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Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter who wrote Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, has said the new bio-pic about the former president gets the most important thing about him right.
Schwartz said in an op-ed for The New York Times he now sees The Art of the Deal “as an unintended work of fiction.” Trump is “exhibit A” when it comes to the difference between how “leaders and other high achievers” present themselves and “how they feel on the inside,” Schwartz writes.
The ghostwriter goes on to note that a lesson he learned from Trump that holds true in the new film is that “a lack of conscience can be a huge advantage when it comes to accruing power, attention and wealth in a society where most other human beings abide by a social contract” and that “nothing” that people get from the outside can replace what’s missing inside.
While he writes that the filmmakers “took artistic liberties,” he adds that it felt “emotionally true” and “consistent” with the person he grew to know while writing the book.
Schwartz says the film focuses less on how Trump rose to power and more on his family’s generational trauma and how it has affected the ex-commander-in-chief as well as the country.
The ghostwriter outlines how Trump would call him at night during the production of the book to tell him about his most recent successes, leaving out his increasingly dire financial situation that would lead to several bankruptcies.
“I did not yet realize that he routinely lied as easily as he breathed, including to me for his own memoir, and without a hint of a guilty conscience,” Schwartz writes, adding that the former president had an “unquenchable thirst to be the center of attention.”
Calling Trump “insecure” and lacking in self-awareness, the ghostwriter says he remained a “prisoner” and a “product” of his childhood.
What created the Trump we see today, including in the film, is the absence of unconditional love from his “primary caretakers” as he grew up, Schwartz says.
To Trump’s father Fred, any sign of weakness or vulnerability was unacceptable in a world where you were either a winner or a loser, a killer or a victim.
Trump witnessed his older brother Fred Jr attempt to leave the family business and instead become a pilot, only to be called a “glorified bus driver” by his father, and succumb to the results of alcoholism at the age of 42.
“I was drawn to business very early, and I was never intimidated by my father the way most people were,” Trump said in The Art of the Deal. “I stood up to him and he respected that. We had a relationship that was almost businesslike.”
Schwartz recalled for The Times that he “still remember the chill I felt when Mr Trump said those words, as if it was fine to have an almost completely transactional relationship with his father.”
The ghostwriter says that this led to Trump’s unwavering attention-seeking and his measuring his own value by things such as his net worth, how tall his buildings were, or now the number of rally attendees.
He used “bravado” and consistent false but bold assertions to replace “actual accomplishments,” Schwartz says.
The film traces the evolution from Fred Trump being the former president’s role model and mentor to attorney Roy Cohn instead taking on that role.
Cohn taught Trump three main lessons, Schwartz says: “Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing and deny everything; and claim victory and never admit defeat.”
The loyalty Trump praised Cohn for was not returned. Trump “bailed” on Cohn, who faced an AIDS diagnosis, Schwartz noted.
“The past is prologue and, as Mr Trump has said, he’s essentially the same person today that he was as a child. That is the central warning The Apprentice poses,” he writes.
