Tony Schwartz wrote Art of the Deal: his name appears on the front cover of the book. In retrospect, he would have titled it, “The Sociopath”. He feels deep remorse for his construction of the Donald Trump legend.
Long New Yorker article. But all of it is good, so you don’t have to finish it: Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All | The New Yorker
NYT summary: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/us/politics/trump-book-tony-schwartz.html?ref=business
I had figured out in mid-May what motivates Trump. Advancing the brand is secondary. What’s key is that he’s an attention seeker. The silly story about Trump acting as his own publicist John Miller is what persuaded me. Trump posing as John Miller spoke about how many women he had dated while he currently pursued his future wife Marla Maples. When people do things that don’t advance a clear goal like building a brand or even scoring a partner, it reveals their true motives. HEAR IT: Trump’s ‘publicist’ John Miller sounds suspiciously like The Donald in recorded 1991 interview – New York Daily News
Tony Schwartz followed Trump for 18 months: I was gratified to learn that he thought Trump was running for the Presidency because he loves publicity. But this is probably the most relevant part of the interview:
Trump has no attention span.
[INDENT][INDENT]“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. [/INDENT][/INDENT] Schwartz would very much like it if Trump did not control the nuclear codes.
Also, “Lying is second nature to him.” But we knew that.
[QUOTE=New Yorker]
Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”
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Schwartz is no longer a writer. He runs a consulting firm called The Energy Project. Going public is not in his financial interest. But he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t.
Excerpt from Schwartz’s diary: [INDENT][INDENT]. “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.” [/INDENT][/INDENT]
