Tag: Art of the Deal

Trump’s ghostwriter reveals what the ‘billion-dollar loser’ was actually doing as he was ‘hemorrhaging cash’

With the revelation from the New York Times that Donald Trump reported losses of more than $1 billion on his taxes between the years 1985 and 1994 — resulting in his paying no income tax for 8 out of 10 of those years — there’s renewed interest in exactly what he was doing during that time period.

And in a new piece from Trump’s ghostwriter for the book “Surviving at the Top,” we learned a curious answer: not much.

Charles Leerhsen worked with Trump to write the book between 1988 and 1990, following up on the success of “The Art of the Deal,” which was ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz. Leerhsen paints a dim picture of Trump in the piece, noting sarcastically that if he had referred to “King Midas” in Trump’s presence, he would have thought of the muffler business rather than the mythical king.

View the complete May 10 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ with Trump. His self-sabotage is rooted in his past.

The following article by Tony Schwartz was posted on the Washington Post website May 16, 2017:

President Trump’s behavior hasn’t changed in decades. It probably never will. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Why does Donald Trump behave in the dangerous and seemingly self-destructive ways he does?

Three decades ago, I spent nearly a year hanging around Trump to write his first book, “The Art of the Deal,” and got to know him very well. I spent hundreds of hours listening to him, watching him in action and interviewing him about his life. For me, none of what he has said or done over the past four months as president comes as a surprise. The way he has behaved over the past week — firing FBI Director James B. Comey, undercutting his own aides as they tried to explain the decision and then disclosing sensitive information to Russian officials — is also entirely predictable. Continue reading “I wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ with Trump. His self-sabotage is rooted in his past.”