Tony Schwartz ghostwrote Donald Trump’s 1987 best-selling autobiography, The Art of the Deal.

During the time Schwartz was working on the book, he spent countless hours with the real estate developer and “got to know him better than almost anyone else outside the Trump family,” The New Yorker said in its profile of Schwartz in 2016.

Schwartz made a lot of money from the book and helped create the image of Trump “as a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for business.”

It took Schwartz almost three decades to learn that he had succeeded far beyond his wildest nightmares in creating this fantasy.

“Tony created Trump,” Schwartz’s editor at New York magazine said. “He’s Dr. Frankenstein.”

Schwartz realized the damage he had done by capturing Trump as Trump wanted to be – and not how he was.

“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.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all

Trump of course was elected president and civilization didn’t end.

But Trump is running for president in 2024.

If he wins, well, civilization is on its own.

“Trump didn’t fit any model of human being I’d ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didn’t care what you wrote.” Schwartz said, adding: “Trump only takes two positions. Either you’re a scummy loser, liar, whatever, or you’re the greatest.”

Schwartz says the Trump’s most essential characteristic is that “He has no attention span.”

Schwartz said Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.”

“That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source — information comes in easily digestible sound bites,” Schwartz said. “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.”

During the eighteen months that Schwartz observed Trump, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk or anywhere else.

Trump’s first wife, Ivana, said that Trump kept a copy of Adolf Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, in a cabinet beside his bed.

In 1990, Trump’s friend Marty Davis, who was then an executive at Paramount, told Marie Brenner, a writer with Vanity Fair magazine, that he had given Trump the book. “I thought he would find it interesting,” Davis told Brenner.

When Brenner asked Trump about the book, however, Trump got that book confused with another book by Hitler, Mein Kampf.

Trump apparently had not read the title.

“If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them,” Trump told Brenner.

Schwartz said that Trump only cared about getting what he wanted and nothing of facts.

Most people are “constrained by the truth,” Schwartz said. Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”

If challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, “Trump doubles down, repeats himself, and becomes belligerent.”

Schwartz said the book perpetuated Trump’s own lie that he was a self-made man.

The New Yorker interview with Schwartz was published on July 18, 2016, less than four months before Trump was elected president.

If Trump is elected President, Schwartz said, “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 knows — that he couldn’t care less about them.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all