The ghostwriter for Donald Trump’s best–selling book The Art of the Deal has warned that if he returns to the White House, the former president will seek “revenge and domination.”
Tony Schwartz claims Trump is haunted by his upbringing with a hard-driving father disdainful of any form of weakness.
“If he does win back the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have much more on his mind than revenge and domination—damn the consequences—in his doomed, lifelong quest to feel good enough,” writes Schwartz in The New York Times.
“Ever since Mr. Trump announced in 2015 that he was running for president, I’ve argued publicly that the only limitation on his behavior as president—then and now—is what he believes he can get away with,” he adds. “Mr. Trump has made it clear that he believes he can get away with a lot more today.”
Trump once called The Art of the Deal his second-favorite book after the Bible, but Schwartz has said the business memoir that topped The New York Times Best Seller List in 1987 was his “greatest regret in life, no question.”
Writing in the Times on Friday, Schwartz says it has been “deeply unsettling” for him to see how many behaviors Trump exhibits that are associated with psychopathy.
He cites seven behaviors linked to “antisocial personality disorder,” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders– deceitfulness, impulsivity, failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, irritability and aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of self or others, consistent irresponsibility and lack of remorse.
“I’ve observed all seven in Mr. Trump over the years and watched them get progressively worse. It’s the last one—lack of remorse—that gives him license to freely exercise the other six,” he writes.
Donald Trump wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ with Tony Schwartz.
Wojtek Laski/Getty Images
“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, and it comes just five weeks before the election.”
Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project leadership consultancy, is referring to the new biopic movie about Trump’s early life that ends with a scene between actors playing Schwartz and the property mogul.
“Watching The Apprentice crystallized two big lessons that I learned from Mr. Trump 30 years ago and that I’ve seen play out in his life ever since with more and more extreme consequences,” he writes.
“The first lesson 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. The second lesson is that nothing we get for ourselves from the outside world can ever adequately substitute for what we’re missing on the inside.”
Schwartz says the movie tells Trump’s story through the eyes of his father Fred, and his mentor and longtime lawyer Roy Cohn.
“What they had in common, and passed on to Donald in spades, was their shamelessness when it came to winning and dominating others, whatever that took. The end always justified the means,” Schwartz writes in the Times.
“For me, the movie felt emotionally true—and consistent with the Donald Trump I came to know three decades ago. The Apprentice is less about how Mr. Trump rose to power than it is about the generational impact of his family’s trauma and dysfunction, and how it shaped the person Mr. Trump became and the impact he’s had on an entire country,” he adds.
Recalling his time working with Trump on the book, he writes: “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.”
