Donald Trump has been nominated and, who knows, may even be elected. Leaving us a last, forlorn hope that—following General Sherman’s immortal formulation—he might choose not to serve. So we might as well get started with the recriminations and guilt. Whose fault is it?
Well, Tony Schwartz has stepped up and says he’s willing to take the rap. He is, Schwartz confesses, the man who made Donald Trump. And who, you ask, is Tony Schwartz? The answer is . . . Trump’s Boswell, if you go by the title of a New Yorker article written by Jane Mayer. But that seems a bit fancy for the actual deed in question. The better description is that Schwartz was, once upon a time, Trump’s ghost.
This is to say, Schwartz helped Trump write a book. And “helped” is probably selling Schwartz’s efforts a little cheap. He says he actually wrote the book in question, that Trump was sort of a distracted bystander, and there is no reason not to believe him. Does anyone think that Trump—whose inability to stay focused on anything for more than three minutes is abundantly evident—could actually sit still and put words on paper, one after another, until there were enough of them to make a book?
So give Schwartz the credit/blame he desires. He wrote the book. And which book might that be? It is, in fact, the one that could fairly be said to have launched the Trump enterprise: the one called The Art of the Deal. The one the nominal author calls, in a phone interview with Mayer, “one of the best-selling business books of all time. Some say it was the best-selling business book ever.”
This—surprise, surprise—is not true. But then with Trump, one tends to discount all statements of fact. Even those that can be easily checked. You wouldn’t believe him if he told you the time.
Trump, unsurprisingly, insists to Mayer that while Schwartz was “very good . . . he didn’t write the book. I wrote the book. I wrote the book. It was my book. And it was a No. 1 bestseller.” Yeah, yeah.
The Donald’s lies about the book are as nothing when compared with the heavy burden of guilt that Tony Schwartz feels for having been his accomplice.
“I put lipstick on a pig,” Schwartz tells Mayer. Which sounds, more or less, like what ghostwriters are paid to do. And Schwartz was paid very well. He split a half-million-dollar advance with Trump, and they went 50/50 on the royalties, as well. Which turned out to be substantial. As Mayer writes, “More than a million copies have been bought, generating several million dollars in royalties.”
Blood money, as Schwartz now sees it. “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. . . . 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.”
To think that a mere ghostwriter could, with a few months of exceedingly lucrative hack work, bring on -Armageddon. Only in America.
No, actually, make that . . . only in Donald Trump’s America.
