The headline is no exaggeration and comes from the Art of the Deal ghostwriter, Tony Swartz. Tony’s full statement reads, “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.” For many of us who have been following Trump for the greater part of a year already have been expressing these very very fears. Jane Mayer from the New Yorker sat done with Tony and produced one of the more insightful perspectives on Trump.
www.newyorker.com/…
One can’t blame Mr. Swartz for writing the Art of the Deal for Trump. But it is interesting to note how Trump sees himself and how he wants other’s to see him. Whereas Tony had written what he thought was an unflattering piece about Trump, Trump himself loved the article.
Around this time, Schwartz, who was one of the leading young magazine writers of the day, stopped by Trump’s office, in Trump Tower. Schwartz had written about Trump before. In 1985, he’d 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. Trump’s efforts—which included a plan to house homeless people in the building in order to harass the tenants—became 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 Schwartz’s 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.
Although conflicted, Swartz decided to ghostwrite the Art of the Deal for Mr. Trump. But, even this provides an insight for me about how Trump views people and the world. That money can buy anything and people will come around when it comes to money.
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 Trump’s 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 classmates—and, unlike many of them, he had no trust fund. “I grew up privileged,” he said. “But my parents made it clear: ‘You’re on your own.’ ” Around the time Trump made his offer, Schwartz’s wife, Deborah Pines, became pregnant with their second daughter, and he worried that the family wouldn’t 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 secure—or that was my rationalization.”
The article also highlights another insight about Trump that is quite telling, if not terrifying.
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 can’t 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.
The President is faced with incredibly challenging decisions everyday and must thoughtfully consider all of the choices patiently. There is nothing in the above quote that gives me any, and I mean any assurance that Trump has any capability of being thoughtful, or showing any humility at all. Actually, it sums up almost succinctly why Trump is so passionate about Twitter. The 140 character limit is the sum total of Trump’s attention span.
Mr. Swartz noted in his journal the more disturbing aspects of his personality.
Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention. “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition 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 character—even weirdly sympathetic—than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.”
Swartz also provided more insight into Trump’s pathological lying. This will of course prompt Trump to call Swartz a liar but what else is new.
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.” Often, Schwartz said, the lies that Trump told him were about money—“how 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.” ...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.”...“Deceit,” he told me, is never “innocent.” He added, “ ‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’ ” Trump, he said, loved the phrase.
Trump being Trump, he could not pass up the opportunity of trying to goad Mr. Swartz from ponying up half of the cost for Trump’s book launch party. Fortunately, Tony learned a thing or two from watching Mr. Trump over the year.
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 event’s 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 Schwartz’s choosing. It was a page out of Trump’s playbook.
Swartz has many regrets about writing the book which he notes in how he views Trump’s ego-maniacal personality. Actually, the whole section is soul draining, especially the part where you have to realize that Trump’s wants to “win” the presidency and we would all be pawns to Trump’s whims and fits!!
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 don’t do it for the money,” Trump declares. ...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, “He’s a living black hole!”...Schwartz told me that Trump’s need for attention is “completely compulsive,” and that his bid for the Presidency is part of a continuum. “He’s managed to keep increasing the dose for forty years,” Schwartz said. After he’d 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.”...But as the ghostwriter he was “trying hard to find my way around” behavior that he considered “if not reprehensible, at least morally questionable.”…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 didn’t inherit what I’ve built,” and that in “The Art of the Deal” he derides wealthy heirs as members of “the Lucky Sperm Club.”
Fascinatingly, Trump called Mr. Swartz just after Trump had apparently gotten off the phone with Jane Mayer. The response was of course very Trump-like. Also, too, reminds us all that even though Trump is running for President, he is not to busy to get on the phone and take out his petty grievances on an imagined enemy out immediately.
Minutes after Trump got off the phone with me, Schwartz’s cell phone rang. “I hear you’re not voting for me,” Trump said. “I just talked to The New Yorker—which, by the way, is a failing magazine that no one reads—and I heard you were critical of me.”
“You’re running for President,” Schwartz said. “I disagree with a lot of what you’re saying.”
“That’s your right, but then you should have just remained silent. I just want to tell you that I think you’re very disloyal. Without me, you wouldn’t 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 didn’t.”
“My business has nothing to do with ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ”
“That’s not what I’ve been told.”
“You’re running for President of the United States. The stakes here are high.”
“Yeah, they are,” he said. “Have a nice life.” Trump hung up.
Now put this into perspective and imagine the same conversation with Vladimir Putin, or China’s premier, or any leader in the middle east. Yeah, I got bone cold chills also. Let that be your reminder, let Brexit be your reminder, let your kid’s faces be your reminder. WE CAN NOT TAKE ANYTHING FOR GRANTED.
Jane Mayer has written a truly outstanding piece about Tony Swartz. I only pulled out a few snippets from her article that really spells out how Trump has learned to manipulate the media and in turn many of his supporters. It’s a quite terrifying ride and Trump has ruthlessly used the Republican party as a means to his end. I think that people like Oprah or Chris Wallace really did America a dis-service by asking trump, “would you ever run for President?” Trump is a person who takes that kind of question and actually thinks he would make a good president. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump is driven exclusively by his own insatiable appetite for money and now power. There will always be someone else to blame if his decisions turn disastrous if not horribly catastrophic. Trump does not understand the term accountability. Trump has gotten away with so many bad decisions and tragic choices so often, it has deluded him entirely. Trump is now trying to project his failings onto Hillary Clinton. This must not happen. We will have to out work the Republicans at every turn.
