Donald Trump’s best selling book, The Art of the Deal, opens with this paragraph:
I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll 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. That’s how I get my kicks.
It’s a good opening. I can imagine a film about Trump opening with a sweeping view of New York City’s skyline and a voice-over of Donald Trump speaking these words as a sort of epigraph to the story that’s about to unfold.
The Art of the Deal was a big best seller and helped launch Donald Trump’s persona as a talented businessman who rose to wealth and fame by his skilled art of deal making. When Donald Trump launched his Presidential campaign, he referenced his book as one of his main credentials: “We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal,” Trump said. The book is one of Trump’s main legitimacy cards.
There is one big problem with Trump’s above statement. He didn’t write the Art of the Deal. Not one word of it. And Trump didn’t say the words quoted above. The entire book was a creation of Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghost writer. Now if you’re thinking, “Well, that’s what ghost writers do, they gather information and write the book,” you won’t be wrong but you won’t be entirely right either. The ghost writer’s job is to paint the main author in the best possible light. That’s true. But there is something unique about this case.
Typically a ghost writer collaborates in writing the book. Meaning, the ghost writer collects materials and does a large number of lengthy interviews with the central author and then begins drafting a book for review by the main author, in this case Trump. Yes, the ghost writer does a lot of the writing. The interviews allow the main author to work out what they believe and tell the story for the ghost writer to capture and use to create the narrative, the book. But in this case that didn’t happen. Trump never told his story.
Tony Schwartz said he was unable to conduct those essential interviews. He was reduced to listening in on phone calls to grasp how Trump dealt with people and traveling with Trump to observe how Trump operated. A lot of what he saw and heard, we now know, was not positive according to Schwartz. Ultimately Schwartz had to put the book together on his own from the riot of materials he could gather. He had to be very creative.
Getting to know who Trump really was and then seeing Trump run for President—and possibly win the White House—has really caused some angst for Schwartz recently. He has a case of ghost writer’s regret. He’s kept quite all these years (the book was published in 1987) because Trump remained in the private sector. But not anymore. Knowing what Trump is really like, compared to how Schwartz falsely portrayed Trump in the book, has caused Schwartz to come forward to tell the world what he knows.
On NPR Schwartz tells us why he couldn’t conduct those book interviews with Trump and what he learned from that:
“One of the chief things I’m concerned about is the limits of his attention span, which are as severe as any person I think I’ve ever met,” Schwartz says. “No matter what question I asked, he would become impatient with it pretty quickly, and literally, from the very first time I sat down to start interviewing him, after about 10 or 15 minutes, he said, ‘You know, I don’t really wanna talk about this stuff, I’m not interested in it, I mean it’s over, it’s the past, I’m done with it, what else have you got?”
There you have it. Trump was incapable of telling his story. He couldn’t sit still long enough and he wasn’t really interested talking about “this stuff.” So Schwartz wrote the entire book from notes and handed it to Trump for review. Trump made no changes, no edits, no revisions, and handed the book back to Schwartz. So the voice you hear on the page, like the opening paragraph quoted above and the ideas you get from the text, are primarily the creation of Tony Schwartz not Donald Trump.
So that’s why when Schwartz saw Trump announce his candidacy and state: “We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal,“ Schwartz immediately tweeted: “Many thanks Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.'” Schwartz felt that “If he could lie about that on Day One–when it was so easily refuted–he is likely to lie about anything.”
Schwartz tells us that what he learned about Donald Trump was not flattering at all. Trump was not some great mind or leader or some great dealmaker. He was “pathologically impulsive and self-centered,” “Had no attention span,” and “Lied strategically…[with] a complete lack of conscience about it.” In writing the book, Schwartz felt he’d “Put lipstick on a pig.”
Now, beyond what Schwartz thinks about Trump, my main reason for posting has to do with my thoughts about writing and personality. It confirms a hunch I’ve had about Trump and the craft of writing. Listening to Trump talk and observing his public behavior made me suspect that Trump wasn’t capable of writing a book like The Art of the Deal. He probably hasn’t written any of his own books. Writers, at least the one’s who dedicate themselves to the craft, are typically careful and precise with words in both writing and speaking. Trump, if you’ve listened to him talk for any length of time, is typically imprecise and sloppy with words. I don’t detect any profound respect for the power and effect of words, which comes natural from a craftsman. And the truth is Trump doesn’t come across as very intelligent. He doesn’t sound like a man who reads much or has seriously wrestled with ideas.
Secondly, from a moral perspective, I find it interesting that Trump’s behavior has stayed pretty consistent since The Art of the Deal was published in 1987. I don’t detect a lot of growth unfortunately. He still seems like the same guy he was almost 3 decades ago: loose with the truth, struggling with attention deficit, and lacking good impulse control. Not that any of this disqualifies him to be President of the United States or so it seems in this bizarro election season. Maybe Trump will win, I really don’t know. But it won’t be because of Trump’s character or abilities, but more likely because of a populist anger and the failure of Hillary Clinton to inspire confidence as the alternative.
Of course Tony Schwartz has been threaten by Donald Trump with litigation over his revelations. That’s to be expected Schwartz admits. I’ll note that Trump’s lawyer in his letter to Schwartz was careful not to say Trump wrote the The Art of the Deal. Trump’s lawyer knows that would be a lie. Schwartz, whom by the way kept a journal (great piece of evidence to substantiate his claims) while writing The Art of the Deal, refused to retract anything. He knows what he’s saying is the truth will not back down.
I think there is some connection between how one thinks and speaks and the quality of their writing. I think, though I may be totally wrong, that you can listen to some people talk, which is a reflection of how they think and organize information, and estimate just what the quality of their writing would be. I’ve experimented with this idea for years and so far I’ve be proven correct in the vast majority of cases. And so listening to Trump all these years, I have a hard time believing he’s a good writer and even capable of creating a book or a good essay, for that matter, on his own.
Jeff Wills 