The Art Of The Reveal

The ghostwriter of Trump’s best-selling memoir says the business mogul is unfit to lead.

- Jane Mayer

Last June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartz’s sprawling house, on a leafy back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up with the day’s big news: Donald J Trump had declared his candidacy for President of the United States. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel personally implicated.

Trump, facing a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, laid out his qualifications, saying, “We need a leader that wrote The Art Of The Deal.” If that was so, Schwartz thought, then he, not Trump, should be running. Schwartz dashed off a tweet: “Many thanks Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I wrote The Art Of The Deal.” 

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 48 weeks on the Times best-seller list, 13 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.”