nearly a thousand
guests, in black tie, were served champagne and fed slices of a giant cake
replica of Trump Tower, which was wheeled in by a parade of women waving red
sparklers. The boxing promoter Don King greeted the crowd in a floor-length
mink coat, and the comedian Jackie Mason introduced Donald and Ivana with
the words Here comes the king and queen! Trump toasted Schwartz, saying
teasingly that he had at least tried to teach him how to make money.
Schwartz got more of an education the next day, when he and Trump spoke on
the phone. After chatting briefly about the party, Trump informed Schwartz
that, as his ghostwriter, he owed him for half the events cost, which was
in the six figures. Schwartz was dumbfounded. He wanted me to split the
cost of entertaining his list of nine hundred second-rate celebrities?
Schwartz had, in fact, learned a few things from watching Trump. He
drastically negotiated down the amount that he agreed to pay, to a few
thousand dollars, and then wrote Trump a letter promising to write a check
not to Trump but to a charity of Schwartzs choosing. It was a page out of
Trumps playbook. In the past seven years, Trump has promised to give
millions of dollars to charity, but reporters for the Washington Post found
that they could document only ten thousand dollars in donationsand they
uncovered no direct evidence that Trump made charitable contributions from
money earned by The Art of the Deal.
Not long after the discussion of the party bills, Trump approached Schwartz
about writing a sequel, for which Trump had been offered a seven-figure
advance. This time, however, he offered Schwartz only a third of the
profits. He pointed out that, because the advance was much bigger, the
payout would be, too. But Schwartz said no. Feeling deeply alienated, he
instead wrote a book called What Really Matters, about the search for
meaning in life. After working with Trump, Schwartz writes, he felt a
gnawing emptiness and became a seeker, longing to be connected to
something timeless and essential, more real.
Schwartz told me that he has decided to pledge all royalties from sales of
The Art of the Deal in 2016 to pointedly chosen charities: the National
Immigration Law Center, Human Rights Watch, the Center for the Victims of
Torture, the National Immigration Forum, and the Tahirih Justice Center. He
doesnt feel that the gesture absolves him. Ill carry this until the end
of my life, he said. Theres no righting it. But I like the idea that, the
more copies that The Art of the Deal sells, the more money I can donate to
the people whose rights Trump seeks to abridge.
Schwartz expected Trump to attack him for speaking out, and he was correct.
Informed that Schwartz had made critical remarks about him, and wouldnt be
voting for him, Trump said, Hes probably just doing it for the publicity.
He also said, Wow. Thats great disloyalty, because I made Tony rich. He
owes a lot to me. I helped him when he didnt have two cents in his pocket.
Its great disloyalty. I guess he thinks its good for himbut hell find
out its not good for him.
Minutes after Trump got off the phone with me, Schwartzs cell phone rang.
I hear youre not voting for me, Trump said. I just talked to The New
Yorkerwhich, by the way, is a failing magazine that no one readsand I
heard you were critical of me.
Youre running for President, Schwartz said. I disagree with a lot of
what youre saying.
Thats your right, but then you should have just remained silent. I just
want to tell you that I think youre very disloyal. Without me, you wouldnt
be where you are now. I had a lot of choice of who to have write the book,
and I chose you, and I was very generous with you. I know that you gave a
lot of speeches and lectures using The Art of the Deal. I could have sued
you, but I didnt.
My business has nothing to do with The Art of the Deal.
Thats not what Ive been told.
Youre running for President of the United States. The stakes here are
high.
Yeah, they are, he said. Have a nice life. Trump hung up.
Schwartz can understand why Trump feels stung, but he felt that he had to
speak up before it was too late. As for Trumps anger toward him, he said,
I dont take it personally, because the truth is he didnt mean it
personally. People are dispensable and disposable in Trumps world. If
Trump is elected President, he warned, the millions of people who voted for
him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what anyone
who deals closely with him already knowsthat he couldnt care less about
them.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Donald Trump. (photo: Bill Clark/Roll Call)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells
-allhttp://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-t
ells-all
Donald Trump's Ghostwriter Tells All
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
19 July 16
The Art of the Deal made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing
knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that mythand regrets it.
ast June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartzs sprawling house, on a leafy
back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up
with the days big news: Donald J. Trump had declared his candidacy for
President. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel
personally implicated.
Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on
Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, We need a leader that
wrote The Art of the Deal. If that was so, Schwartz thought, then he,
not Trump, should be running. Schwartz dashed off a tweet: Many thanks
Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I
wrote The Art of the Deal.
Schwartz had ghostwritten Trumps 1987 breakthrough memoir, earning a joint
byline on the cover, half of the books five-hundred-thousand-dollar
advance, and half of the royalties. The book was a phenomenal success,
spending forty-eight weeks on the Times best-seller list, thirteen of them
at No. 1. More than a million copies have been bought, generating several
million dollars in royalties. The book expanded Trumps renown far beyond
New York City, making him an emblem of the successful tycoon. Edward Kosner,
the former editor and publisher of New York, where Schwartz worked as a
writer at the time, says, Tony created Trump. Hes Dr. Frankenstein.
Starting in late 1985, Schwartz spent eighteen months with Trumpcamping out
in his office, joining him on his helicopter, tagging along at meetings, and
spending weekends with him at his Manhattan apartment and his Florida
estate. During that period, Schwartz felt, he had got to know him better
than almost anyone else outside the Trump family. Until Schwartz posted the
tweet, though, he had not spoken publicly about Trump for decades. It had
never been his ambition to be a ghostwriter, and he had been glad to move
on. But, as he watched a replay of the new candidate holding forth for
forty-five minutes, he noticed something strange: over the decades, Trump
appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz
recalls thinking, If he could lie about that on Day Onewhen it was so
easily refutedhe is likely to lie about anything.
It seemed improbable that Trumps campaign would succeed, so Schwartz told
himself that he neednt worry much. But, as Trump denounced Mexican
immigrants as rapists, near the end of the speech, Schwartz felt anxious.
He had spent hundreds of hours observing Trump firsthand, and felt that he
had an unusually deep understanding of what he regarded as Trumps beguiling
strengths and disqualifying weaknesses. Many Americans, however, saw Trump
as a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for businessa
mythical image that Schwartz had helped create. It pays to trust your
instincts, Trump says in the book, adding that he was set to make hundreds
of millions of dollars after buying a hotel that he hadnt even walked
through.
In the subsequent months, as Trump defied predictions by establishing
himself as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, Schwartzs desire
to set the record straight grew. He had long since left journalism to launch
the Energy Project, a consulting firm that promises to improve employees
productivity by helping them boost their physical, emotional, mental, and
spiritual morale. It was a successful company, with clients such as
Facebook, and Schwartzs colleagues urged him to avoid the political fray.
But the prospect of President Trump terrified him. It wasnt because of
Trumps ideologySchwartz doubted that he had one. The problem was Trumps
personality, which he considered pathologically impulsive and self-centered.
Schwartz thought about publishing an article describing his reservations
about Trump, but he hesitated, knowing that, since hed cashed in on the
flattering Art of the Deal, his credibility and his motives would be seen
as suspect. Yet watching the campaign was excruciating. Schwartz decided
that if he kept mum and Trump was elected hed never forgive himself. In
June, he agreed to break his silence and give his first candid interview
about the Trump he got to know while acting as his Boswell.
I put lipstick on a pig, he said. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I
contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention
and made him more appealing than he is. He went on, I genuinely believe
that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent
possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.
If he were writing The Art of the Deal today, Schwartz said, it would be a
very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call
it, he answered, The Sociopath.
The idea of Trump writing an autobiography didnt originate with either
Trump or Schwartz. It began with Si Newhouse, the media magnate whose
company, Advance Publications, owned Random House at the time, and continues
to own Condé Nast, the parent company of this magazine. It was very
definitely, and almost uniquely, Si Newhouses idea, Peter Osnos, who
edited the book, recalls. GQ, which Condé Nast also owns, had published a
cover story on Trump, and Newhouse noticed that newsstand sales had been
unusually strong.
Newhouse called Trump about the project, then visited him to discuss it.
Random House continued the pursuit with a series of meetings. At one point,
Howard Kaminsky, who ran Random House then, wrapped a thick Russian novel in
a dummy cover that featured a photograph of Trump looking like a conquering
hero; at the top was Trumps name, in large gold block lettering. Kaminsky
recalls that Trump was pleased by the mockup, but had one suggestion:
Please make my name much bigger. After securing the half-million-dollar
advance, Trump signed a contract.
Around this time, Schwartz, who was one of the leading young magazine
writers of the day, stopped by Trumps office, in Trump Tower. Schwartz had
written about Trump before. In 1985, hed published a piece in New York
called A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story, which portrayed him not as
a brilliant mogul but as a ham-fisted thug who had unsuccessfully tried to
evict rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants from a building that he
had bought on Central Park South. Trumps effortswhich included a plan to
house homeless people in the building in order to harass the tenantsbecame
what Schwartz described as a fugue of failure, a farce of fumbling and
bumbling. An accompanying cover portrait depicted Trump as unshaven,
unpleasant-looking, and shiny with sweat. Yet, to Schwartzs amazement,
Trump loved the article. He hung the cover on a wall of his office, and sent
a fan note to Schwartz, on his gold-embossed personal stationery. Everybody
seems to have read it, Trump enthused in the note, which Schwartz has kept.
I was shocked, Schwartz told me. Trump didnt fit any model of human
being Id ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didnt care what
you wrote. He went on, Trump only takes two positions. Either youre a
scummy loser, liar, whatever, or youre the greatest. I became the greatest.
He wanted to be seen as a tough guy, and he loved being on the cover.
Schwartz wrote him back, saying, Of all the people Ive written about over
the years, you are certainly the best sport.
And so Schwartz had returned for more, this time to conduct an interview for
Playboy. But to his frustration Trump kept making cryptic, monosyllabic
statements. He mysteriously wouldnt answer my questions, Schwartz said.
After twenty minutes, he said, Trump explained that he didnt want to reveal
anything new about himselfhe had just signed a lucrative book deal and
needed to save his best material.
What kind of book? Schwartz said.
My autobiography, Trump replied.
Youre only thirty-eightyou dont have one yet! Schwartz joked.
Yeah, I know, Trump said.
If I were you, Schwartz recalls telling him, Id write a book called The
Art of the Deal. Thats something people would be interested in.
Youre right, Trump agreed. Do you want to write it?
Schwartz thought it over for several weeks. He knew that he would be making
a Faustian bargain. A lifelong liberal, he was hardly an admirer of Trumps
ruthless and single-minded pursuit of profit. It was one of a number of
times in my life when I was divided between the Devil and the higher side,
he told me. He had grown up in a bourgeois, intellectual family in
Manhattan, and had attended élite private schools, but he was not as wealthy
as some of his classmatesand, unlike many of them, he had no trust fund. I
grew up privileged, he said. But my parents made it clear: Youre on your
own. Around the time Trump made his offer, Schwartzs wife, Deborah
Pines, became pregnant with their second daughter, and he worried that the
family wouldnt fit into their Manhattan apartment, whose mortgage was
already too high. I was overly worried about money, Schwartz said. I
thought money would keep me safe and secureor that was my rationalization.
At the same time, he knew that if he took Trumps money and adopted Trumps
voice his journalism career would be badly damaged. His heroes were such
literary nonfiction writers as Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, and David Halberstam.
Being a ghostwriter was hackwork. In the end, though, Schwartz had his
price. He told Trump that if he would give him half the advance and half the
books royalties hed take the job.
Such terms are unusually generous for a ghostwriter. Trump, despite having a
reputation as a tough negotiator, agreed on the spot. It was a huge
windfall, Schwartz recalls. But I knew I was selling out. Literally, the
term was invented to describe what I did. Soon Spy was calling him former
journalist Tony Schwartz.
Schwartz thought that The Art of the Deal would be an easy project. The
books structure would be simple: hed chronicle half a dozen or so of
Trumps biggest real-estate deals, dispense some bromides about how to
succeed in business, and fill in Trumps life story. For research, he
planned to interview Trump on a series of Saturday mornings. The first
session didnt go as planned, however. After Trump gave him a tour of his
marble-and-gilt apartment atop Trump Towerwhich, to Schwartz, looked
unlived-in, like the lobby of a hotelthey began to talk. But the discussion
was soon hobbled by what Schwartz regards as one of Trumps most essential
characteristics: He has no attention span.
In those days, Schwartz recalls, Trump was generally affable with reporters,
offering short, amusingly immodest quotes on demand. Trump had been
forthcoming with him during the New York interview, but it hadnt required
much time or deep reflection. For the book, though, Trump needed to provide
him with sustained, thoughtful recollections. He asked Trump to describe his
childhood in detail. After sitting for only a few minutes in his suit and
tie, Trump became impatient and irritable. He looked fidgety, Schwartz
recalls, like a kindergartner who cant sit still in a classroom. Even
when Schwartz pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his
youth, and made it clear that he was bored. Far more quickly than Schwartz
had expected, Trump ended the meeting.
Week after week, the pattern repeated itself. Schwartz tried to limit the
sessions to smaller increments of time, but Trumps contributions remained
oddly truncated and superficial.
Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this
fundamental aspect of who he is doesnt seem to be fully understood,
Schwartz told me. Its implicit in a lot of what people write, but its
never explicitor, at least, I havent seen it. And that is that its
impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own
self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . .
Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trumps
inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. If he had
to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, its impossible to imagine
him paying attention over a long period of time, he said.
In a recent phone interview, Trump told me that, to the contrary, he has the
skill that matters most in a crisis: the ability to forge compromises. The
reason he touted The Art of the Deal in his announcement, he explained,
was that he believes that recent Presidents have lacked his toughness and
finesse: Look at the trade deficit with China. Look at the Iran deal. Ive
made a fortune by making deals. I do that. I do that well. Thats what I
do.
But Schwartz believes that Trumps short attention span has left him with a
stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance. He said,
Thats why he so prefers TV as his first news sourceinformation comes in
easily digestible sound bites. He added, I seriously doubt that Trump has
ever read a book straight through in his adult life. During the eighteen
months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trumps
desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.
Other journalists have noticed Trumps apparent lack of interest in reading.
In May, Megyn Kelly, of Fox News, asked him to name his favorite book, other
than the Bible or The Art of the Deal. Trump picked the 1929 novel All
Quiet on the Western Front. Evidently suspecting that many years had
elapsed since hed read it, Kelly asked Trump to talk about the most recent
book hed read. I read passages, I read areas, Ill read chaptersI dont
have the time, Trump said. As The New Republic noted recently, this
attitude is not shared by most U.S. Presidents, including Barack Obama, a
habitual consumer of current books, and George W. Bush, who reportedly
engaged in a fiercely competitive book-reading contest with his political
adviser Karl Rove.
Trumps first wife, Ivana, famously claimed that Trump kept a copy of Adolf
Hitlers collected speeches, My New Order, in a cabinet beside his bed. In
1990, Trumps friend Marty Davis, who was then an executive at Paramount,
added credence to this story, telling Marie Brenner, of Vanity Fair, that he
had given Trump the book. I thought he would find it interesting, Davis
told her. When Brenner asked Trump about it, however, he mistakenly
identified the volume as a different work by Hitler: Mein Kampf.
Apparently, he had not so much as read the title. If I had these speeches,
and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them, Trump told Brenner.
Growing desperate, Schwartz devised a strategy for trapping Trump into
giving more material. He made plans to spend the weekend with Trump at
Mar-a-Lago, his mansion in Palm Beach, where there would be fewer
distractions. As they chatted in the garden, Ivana icily walked by, clearly
annoyed that Schwartz was competing for her husbands limited free time.
Trump again grew impatient. Long before lunch on Saturday, Schwartz recalls,
Trump essentially threw a fit. He stood up and announced that he couldnt
stand any more questions.
Schwartz went to his room, called his literary agent, Kathy Robbins, and
told her that he couldnt do the book. (Robbins confirms this.) As Schwartz
headed back to New York, though, he came up with another plan. He would
propose eavesdropping on Trumps life by following him around on the job
and, more important, by listening in on his office phone calls. That way,
extracting extended reflections from Trump would not be required. When
Schwartz presented the idea to Trump, he loved it. Almost every day from
then on, Schwartz sat about eight feet away from him in the Trump Tower
office, listening on an extension of Trumps phone line. Schwartz says that
none of the bankers, lawyers, brokers, and reporters who called Trump
realized that they were being monitored. The calls usually didnt last long,
and Trumps assistant facilitated the conversation-hopping. While he was
talking with someone, she often came in with a Post-it note informing him of
the next caller on hold.
He was playing people, Schwartz recalls. On the phone with business
associates, Trump would flatter, bully, and occasionally get mad, but always
in a calculated way. Before the discussion ended, Trump would share the
news of his latest success, Schwartz says. Instead of saying goodbye at the
end of a call, Trump customarily signed off with Youre the greatest!
There was not a single call that Trump deemed too private for Schwartz to
hear. He loved the attention, Schwartz recalls. If he could have had
three hundred thousand people listening in, he would have been even
happier.
This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more
thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve
for after the campaign. There isnt, Schwartz insists. There is no
private Trump. This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on The Art
of the Deal, Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at
Trumps personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for
public attention. All he is is stomp, stomp, stomprecognition from
outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in
particular, he observed, on October 21, 1986. But, as he noted in the
journal a few days later, the book will be far more successful if Trump is
a sympathetic charactereven weirdly sympatheticthan if he is just hateful
or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.
Eavesdropping solved the interview problem, but it presented a new one.
After hearing Trumps discussions about business on the phone, Schwartz
asked him brief follow-up questions. He then tried to amplify the material
he got from Trump by calling others involved in the deals. But their
accounts often directly conflicted with Trumps. Lying is second nature to
him, Schwartz said. More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the
ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment
is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true. Often, Schwartz
said, the lies that Trump told him were about moneyhow much he had paid
for something, or what a building he owned was worth, or how much one of his
casinos was earning when it was actually on its way to bankruptcy. Trump
bragged that he paid only eight million dollars for Mar-a-Lago, but omitted
that he bought a nearby strip of beach for a record sum. After gossip
columns reported, erroneously, that Prince Charles was considering buying
several apartments in Trump Tower, Trump implied that he had no idea where
the rumor had started. (It certainly didnt hurt us, he says, in The Art
of the Deal.) Wayne Barrett, a reporter for the Village Voice, later
revealed that Trump himself had planted the story with journalists. Schwartz
also suspected that Trump engaged in such media tricks, and asked him about
a story making the roundsthat Trump often called up news outlets using a
pseudonym. Trump didnt deny it. As Schwartz recalls, he smirked and said,
You like that, do you?
Schwartz says of Trump, He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of
conscience about it. Since most people are constrained by the truth,
Trumps indifference to it gave him a strange advantage.
When challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double
down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent. This quality was recently on
display after Trump posted on Twitter a derogatory image of Hillary Clinton
that contained a six-pointed star lifted from a white-supremacist Web site.
Campaign staffers took the image down, but two days later Trump angrily
defended it, insisting that there was no anti-Semitic implication. Whenever
the thin veneer of Trumps vanity is challenged, Schwartz says, he
overreactsnot an ideal quality in a head of state.
When Schwartz began writing The Art of the Deal, he realized that he
needed to put an acceptable face on Trumps loose relationship with the
truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trumps voice, he
explained to the reader, I play to peoples fantasies. . . . People want to
believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most
spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. Its an innocent form of
exaggerationand its a very effective form of promotion. Schwartz now
disavows the passage. Deceit, he told me, is never innocent. He added,
Truthful hyperbole is a contradiction in terms. Its a way of saying,
Its a lie, but who cares? Trump, he said, loved the phrase.
In his journal, Schwartz describes the process of trying to make Trumps
voice palatable in the book. It was kind of a trick, he writes, to mimic
Trumps blunt, staccato, no-apologies delivery while making him seem almost
boyishly appealing. One strategy was to make it appear that Trump was just
having fun at the office. I try not to take any of whats happened too
seriously, Trump says in the book. The real excitement is playing the
game.
In his journal, Schwartz wrote, Trump stands for many of the things I
abhor: his willingness to run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic
obsessions, the absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and
money. Looking back at the text now, Schwartz says, I created a character
far more winning than Trump actually is. The first line of the book is an
example. I dont do it for the money, Trump declares. Ive got enough,
much more than Ill ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form.
Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like
making deals, preferably big deals. Thats how I get my kicks. Schwartz now
laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. Of course hes in
it for the money, he said. One of the most deep and basic needs he has is
to prove that Im richer than you. As for the idea that making deals is
a form of poetry, Schwartz says, He was incapable of saying something like
thatit wouldnt even be in his vocabulary. He saw Trump as driven not by a
pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for money, praise, and
celebrity. Often, after spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile
one hugely expensive project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning
plates, Schwartz would go home and tell his wife, Hes a living black
hole!
Schwartz reminded himself that he was being paid to tell Trumps story, not
his own, but the more he worked on the project the more disturbing he found
it. In his journal, he describes the hours he spent with Trump as draining
and deadening. Schwartz told me that Trumps need for attention is
completely compulsive, and that his bid for the Presidency is part of a
continuum. Hes managed to keep increasing the dose for forty years,
Schwartz said. After hed spent decades as a tabloid titan, the only thing
left was running for President. If he could run for emperor of the world, he
would.
Rhetorically, Schwartzs aim in The Art of the Deal was to present Trump
as the hero of every chapter, but, after looking into some of his supposedly
brilliant deals, Schwartz concluded that there were cases in which there was
no way to make Trump look good. So he sidestepped unflattering incidents and
details. I didnt consider it my job to investigate, he says.
Schwartz also tried to avoid the strong whiff of cronyism that hovered over
some deals. In his 1986 journal, he describes what a challenge it was to
put his best foot forward in writing about one of Trumps first triumphs:
his development, starting in 1975, of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, on the site of
the former Commodore Hotel, next to Grand Central Terminal. In order to
afford the hotel, Trump required an extremely large tax abatement. Richard
Ravitch, who was then in charge of the agency that had the authority to
grant such tax breaks to developers, recalls that he declined to grant the
abatement, and Trump got so unpleasant I had to tell him to get out. Trump
got it anyway, largely because key city officials had received years of
donations from his father, Fred Trump, who was a major real-estate developer
in Queens. Wayne Barrett, whose reporting for the Voice informed his
definitive 1991 book, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, says, It was all
Freds political connections that created the abatement. In addition, Trump
snookered rivals into believing that he had an exclusive option from the
city on the project, when he didnt. Trump also deceived his partner in the
deal, Jay Pritzker, the head of the Hyatt Hotel chain. Pritzker had rejected
an unfavorable term proposed by Trump, but at the closing Trump forced it
through, knowing that Pritzker was on a mountain in Nepal and could not be
reached. Schwartz wrote in his journal that almost everything about the
hotel deal had an immoral cast. But as the ghostwriter he was trying hard
to find my way around behavior that he considered if not reprehensible, at
least morally questionable.
Many tall tales that Trump told Schwartz contained a kernel of truth but
made him out to be cleverer than he was. One of Trumps favorite stories was
about how he had tricked the company that owned Holiday Inn into becoming
his partner in an Atlantic City casino. Trump claimed that he had quieted
executives fears of construction delays by ordering his construction
supervisor to make a vacant lot that he owned look like the most active
construction site in the history of the world. As Trump tells it in The
Art of the Deal, there were so many dump trucks and bulldozers pushing
around dirt and filling holes that had just been dug that when Holiday Inn
executives visited the site it looked as if we were in the midst of
building the Grand Coulee Dam. The stunt, Trump claimed, pushed the deal
through. After the book came out, though, a consultant for Trumps casinos,
Al Glasgow, who is now deceased, told Schwartz, It never happened. There
may have been one or two trucks, but not the fleet that made it a great
story.
Schwartz tamped down some of Trumps swagger, but plenty of it remained. The
manuscript that Random House published was, depending on your perspective,
either entertainingly insightful or shamelessly self-aggrandizing. To borrow
a title from Norman Mailer, who frequently attended prizefights at Trumps
Atlantic City hotels, the book could have been called Advertisements for
Myself.
In 2005, Timothy L. OBrien, an award-winning journalist who is currently
the executive editor of Bloomberg View, published Trump Nation, a
meticulous investigative biography. (Trump unsuccessfully sued him for
libel.) OBrien has taken a close look at The Art of the Deal, and he told
me that it might be best characterized as a nonfiction work of fiction.
Trumps life story, as told by Schwartz, honestly chronicled a few setbacks,
such as Trumps disastrous 1983 purchase of the New Jersey Generals, a
football team in the flailing United States Football League. But OBrien
believes that Trump used the book to turn almost every step of his life,
both personal and professional, into a glittering fable.
Some of the falsehoods in The Art of the Deal are minor. Spy upended
Trumps claims that Ivana had been a top model and an alternate on the
Czech Olympic ski team. Barrett notes that in The Art of the Deal Trump
describes his father as having been born in New Jersey to Swedish parents;
in fact, he was born in the Bronx to German parents. (Decades later, Trump
spread falsehoods about Obamas origins, claiming it was possible that the
President was born in Africa.)
In The Art of the Deal, Trump portrays himself as a warm family man with
endless admirers. He praises Ivanas taste and business skillI said you
cant bet against Ivana, and she proved me right. But Schwartz noticed
little warmth or communication between Trump and Ivana, and he later learned
that while The Art of the Deal was being written Trump began an affair
with Marla Maples, who became his second wife. (He divorced Ivana in 1992.)
As far as Schwartz could tell, Trump spent very little time with his family
and had no close friends. In The Art of the Deal, Trump describes Roy
Cohn, his personal lawyer, in the warmest terms, calling him the sort of
guy whod be there at your hospital bed . . . literally standing by you to
the death. Cohn, who in the fifties assisted Senator Joseph McCarthy in his
vicious crusade against Communism, was closeted. He felt abandoned by Trump
when he became fatally ill from AIDS, and said, Donald pisses ice water.
Schwartz says of Trump, Hed like people when they were helpful, and turn
on them when they werent. It wasnt personal. Hes a transactional manit
was all about what you could do for him.
According to Barrett, among the most misleading aspects of The Art of the
Deal was the idea that Trump made it largely on his own, with only minimal
help from his father, Fred. Barrett, in his book, notes that Trump once
declared, The working man likes me because he knows I didnt inherit what
Ive built, and that in The Art of the Deal he derides wealthy heirs as
members of the Lucky Sperm Club.
Trumps self-portrayal as a Horatio Alger figure has buttressed his populist
appeal in 2016. But his origins were hardly humble. Freds fortune, based on
his ownership of middle-income properties, wasnt glamorous, but it was
sizable: in 2003, a few years after Fred died, Trump and his siblings
reportedly sold some of their fathers real-estate holdings for half a
billion dollars. In The Art of the Deal, Trump cites his father as the
most important influence on me, but in his telling his fathers main legacy
was teaching him the importance of toughness. Beyond that, Schwartz says,
Trump barely talked about his fatherhe didnt want his success to be seen
as having anything to do with him. But when Barrett investigated he found
that Trumps father was instrumental in his sons rise, financially and
politically. In the book, Trump says that my energy and my enthusiasm
explain how, as a twenty-nine-year-old with few accomplishments, he acquired
the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Barrett reports, however, that Trumps father had to
co-sign the many contracts that the deal required. He also lent Trump seven
and a half million dollars to get started as a casino owner in Atlantic
City; at one point, when Trump couldnt meet payments on other loans, his
father tried to tide him over by sending a lawyer to buy some three million
dollars worth of gambling chips. Barrett told me, Donald did make some
smart moves himself, particularly in assembling the site for the Trump
Tower. That was a stroke of genius. Nonetheless, he said, The notion that
hes a self-made man is a joke. But I guess they couldnt call the book The
Art of My Fathers Deals.
The other key myth perpetuated by The Art of the Deal was that Trumps
intuitions about business were almost flawless. The book helped fuel the
notion that he couldnt fail, Barrett said. But, unbeknown to Schwartz and
the public, by late 1987, when the book came out, Trump was heading toward
what Barrett calls simultaneous personal and professional
self-destruction. OBrien agrees that during the next several years Trumps
life unravelled. The divorce from Ivana reportedly cost him twenty-five
million dollars. Meanwhile, he was in the midst of what OBrien calls a
crazy shopping spree that resulted in unmanageable debt. He was buying the
Plaza Hotel and also planning to erect the tallest building in the world,
on the former rail yards that he had bought on the West Side. In 1987, the
city denied him permission to construct such a tall skyscraper, but in The
Art of the Deal he brushed off this failure with a one-liner: I can afford
to wait. OBrien says, The reality is that he couldnt afford to wait. He
was telling the media that the carrying costs were three million dollars,
when in fact they were more like twenty million. Trump was also building a
third casino in Atlantic City, the Taj, which he promised would be the
biggest casino in history. He bought the Eastern Air Lines shuttle that
operated out of New York, Boston, and Washington, rechristening it the Trump
Shuttle, and acquired a giant yacht, the Trump Princess. He was on a total
run of complete and utter self-absorption, Barrett says, adding, Its kind
of like now.
Schwartz said that when he was writing the book the greatest percentage of
Trumps assets was in casinos, and he made it sound like each casino was
more successful than the last. But every one of them was failing. He went
on, I think he was just spinning. I dont think he could have believed it
at the time. He was losing millions of dollars a day. He had to have been
terrified.
In 1992, the journalist David Cay Johnston published a book about casinos,
Temples of Chance, and cited a net-worth statement from 1990 that assessed
Trumps personal wealth. It showed that Trump owed nearly three hundred
million dollars more to his creditors than his assets were worth. The next
year, his company was forced into bankruptcythe first of six such
instances. The Trump meteor had crashed.
But in The Art of the Deal, OBrien told me, Trump shrewdly and
unabashedly promoted an image of himself as a dealmaker nonpareil who could
always get the best out of every situationand who can now deliver America
from its malaise. This idealized version was presented to an exponentially
larger audience, OBrien noted, when Mark Burnett, the reality-television
producer, read The Art of the Deal and decided to base a new show on it,
The Apprentice, with Trump as the star. The first season of the show,
which premièred in 2004, opens with Trump in the back of a limousine,
boasting, Ive mastered the art of the deal, and Ive turned the name Trump
into the highest-quality brand. An image of the books cover flashes
onscreen as Trump explains that, as the master, he is now seeking an
apprentice. OBrien said, The Apprentice is mythmaking on steroids.
Theres a straight line from the book to the show to the 2016 campaign.
It took Schwartz a little more than a year to write The Art of the Deal.
In the spring of 1987, he sent the manuscript to Trump, who returned it to
him shortly afterward. There were a few red marks made with a fat-tipped
Magic Marker, most of which deleted criticisms that Trump had made of
powerful individuals he no longer wanted to offend, such as Lee Iacocca.
Otherwise, Schwartz says, Trump changed almost nothing.
In my phone interview with Trump, he initially said of Schwartz, Tony was
very good. He was the co-author. But he dismissed Schwartzs account of the
writing process. He didnt write the book, Trump told me. I wrote the
book. I wrote the book. It was my book. And it was a No. 1 best-seller, and
one of the best-selling business books of all time. Some say it was the
best-selling business book ever. (It is not.) Howard Kaminsky, the former
Random House head, laughed and said, Trump didnt write a postcard for us!
Trump was far more involved in the books promotion. He wooed booksellers
and made one television appearance after another. He publicly promised to
donate his cut of the books royalties to charity. He even made a surprise
trip to New Hampshire, where he stirred additional publicity by floating the
possibility that he might run for President.
In December of 1987, a month after the book was published, Trump hosted an
extravagant book party in the pink marble atrium of Trump Tower. Klieg
lights lit a red carpet outside the building. Inside, nearly a thousand
guests, in black tie, were served champagne and fed slices of a giant cake
replica of Trump Tower, which was wheeled in by a parade of women waving red
sparklers. The boxing promoter Don King greeted the crowd in a floor-length
mink coat, and the comedian Jackie Mason introduced Donald and Ivana with
the words Here comes the king and queen! Trump toasted Schwartz, saying
teasingly that he had at least tried to teach him how to make money.
Schwartz got more of an education the next day, when he and Trump spoke on
the phone. After chatting briefly about the party, Trump informed Schwartz
that, as his ghostwriter, he owed him for half the events cost, which was
in the six figures. Schwartz was dumbfounded. He wanted me to split the
cost of entertaining his list of nine hundred second-rate celebrities?
Schwartz had, in fact, learned a few things from watching Trump. He
drastically negotiated down the amount that he agreed to pay, to a few
thousand dollars, and then wrote Trump a letter promising to write a check
not to Trump but to a charity of Schwartzs choosing. It was a page out of
Trumps playbook. In the past seven years, Trump has promised to give
millions of dollars to charity, but reporters for the Washington Post found
that they could document only ten thousand dollars in donationsand they
uncovered no direct evidence that Trump made charitable contributions from
money earned by The Art of the Deal.
Not long after the discussion of the party bills, Trump approached Schwartz
about writing a sequel, for which Trump had been offered a seven-figure
advance. This time, however, he offered Schwartz only a third of the
profits. He pointed out that, because the advance was much bigger, the
payout would be, too. But Schwartz said no. Feeling deeply alienated, he
instead wrote a book called What Really Matters, about the search for
meaning in life. After working with Trump, Schwartz writes, he felt a
gnawing emptiness and became a seeker, longing to be connected to
something timeless and essential, more real.
Schwartz told me that he has decided to pledge all royalties from sales of
The Art of the Deal in 2016 to pointedly chosen charities: the National
Immigration Law Center, Human Rights Watch, the Center for the Victims of
Torture, the National Immigration Forum, and the Tahirih Justice Center. He
doesnt feel that the gesture absolves him. Ill carry this until the end
of my life, he said. Theres no righting it. But I like the idea that, the
more copies that The Art of the Deal sells, the more money I can donate to
the people whose rights Trump seeks to abridge.
Schwartz expected Trump to attack him for speaking out, and he was correct.
Informed that Schwartz had made critical remarks about him, and wouldnt be
voting for him, Trump said, Hes probably just doing it for the publicity.
He also said, Wow. Thats great disloyalty, because I made Tony rich. He
owes a lot to me. I helped him when he didnt have two cents in his pocket.
Its great disloyalty. I guess he thinks its good for himbut hell find
out its not good for him.
Minutes after Trump got off the phone with me, Schwartzs cell phone rang.
I hear youre not voting for me, Trump said. I just talked to The New
Yorkerwhich, by the way, is a failing magazine that no one readsand I
heard you were critical of me.
Youre running for President, Schwartz said. I disagree with a lot of
what youre saying.
Thats your right, but then you should have just remained silent. I just
want to tell you that I think youre very disloyal. Without me, you wouldnt
be where you are now. I had a lot of choice of who to have write the book,
and I chose you, and I was very generous with you. I know that you gave a
lot of speeches and lectures using The Art of the Deal. I could have sued
you, but I didnt.
My business has nothing to do with The Art of the Deal.
Thats not what Ive been told.
Youre running for President of the United States. The stakes here are
high.
Yeah, they are, he said. Have a nice life. Trump hung up.
Schwartz can understand why Trump feels stung, but he felt that he had to
speak up before it was too late. As for Trumps anger toward him, he said,
I dont take it personally, because the truth is he didnt mean it
personally. People are dispensable and disposable in Trumps world. If
Trump is elected President, he warned, the millions of people who voted for
him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what anyone
who deals closely with him already knowsthat he couldnt care less about
them.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize