Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter who wrote Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal recently gave an interview to The New Yorker. During that interview Schwartz said he deep regrets for “presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.”
The resulting New Yorker article is a fantastic read, painting a portrait of the real Donald Trump in a manner that should cause every Trump supporter to at least have serious second thoughts about voting for him, if it doesn’t scare them to death. As explained in the article, in the process of preparing to write The Art of the Deal, Schultz got to know Trump as few other have. From the article: “Starting in late 1985, Schwartz spent eighteen months with Trump—camping 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. .
While he made a lot of money on The Art of the Deal, Schwartz is not proud of his work on the book. “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.”
Other excerpts from the New Yorker article:
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 Trump’s. “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.”….. Schwartz says of Trump, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s 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….. Whenever “the thin veneer of Trump’s vanity is challenged,” Schwartz says, he overreacts—not an ideal quality in a head of state.
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.”
“Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focused 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 Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.
Whether you love or hate Trump, or if you simply intend to hold your nose when you vote for him, this is an article you should read in its entirety. You owe it to yourself to educate yourself about the true nature of this man who may become President of the United States and the most powerful person in world before stepping into a voting booth in November.
Here is the link to the New Yorker article: Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All
Cajun 7/18/2016