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Since it’s unlikelyThe Art of the Dealwill go out of print anytime soon, the book’s co-author Tony Schwartz has a different proposal.
Shortly afterThe New York Timespublished a damning report detailing President Donald Trump‘sbusiness and financial woesover the ‘80s and ‘90s, Schwartz — who has emerged as anextremely vocal criticof Trump — shared that he believed the 1987 memoir, which served as a testament to Trump’s business acumen, should be recategorized as a work of fiction.
“Given theTimesreport on Trump’s staggering losses, I’d be fine if Random House simply took the book out of print. Or recategorized it as fiction,” hetweetedon Wednesday.
During an interview with CNN’sAnderson Cooperthat aired the same day, Schwartz went on to share that given the choice to re-title the book today, he would dub itThe Sociopath —a claim he previously made during a2016 interviewwithThe New Yorker.
“He has no conscience, he has no guilt. All he wants to do is make the case that he would like to be true,” Schwartz told Cooper. “He does not experience the world in a way that an ordinary human being would.”
Asked whether he honestly believed Trump to be a sociopath, Schwartz took a pause before replying, “without any question.”
“I encourage people who wonder [about] that to simply Google ‘sociopath’ and the first or second entry gives you 9 or 10 describe words,” he continued. “It always includes a kind of pathological narcissism, which is what many people describe him as being, but it adds the element of absence of conscience, which changes everything.”
According to theTimesreport, federal tax documents from 1985 to 1994 show that Trump only paid income taxes twice during those years, earning his exemption otherwise due to the massive amounts of money he was losing.
Trump totaled losses over $1 billion during that 10-year period — a reality at odds with how he has marketed himself as a deal-savvy businessman, including during the 2016 presidential election.
“In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer,” theTimesreported.
Trump quickly slammed theTimesinvestigation as a “hit job” but did not dispute the losses themselves. Instead, the president obliquely defended the large sums as “depreciations” and “massive write-offs.”
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This is far from the first time Schwartz has publicly slammed Trump.
“I doregret writing the book,” Schwartz toldGood Morning AmericaaboutThe Art of the Dealin 2016. “I never in a million years thought he would run for president. Had I thought that 30 years ago, I wouldn’t have written the book. But for 29 years I didn’t think he would and it didn’t seem like it was important to speak out. I now feel it’s my civic duty. I have nothing to gain from this.”
Echoing the comment toThe New Yorkerthat year, Schwartz elaborated, “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.”
“It just feels wrong,” Schwartz said.
source: people.com
