His Art of the Deal musings were actually the ghost writer's musings of how Trump wanted himself portrayed. His real deal making was based on outright lies, bullying, boasting and falling back on his father's money according to the article I posted a few pages ago by the ghost writer Tony Schwartz. Now his father's gone, he's had to fall back to just lying, bullying and boasting to get deals done; and most people can see right through it.
“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.”
Yeah this guy is a rational and thoughtful source.
We see more evidence of Schrodinger's Trump again, in that he's a man who has never read a book through in his life though a few pages ago people were complaining that he's got a collation of Hitler speeches in a book he owns. So he's both a reader of Naziism and a non-reader.
After reading that larger New Yorker piece and a few others, he seems to be saying that he used to be a "sell out hack" (his words, not mine) but now he's turned on Trump so he's a proper journalist again. His main point seems to be that Trump has no attention span because he didn't like endlessly glossing over his history with a ghostwriter; firstly, I don't see the connection between that and "an attention span". There's plenty of people both powerful and not who don't like reminiscing about their past and feel it uncomfortable and a waste of time when they could be doing things in the present. This doesn't mean they lack attention span only that they don't place any importance on speaking about it. Shit, if I had to put up with a ghostwriter taking up hours of my day with banal questions about my childhood and the "we;ll how did that make you feel" spiel then I'd be irritated too. He's drawing conclusions here that are at best unsubstantiated and at worst unfair. Remembering that he's essentially attempting to apply for re-admission to the human race by his own regards, it isn't surprising that he would be doing this.
And if I'm deadly honest, the way that the New Yorker keeps mixing in quotes from the journal in the 1980s with recent quotes without really establishing the change is sneaky as fuck. It makes it sound like at this point our friendly neighbourhood ghostwriter was in some sort of moral panic but it's bollocks if you read it carefully. He wrote in the 1980s that following Trump around all day and listening into his phonecalls was "draining" and "deadening". Those aren't really negative terms about Trump, they're describing that he's knackered. However when they put it next to a recent quote in this paragraph ("completely compulsive"), it changes the association:
Schwartz reminded himself that he was being paid to tell Trump’s 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 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.”
This next bit is just fucking cheeky.
Some of the falsehoods in “The Art of the Deal” are minor. Spy upended Trump’s 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 Obama’s 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 Ivana’s taste and business skill—“I said you can’t bet against Ivana, and she proved me right.
In an article which makes the claim that Trump didn't write any of his book and instead the ghostwriter wrote it all as a flattering take on his life, they THEN blame Trump for factual errors that appeared in the book.
But how can that be true? How is Trump responsible for the factually incorrect claims but the ghostwriter is responsible for the rest of the book? Again it's Schrodinger's Trump - simultaneously the author and not the author, whichever is needed in order to criticise him at that exact moment in time.
It's all over the article, these type of strange contradictions:
The other key myth perpetuated by “The Art of the Deal” was that Trump’s intuitions about business were almost flawless. “The book helped fuel the notion that he couldn’t fail,” Barrett said.
Trump’s life story, as told by Schwartz, honestly chronicled a few setbacks, such as Trump’s disastrous 1983 purchase of the New Jersey Generals, a football team in the flailing United States Football League.
My general takeaway from that whole thing is not some deeper appreciation of Trump's character, but that the ghostwriter was a highly liberal writer who despite his parent's massive wealth felt "forced" to ghostwrite a book and then years later in 2016 after it has made him an absolute fortune, decided to have a Come to Jesus moment and denounce it as the subject was on the campaign trail because, and again these are his words and not mine, he disagreed with a lot of Trump's policies.
I'm not sure what it is that this is trying to prove to me.
