The following article by Max Greenwood was posted on the HIll website June 16, 2018:
Tony Schwartz, the author who ghostwrote President Trump‘s famous 1987 book “The Art of the Deal,” said Saturday that the president would act like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un if he were given the same authority.
Schwartz, who has been highly critical of Trump’s political career, accused the president of possessing the “lack of conscience,” “sociopathy” and “inner sense of emptiness” to go down the road of a dictator if he were permitted to do so.
“If Trump had the power that Kim Jong Un does … and the lack of consequence if he, quote, ‘breaks the law,’ I believe that Trump would be murdering as many enemies as Kim Jong Un does,” Schwartz said on MSNBC’s “AM Joy.”
Schwartz’s comments came days after Trump met in Singapore with Kim, marking the first such summit between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader in history.
Trump praised Kim following the meeting, calling him “a very worthy, very smart negotiator” and hailing him as “very talented.”
Kim, who took power in 2011 after his father, former leader Kim Jong Il, died, has kept up his country’s reputation for political repression and gross abuses of human rights.
Despite that reputation, Trump has largely shrugged off such abuses, most recently telling Fox News’s Brett Baier in an interview this week that Kim is a “tough guy” and that there are “a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”
Trump drew further scrutiny on Friday when he remarked — apparently jokingly — that he wanted “his people” to listen to him like Kim’s people listen to him.
“He’s the head of a country. And I mean, he is the strong head,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends.” “He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”