'Emperor has no clothes': man who helped make Trump myth says facade has fallen
One man was not surprised by revelations that Donald Trump does not deserve his reputation as a preternaturally successful businessman and deal maker. The man who helped create the illusion.
Tony Schwartz spent hundreds of hours with Trump to ghostwrite his bestselling 1987 book The Art of the Deal, effectively creating the origin story of the brash property tycoon. It was Schwartz who coined the phrase “truthful hyperbole”, which neatly foreshadowed Trump and his supporters’ attempts to rationalize many of his false and misleading claims.
The 68-year-old writer has long disowned the president as a malignant narcissist and expressed regret for his part in constructing the mythology. So the New York Times report, detailing chronic financial losses and vast outstanding loans, confirmed his view that Trump was always better at cutting fantasy deals than making real ones.
“It’s the ultimate unmasking of the emperor with no clothes,” Schwartz said by phone from Riverdale in the Bronx, New York. “There’s nothing more important to Trump than being seen as very, very rich, which is why he’s expended so much effort in trying to claim a net worth far beyond what he actually was worth.
“The fact the evidence is unequivocal that he was not the person he claimed to be means that he’s lost the central premise on which he’s based his own self-worth, because Trump con
fuses personal worth with net worth. There’s nothing Trump hates more than to feel weak and vulnerable and like a failure, so he won’t allow himself to acknowledge those feelings, but they’ll be there and they will affect him.
“Unfortunately, should he be reelected, one of the ways he’ll respond to that is he’ll take it out on everyone who he thinks diminished or belittled him along the way.”
Success in business is at the core of Trump’s identity. With the help of more than $400m from his father over decades, he was property developer, celebrity and symbol of 80s excess. Enter Schwartz, a liberal journalist who, interviewing Trump for Playboy magazine, learned of his ambition to write an autobiography aged just 38. Schwartz said a book called The Art of the Deal would be a better idea. Trump asked him to ghostwrite it and, with a growing family and high mortgage, Schwartz agreed. It sold more than a million copies.
Trump continued to burnish his image with a relentless self-publicity campaign in New York tabloid newspapers. Then he was cast in the reality TV show The Apprentice, sitting in judgment on would-be entrepreneurs from the boardroom at the flashy, marble-clad, gold-trimmed Trump Tower.
He told viewers that his company was bigger and stronger than ever before. “It was all a hoax,” the New York Times reported on Monday. “Months after that inaugural episode in January 2004, Mr Trump filed his individual tax return reporting $89.9 million in net losses from his core businesses for the prior year.”
Schwartz now says The Art of the Deal would have been more appropriately entitled The Sociopath.
He admits with regret: “It did help to create the mythology of Donald Trump and, unfortunately, I do think it played a significant role. The Apprentice had a far bigger impact because it went on for years and it was seen by millions and millions of people, and millions of people don’t see a book. Or very rarely.
“All of that, plus his own relentless self promotion over a 30- or 40year period, rose up to a fantasy reality TV version of who he was that was never true. It’s been systematically dismantled, especially over the last four years by the evidence that everything he touches fails. Trump’s failures radically outweigh his successes and that is not the definition of a successful, much less a superior businessman.”
Some commentators have argued that Trump – married to a model, gorging on fast food in gaudy settings and plastering his name on big buildings – offers a poor person’s version of what it is to be rich. Schwartz says: “It’s a kind of amped-up, over-the-top vision but it’s now like a balloon that’s been punctured. The facade comes off because we’ve seen behind the screen with Trump and what we know is that it’s all bullshit.”
The New York Times report also exposed Trump’s world-class ability to avoid paying federal income taxes: just $750 in 2016, $750 in 2017 and none at all in several previous years. His blue-collar supporters pay far more.
Schwartz admits: “The scale of his brazenness at least slightly took my breath away.
“The idea that during the first two years as president, he would continue to do exactly the same quasi-legal or illegal things that he had done in the years before is kind of amazing. It means that he does feel untouchable and he does feel entitled to live by a different set of rules than everyone, including the people who support him.”
Schwartz watched Trump’s political rise with horror. He spoke out in the New Yorker magazine in July 2016 in an article that noted he had been dubbed “Dr Frankenstein” for unleashing a destructive creature on the world. In an interview with the Observer that October, he warned that a Trump presidency would be “staggeringly dangerous”, with the potential for martial law, the end of press freedom and even nuclear war.
“At the time, the reaction I got was, ‘You are really over the top, like, what’s wrong with you?’” he recalls. “I felt a little like Paul Revere trying to warn that the British were coming. ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’ Most people could not imagine that a human being, much less a president, could operate without a conscience and without a scintilla of empathy for anyone.”
“The consequence of those two facts – they roll up to a sociopathic or psychopathic personality – is that he doesn’t have the constraint of love for other people or shame at a particular behaviour that 99% or 98% of the population has at least some measure of. And in a world in which he simply wants to dominate, that gives him an enormous advantage. That’s what’s so terrifying about his re-election and that’s why democracy is so clearly at risk in the United States.”
Schwartz expected Trump to lose in 2016 and took his daughter to Hillary Clinton’s election night party at the Javits Center in New York, a celebration that rapidly turned into a wake for tearful supporters. He went home around 9am and took a sleeping pill because he could not bear to watch.
“I feel very much the same way this time on all counts, which is scary. I do believe he’s going to lose and there’s a good chance that he’s going to lose by a lot. I also am sobered by the fact that I thought this before and I was wrong. Trump has been able to surprise everyone over and over and over again,” he said.
Trump has spent months seeking to discredit the legitimacy of the election, making baseless claims that mail-in ballots are plagued by fraud. Last week he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Like dictators across the world, he may fear prosecution over his financial affairs if he leaves office – making him even more determined to cling to power.
“With the release of his taxes and the prospect that he would be indicted even greater than it was before, he doesn’t really have a place where he’s safe other than being president,” Schwartz said.
For his part, Schwartz walked away from journalism to start a consulting firm, The Energy Project, which aims to help people improve their life management and wellbeing within organisations. He now confronts his role as a Trump enabler in an audiobook, Dealing with the Devil: My Mother, Trump and Me.
“The Art of the Deal helped him to be able to fabricate a fantasy reality that he has propagated for all of the years since. I came out of that book feeling empty and ashamed, really questioning myself about why I made that choice and who’s the monster I’ve created here?”
Schwartz says that, like Trump, he was compelled to look to the world for the attention and love he lacked at home. But the men drew opposite lessons. Schwartz believes that his experience with The Art of the Deal led to a positive self-reckoning and changed the ways he deals with criticism.
Do people still call him “Dr Frankenstein” and point an accusing finger? “I almost get the opposite,” he says. “I get people trying to reassure me that it wasn’t my fault. I think it’s partly because I’ve been so open about my own sense of responsibility for it and most people look at it and say, ‘Come on, you couldn’t have known. I understand you made a decision to write a book about a real estate guy. Big deal.’
“No, that’s not true. One of the missions of my book is to help reflect for people how critical choices – even what you might think are not going to be consequential – actually are. Is that choice you’re making consistent with that person you want to be? Had I had the maturity or the courage to do that, I would not have written that book.”