Maryanne Trump Barry about Donald Trump

[Sixties Fan]

9/14/2021

Two days after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, President Donald Trump's top military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, single-handedly took top-secret action to limit Trump from potentially ordering a dangerous military strike or launching nuclear weapons, according to "Peril," a new book by legendary journalist Bob Woodward and veteran Washington Post reporter Robert Costa. CNN's Jamie Gangel reports.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Sessions, 73, said his March 2017 decision, forced because he did not disclose to Congress contacts with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 election, “protected the rule of law and resulted in your exoneration”.

In fact, special counsel Robert Mueller, appointed by then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein on 17 May 2017, said in his report that though he had not found evidence of criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the president, he was not exonerating Trump.

----
On Friday, he wrote: “Look, I know your anger, but recusal was required by law. I did my duty and you’re damn fortunate I did. It protected the rule of law and resulted in your exoneration.

“Your personal feelings don’t dictate who Alabama picks as their senator, the people of Alabama do.”

Jeff Sessions snaps back after Trump tells Alabama not to trust him

Former attorney general insists president ‘damned fortunate’ he recused from Russia inquiry but Trump endorses Senate opponent

www.theguardian.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Mick Mulvaney, former acting White House chief of staff, spoke exclusively to CBS News' Catherine Herridge about Jan. 6, Pat Cipollone’s closed-door testimony and how the insurrection may impact former President Donald Trump's potential run in 2024.

 

[BackAgain]

Let's talk about dinner with Donald Trump,

(laughing)

which is an episode that's played out

at real cinematic length in your book.

And by the way, you got two scoops of ice cream.

Most guests apparently only get one.

That's what I've heard.

(laughing)

He was really putting the arm on you.

Is it customary for the Director of the FBI

to be invited to dinner at the residence of the President?

No, and it freaked me out.

And so, I was consoled that afternoon

by recently-departed Director of National Intelligence,

Jim Clapper, who I was giving a recognition to at the FBI,

and I told him about this invitation.

The President had called me at my desk

while I'm having a sandwich and asked me

did I want to come over for dinner that night.

And I said, I don't know what this is about.

It makes me very uncomfortable.

He called you for that night?

That seems rude.

(laughing)

Yeah.

It's funny you should say that.

He said, You want to come over for dinner tonight?

And I kind of paused a little bit.

And he said, Because if you can't do it tonight,

we could do it tomorrow night.

I'm here all weekend.

(laughing)

And he said, How about tonight?

Is 6 or 6:30 better?

And I said whatever works for you, Mr. President.

And I had a date with my wife to get Thai food,

which I should have kept (laughs).

(laughing)

Yeah, you really should have.

I hung up, as I explain in the book,

and I broke the date with Patrice.

And I, what Clapper said to me was,

No, it's gonna be a group thing.

I've heard other people are being invited to dinner.

And so I was relieved.

I thought, okay, well that kind of makes sense.

It'll probably be leaders of Homeland Security

and other agencies so the President

can get to know his team or something.

Fun.

And so I go over.

(laughing)

And, you say fun?

Fun, yeah.

(laughing)

Yep, being FBI Director's nothing but fun (laughs).

Now, you said earlier today in an interview

that you don't hate the President.

You don't even dislike him.

I'll let that pitch go by.

(laughing)

You know it's funny, my wife asked me the same question

after she saw the interview.

And the answer is I dislike many of things he does.

Him as a person I actually, this is gonna sound odd,

I actually kind of feel sorry for.

How so?

I think, I've said this before, it's a hard thing to say,

but I think he has an emptiness inside of him

and a hunger for affirmation I've never seen in an adult.

(laughing)

And I'm not saying that to be funny.

I think that he lacks external reference points,

and instead of calling, making hard decisions

by calling upon a religious tradition or logic

or tradition or history, it's all what will fill this hole.

You think something's missing?

Something is missing in his life that has created

this orientation that I've never,

I meant when I said I've not seen in an adult before.

In other words, what we're looking at in the days

and weeks to come is a series of

an attempt at seduction, and then at pressure.

Let's talk about the seduction at dinner.

How does he do it?

Does he have charm?

How does he try to reel you in?

First of all, I figured out it was just the two of us

by standing in the doorway and seeing this little table

in the middle of the Green Room.

(laughing)

That's Director of the FBI can figure that out.

Investigator.

(laughing)

Your tax dollars were well spent with me.

Exactly.

(laughing)

There ya go.

Yeah, and so at the beginning of the dinner he said,

So what do you want to do?

And then we had a conversation about whether I intended

to stay as FBI Director, which was so strange

because he had, by that point, I think three times

said that he hoped I was going to stay.

And in the episode where I was trying

to hide in the drape in the Blue Room,

(laughing)

which is not made up, by the way.

And the whole world, including my children,

thought he kissed me.

(laughing)

It was not a kiss.

He was whispering in my ear,

I really look forward to working with you.

And so now at the beginning of the dinner,

he's acting like we never had those conversations

and did I want to stay at FBI Director.

And he would understand if I wanted to walk away,

lots of people want my job, that kind of thing.

And then a short time later, he just looked at me

and said he needed loyalty.

He expects loyalty.

And I, I was stunned by that, and so I just stared at him.

And it seemed like an eternity.

It was probably a couple seconds.

And then he dropped his eyes and continued eating,

and I continued eating.

And then he started talking more.

And he came back to that late in the dinner.

He clearly noticed that I just stared at him

when he asked for loyalty.

So he came back to it.

And I tried, during the dinner,

between the first request for loyalty and the second request

to interject things that would explain to him

why it's so important that the Justice Department

be at a distance from the President.

(full interview online)

James Comey on His Infamous Dinner with Trump

David Remnick speaks with James Comey about the “emptiness” of Donald Trump and whether the President is fit for office.

www.newyorker.com

Zzzz. What a snooze fest.

 

[gipper]

Liked, but Trump's actually incredibly smart.

If he were, he wouldn’t have appointed establishment ***** throughout his administration. He would have done something about police brutality after the George murder, thus avoiding the Summer of George. He would have fired Fauci immediately after the virus hit.

Now I’ll grant you he’s smarter and more capable than old demented Joe, but that isn’t saying much.

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ One person who worked for Trump and his business for 18 years talks about her knowledge of him ]

Barbara Res on [Tower of Lies]

Barbara Res, former Trump Organization executive vice president, talked about her book, [Tower of Lies: What My Eighteen Years of Working With Donald Trump Reveals About Him].

www.c-span.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

[ One who worked for Trump for ten years ]

 

[Mac1958]

Over the years the Texas senator has gone from Trump's biggest foe to one of his most loyal allies.

Mr Cruz once called Trump a "pathological liar" and a "coward".

This week he is leading the charge in the US Senate against certifying President-elect Joe Biden's election win.


(vide video online)

There's no better definition of "craven politician" than a guy who will let a fat orange buffoon insult his wife and STILL sell his soul to him.

Ugly stuff. No shame, period.

 

[bodecea]

Just a couple of low-life hacks trying to make some easy money off slander and lies, just like 100 others have done.

You mean the fat former guy.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Three of Donald Trump's top aides speak out about why they oppose his re-election and are backing Joe Biden in this exclusive interview with MSNBC anchor Ari Melber. Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen, "The Art of the Deal" co-author Tony Schwartz and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci reflect on how Trump’s star power made them want to work with him. Cohen reacts to Trump calling out the Proud Boys during the debate, arguing they are “his army and he will call them to arms when he loses.”

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

Schwartz had ghostwritten Trump’s 1987 breakthrough memoir, earning a joint byline on the cover, half of the book’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, and half of the royalties. The book was a phenomenal success, spending forty-eight weeks on the Times best-seller list, thirteen of them at No. 1. More than a million copies have been bought, generating several million dollars in royalties. The book expanded Trump’s renown far beyond New York City, making him an emblem of the successful tycoon. Edward Kosner, the former editor and publisher of New York, where Schwartz worked as a writer at the time, says, “Tony created Trump. He’s Dr. Frankenstein.”

Starting in late 1985, Schwartz spent eighteen months with Trump—camping out in his office, joining him on his helicopter, tagging along at meetings, and spending weekends with him at his Manhattan apartment and his Florida estate. During that period, Schwartz felt, he had got to know him better than almost anyone else outside the Trump family. Until Schwartz posted the tweet, though, he had not spoken publicly about Trump for decades. It had never been his ambition to be a ghostwriter, and he had been glad to move on. But, as he watched a replay of the new candidate holding forth for forty-five minutes, he noticed something strange: over the decades, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz recalls thinking, “If he could lie about that on Day One—when it was so easily refuted—he is likely to lie about anything.”



It seemed improbable that Trump’s campaign would succeed, so Schwartz told himself that he needn’t worry much. But, as Trump denounced Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” near the end of the speech, Schwartz felt anxious. He had spent hundreds of hours observing Trump firsthand, and felt that he had an unusually deep understanding of what he regarded as Trump’s beguiling strengths and disqualifying weaknesses. Many Americans, however, saw Trump as a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for business—a mythical image that Schwartz had helped create. “It pays to trust your instincts,” Trump says in the book, adding that he was set to make hundreds of millions of dollars after buying a hotel that he hadn’t even walked through.

In the subsequent months, as Trump defied predictions by establishing himself as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, Schwartz’s desire to set the record straight grew. He had long since left journalism to launch the Energy Project, a consulting firm that promises to improve employees’ productivity by helping them boost their “physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual” morale. It was a successful company, with clients such as Facebook, and Schwartz’s colleagues urged him to avoid the political fray. But the prospect of President Trump terrified him. It wasn’t because of Trump’s ideology—Schwartz doubted that he had one. The problem was Trump’s personality, which he considered pathologically impulsive and self-centered.

Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

In “The Art of the Deal,” Tony Schwartz helped create the myth that Trump is a charming business genius. Now he calls him unfit to lead.

www.newyorker.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

Schwartz thought about publishing an article describing his reservations about Trump, but he hesitated, knowing that, since he’d cashed in on the flattering “Art of the Deal,” his credibility and his motives would be seen as suspect. Yet watching the campaign was excruciating. Schwartz decided that if he kept mum and Trump was elected he’d never forgive himself. In June, he agreed to break his silence and give his first candid interview about the Trump he got to know while acting as his Boswell.

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

The idea of Trump writing an autobiography didn’t originate with either Trump or Schwartz. It began with Si Newhouse, the media magnate whose company, Advance Publications, owned Random House at the time, and continues to own Condé Nast, the parent company of this magazine. “It was very definitely, and almost uniquely, Si Newhouse’s idea,” Peter Osnos, who edited the book, recalls. GQ, which Condé Nast also owns, had published a cover story on Trump, and Newhouse noticed that newsstand sales had been unusually strong.

Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

In “The Art of the Deal,” Tony Schwartz helped create the myth that Trump is a charming business genius. Now he calls him unfit to lead.

www.newyorker.com

 

[bodecea]

So when did you read the diary?

You know Project Veritas wouldn't even touch it.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

Newhouse called Trump about the project, then visited him to discuss it. Random House continued the pursuit with a series of meetings. At one point, Howard Kaminsky, who ran Random House then, wrapped a thick Russian novel in a dummy cover that featured a photograph of Trump looking like a conquering hero; at the top was Trump’s name, in large gold block lettering. Kaminsky recalls that Trump was pleased by the mockup, but had one suggestion: “Please make my name much bigger.” After securing the half-million-dollar advance, Trump signed a contract.

Around this time, Schwartz, who was one of the leading young magazine writers of the day, stopped by Trump’s office, in Trump Tower. Schwartz had written about Trump before. In 1985, he’d published a piece in New York called “A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story,” which portrayed him not as a brilliant mogul but as a ham-fisted thug who had unsuccessfully tried to evict rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants from a building that he had bought on Central Park South. Trump’s efforts—which included a plan to house homeless people in the building in order to harass the tenants—became what Schwartz described as a “fugue of failure, a farce of fumbling and bumbling.” An accompanying cover portrait depicted Trump as unshaven, unpleasant-looking, and shiny with sweat. Yet, to Schwartz’s amazement, Trump loved the article. He hung the cover on a wall of his office, and sent a fan note to Schwartz, on his gold-embossed personal stationery. “Everybody seems to have read it,” Trump enthused in the note, which Schwartz has kept.

“I was shocked,” Schwartz told me. “Trump didn’t fit any model of human being I’d ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didn’t care what you wrote.” He went on, “Trump only takes two positions. Either you’re a scummy loser, liar, whatever, or you’re the greatest. I became the greatest. He wanted to be seen as a tough guy, and he loved being on the cover.” Schwartz wrote him back, saying, “Of all the people I’ve written about over the years, you are certainly the best sport.”

Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

In “The Art of the Deal,” Tony Schwartz helped create the myth that Trump is a charming business genius. Now he calls him unfit to lead.

www.newyorker.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 4

Newhouse called Trump about the project, then visited him to discuss it. Random House continued the pursuit with a series of meetings. At one point, Howard Kaminsky, who ran Random House then, wrapped a thick Russian novel in a dummy cover that featured a photograph of Trump looking like a conquering hero; at the top was Trump’s name, in large gold block lettering. Kaminsky recalls that Trump was pleased by the mockup, but had one suggestion: “Please make my name much bigger.” After securing the half-million-dollar advance, Trump signed a contract.

Around this time, Schwartz, who was one of the leading young magazine writers of the day, stopped by Trump’s office, in Trump Tower. Schwartz had written about Trump before. In 1985, he’d published a piece in New York called “A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story,” which portrayed him not as a brilliant mogul but as a ham-fisted thug who had unsuccessfully tried to evict rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants from a building that he had bought on Central Park South. Trump’s efforts—which included a plan to house homeless people in the building in order to harass the tenants—became what Schwartz described as a “fugue of failure, a farce of fumbling and bumbling.” An accompanying cover portrait depicted Trump as unshaven, unpleasant-looking, and shiny with sweat. Yet, to Schwartz’s amazement, Trump loved the article. He hung the cover on a wall of his office, and sent a fan note to Schwartz, on his gold-embossed personal stationery. “Everybody seems to have read it,” Trump enthused in the note, which Schwartz has kept.

“I was shocked,” Schwartz told me. “Trump didn’t fit any model of human being I’d ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didn’t care what you wrote.” He went on, “Trump only takes two positions. Either you’re a scummy loser, liar, whatever, or you’re the greatest. I became the greatest. He wanted to be seen as a tough guy, and he loved being on the cover.” Schwartz wrote him back, saying, “Of all the people I’ve written about over the years, you are certainly the best sport.”

Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

In “The Art of the Deal,” Tony Schwartz helped create the myth that Trump is a charming business genius. Now he calls him unfit to lead.

www.newyorker.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 5

And so Schwartz had returned for more, this time to conduct an interview for Playboy. But to his frustration Trump kept making cryptic, monosyllabic statements. “He mysteriously wouldn’t answer my questions,” Schwartz said. After twenty minutes, he said, Trump explained that he didn’t want to reveal anything new about himself—he had just signed a lucrative book deal and needed to save his best material.

“What kind of book?” Schwartz said.


“My autobiography,” Trump replied.

“You’re only thirty-eight—you don’t have one yet!” Schwartz joked.

“Yeah, I know,” Trump said.

“If I were you,” Schwartz recalls telling him, “I’d write a book called ‘The Art of the Deal.’ That’s something people would be interested in.”

“You’re right,” Trump agreed. “Do you want to write it?”

Schwartz thought it over for several weeks. He knew that he would be making a Faustian bargain. A lifelong liberal, he was hardly an admirer of Trump’s ruthless and single-minded pursuit of profit. “It was one of a number of times in my life when I was divided between the Devil and the higher side,” he told me. He had grown up in a bourgeois, intellectual family in Manhattan, and had attended élite private schools, but he was not as wealthy as some of his classmates—and, unlike many of them, he had no trust fund. “I grew up privileged,” he said. “But my parents made it clear: ‘You’re on your own.’ ” Around the time Trump made his offer, Schwartz’s wife, Deborah Pines, became pregnant with their second daughter, and he worried that the family wouldn’t fit into their Manhattan apartment, whose mortgage was already too high. “I was overly worried about money,” Schwartz said. “I thought money would keep me safe and secure—or that was my rationalization.” At the same time, he knew that if he took Trump’s money and adopted Trump’s voice his journalism career would be badly damaged. His heroes were such literary nonfiction writers as Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, and David Halberstam. Being a ghostwriter was hackwork. In the end, though, Schwartz had his price. He told Trump that if he would give him half the advance and half the book’s royalties he’d take the job.

Such terms are unusually generous for a ghostwriter. Trump, despite having a reputation as a tough negotiator, agreed on the spot. “It was a huge windfall,” Schwartz recalls. “But I knew I was selling out. Literally, the term was invented to describe what I did.” Soon Spy was calling him “former journalist Tony Schwartz.”

Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

In “The Art of the Deal,” Tony Schwartz helped create the myth that Trump is a charming business genius. Now he calls him unfit to lead.

www.newyorker.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 6

Schwartz thought that “The Art of the Deal” would be an easy project. The book’s structure would be simple: he’d chronicle half a dozen or so of Trump’s biggest real-estate deals, dispense some bromides about how to succeed in business, and fill in Trump’s life story. For research, he planned to interview Trump on a series of Saturday mornings. The first session didn’t go as planned, however. After Trump gave him a tour of his marble-and-gilt apartment atop Trump Tower—which, to Schwartz, looked unlived-in, like the lobby of a hotel—they began to talk. But the discussion was soon hobbled by what Schwartz regards as one of Trump’s most essential characteristics: “He has no attention span.”

In those days, Schwartz recalls, Trump was generally affable with reporters, offering short, amusingly immodest quotes on demand. Trump had been forthcoming with him during the New Yorkinterview, but it hadn’t required much time or deep reflection. For the book, though, Trump needed to provide him with sustained, thoughtful recollections. He asked Trump to describe his childhood in detail. After sitting for only a few minutes in his suit and tie, Trump became impatient and irritable. He looked fidgety, Schwartz recalls, “like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Even when Schwartz pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his youth, and made it clear that he was bored. Far more quickly than Schwartz had expected, Trump ended the meeting.


Week after week, the pattern repeated itself. Schwartz tried to limit the sessions to smaller increments of time, but Trump’s contributions remained oddly truncated and superficial.

“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 focussed 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.

In a recent phone interview, Trump told me that, to the contrary, he has the skill that matters most in a crisis: the ability to forge compromises. The reason he touted “The Art of the Deal” in his announcement, he explained, was that he believes that recent Presidents have lacked his toughness and finesse: “Look at the trade deficit with China. Look at the Iran deal. I’ve made a fortune by making deals. I do that. I do that well. That’s what I do.”

But Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.

Other journalists have noticed Trump’s apparent lack of interest in reading. In May, Megyn Kelly, of Fox News, asked him to name his favorite book, other than the Bible or “The Art of the Deal.” Trump picked the 1929 novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Evidently suspecting that many years had elapsed since he’d read it, Kelly asked Trump to talk about the most recent book he’d read. “I read passages, I read areas, I’ll read chapters—I don’t have the time,” Trump said. As The New Republic noted recently, this attitude is not shared by most U.S. Presidents, including Barack Obama, a habitual consumer of current books, and George W. Bush, who reportedly engaged in a fiercely competitive book-reading contest with his political adviser Karl Rove.

Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

In “The Art of the Deal,” Tony Schwartz helped create the myth that Trump is a charming business genius. Now he calls him unfit to lead.

www.newyorker.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 7

Trump’s first wife, Ivana, famously claimed that Trump kept a copy of Adolf Hitler’s collected speeches, “My New Order,” in a cabinet beside his bed. In 1990, Trump’s friend Marty Davis, who was then an executive at Paramount, added credence to this story, telling Marie Brenner, of Vanity Fair, that he had given Trump the book. “I thought he would find it interesting,” Davis told her. When Brenner asked Trump about it, however, he mistakenly identified the volume as a different work by Hitler: “Mein Kampf.” Apparently, he had not so much as read the title. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them,” Trump told Brenner.

Growing desperate, Schwartz devised a strategy for trapping Trump into giving more material. He made plans to spend the weekend with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his mansion in Palm Beach, where there would be fewer distractions. As they chatted in the garden, Ivana icily walked by, clearly annoyed that Schwartz was competing for her husband’s limited free time. Trump again grew impatient. Long before lunch on Saturday, Schwartz recalls, Trump “essentially threw a fit.” He stood up and announced that he couldn’t stand any more questions.

Schwartz went to his room, called his literary agent, Kathy Robbins, and told her that he couldn’t do the book. (Robbins confirms this.) As Schwartz headed back to New York, though, he came up with another plan. He would propose eavesdropping on Trump’s life by following him around on the job and, more important, by listening in on his office phone calls. That way, extracting extended reflections from Trump would not be required. When Schwartz presented the idea to Trump, he loved it. Almost every day from then on, Schwartz sat about eight feet away from him in the Trump Tower office, listening on an extension of Trump’s phone line. Schwartz says that none of the bankers, lawyers, brokers, and reporters who called Trump realized that they were being monitored. The calls usually didn’t last long, and Trump’s assistant facilitated the conversation-hopping. While he was talking with someone, she often came in with a Post-it note informing him of the next caller on hold.

“He was playing people,” Schwartz recalls. On the phone with business associates, Trump would flatter, bully, and occasionally get mad, but always in a calculated way. Before the discussion ended, Trump would “share the news of his latest success,” Schwartz says. Instead of saying goodbye at the end of a call, Trump customarily signed off with “You’re the greatest!” There was not a single call that Trump deemed too private for Schwartz to hear. “He loved the attention,” Schwartz recalls. “If he could have had three hundred thousand people listening in, he would have been even happier.”


This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There is no private Trump.” This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on “The Art of the Deal,” Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention. “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.”

(more online)

Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All

In “The Art of the Deal,” Tony Schwartz helped create the myth that Trump is a charming business genius. Now he calls him unfit to lead.

www.newyorker.com