Tony Schwartz

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds.

Visit progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.

Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

Well, the last debate is over.

In a little over a week, we'll tally the votes.

And whether he wins or loses will define Donald Trump's story.

So I want to go back to the beginning and see if I could get some perspective on the man who's been president these past four years.

And that means going back three decades before he won in 2016 to what's his origin story, or at least the origin story he wanted told.

The Art of the Deal created the dealmaker businessman persona that Trump rode into reality television and then into the White House.

And my guest this week is the man who wrote it, Tony Schwartz.

Schwartz has done a lot of soul searching since writing The Art of the Deal and has a memoir dealing with the devil that explores how and why he got into business with Trump.

We talked about what he knows about the president now, what what he knew about him then, and what he makes of the character he created.

Take a listen.

Tony Schwartz, thanks for being here with us on the ticket.

Thank you.

So let's go back in time here a little bit.

Tell us the story of how you came to write The Art of the Deal.

Yeah, it's becoming an origin story now, and those stories I always feel like maybe they're not true when other people tell them to me.

So, but this one is as best I remember.

It is that I was a staff writer at New York Magazine in 1985, and I heard about this building that Donald Trump, who I was aware of.

And at that point, not that many people outside New York were aware of him, but he was beginning to be a pretty big figure in the city.

And I heard that he bought this.

building on 100 Central Park South, which is overlooking Central Park, a very desirable desirable location, but it was a rent control and rent stabilized building.

So the people who were living in it were paying tiny little rents.

And mostly they were people on fixed incomes living in the back apartments with no view at all.

But the big front apartments, which are eight or nine rooms, were all people who were wired into influence and had figured out how to get a rent control apartment for a pittance.

And the reason I mentioned that is because what Trump was trying to do was to force the tenants out in any way he could in order to be able to convert the building and charge market prices.

It was a very common landlord goal in those days.

And the worst of those landlords did it by hiring companies with names like Urban Relocation to harass the tenants out.

Right.

They didn't send fruit baskets wishing them good luck in finding another location.

To the contrary, they broke the elevators, refused to do repairs, made people walk up and down, didn't replace lights in the hallway, all this kind of stuff that was designed to make life so miserable that they would give up.

And I thought, wow, this is an interesting story that Trump's doing this.

So I went out to do that story.

And not only did it turn out to be true, but he wasn't good at it.

As we now know is true of Trump about almost everything.

He did a terrible job of harassing those tenants.

And in particular, the ones who lived in the big apartments were pretty savvy people.

And they found a terrific tenant lawyer.

And they basically battled Trump successfully for years and years, kept on their apartments.

And to the ones that finally left, he had to pay a lot of money.

It was called the Cold War on Central Park South.

This piece was a very critical piece.

And the cover image was an illustration of Trump looking like a thug.

And my assumption was he'd never talk to me again.

To the contrary, he framed it and put it up on his wall and wrote me a

fan letter.

Because at that time, which has now changed, but at that time, any publicity to Trump was good publicity.

It was clear to me, and this is important, that this was a bad guy, like a guy with no conscience, a guy who was only about how much money can I make and how much power can I wield.

That's how I met Donald Trump.

Seems unlikely that I would have written a book with him, doesn't it?

Yeah,

I mean, you talk about how you had a young family and you wanted to get some financial stability.

Was it just that you saw that there was a paycheck here and you were willing to trade in for that?

Yeah, I mean, I plumbed my own depths looking for the explanation,

and there were several.

The first one I would say, and certainly the one I was most conscious of, was just plain money.

In the end, I knew that if I did this book, I had the potential to earn vastly more money than I'd earned in years as a journalist, which was not much.

That was the number one reason.

But, you know, years later, and in this book I've written, as I looked at my history, I realized that another primary reason that I did that book was, as I put it in the book, to stick my finger in my mother's eyes.

My mother was a really effective and well-known social activist who, you know, had had fought for social justice in many different areas, race, gender.

And she was,

as I tell the story in this memoir, she was an extremely difficult person, interpersonally, to be her son.

And

what she stood for in some way, I needed to stand against.

And there was nothing more offensive I could do from her perspective than to write a book with Donald Trump.

And she told you that.

Without question, more than once.

When you say you wrote The Art of the Deal with Donald Trump, how much writing did Donald Trump do?

The right question is how much reading did he do?

Because I do believe that he actually read the manuscript that I wrote.

And I say that because he made enough intermittent red marks to make me believe he'd read it.

And that's notable because I believe it's the only book he he read in his adult life including the other dozen that have been written for him so he wrote not a word because he's not capable of writing a book it's interesting you're psychologizing your own motivations after the fact with your mom and writing something to stick it in her eye there is something that is familiar in that in our politics right now, where it does seem like a lot of Trump politics and not politics overall, but Trump politics is doing things because they know that it will drive other people crazy, and especially people they don't like crazy.

And that that, when you actually look at the motivation, that's what it is.

I do think that's the case.

I think Trump is the king of that particular style.

Grievance is really at the heart of it, or being aggrieved.

Trump just happens to have this remarkable quality of feeling every bit as aggrieved or more than people who have have no resources do, even though he has infinite external resources.

The problem is, he has no internal resources.

He's so vastly empty inside.

There isn't a conscience, which would be associated sort of with a soul.

There's no sense that I have to abide by any set of precepts or rules or principles.

And there's no empathy because there's no heart.

He doesn't care.

He literally doesn't care for anyone.

And that includes his own children.

The exception, I guess, could be Ivanka, but that's so perverse, literally, in the nature of that relationship that it almost doesn't count.

I think he is fundamentally incapable of feeling positive emotion toward another human being.

Is that who he was then when you first met him too?

Because I think one of the things that jumps out at people, often when they're watching old tapes of Donald Trump, is that the speaking pattern has changed, is sort of the most noticeable thing.

There seems to be some consistent threads of the salesman,

but that there is more, at least publicly, anger that's crept into who he is and defined who he is, and that the grievance stuff has become so much the front burner in his mind rather than something that was sitting in the back and

thinking about the world through a partial grievance lens.

Yeah.

Well, Trump has always felt aggrieved at every stage of his life, starting with when his father sent him off to military school, which was in effect reform school, and he was banished from the house, effectively.

So I think that's always been there.

He took it out on...

people who did work for him by not paying them and by going after the Central Park five and all these different ways that he did it as much as 30 and 40 years ago.

But is he more aggrieved now?

Is he angrier now?

Without question, Isaac.

This is a guy who has a barely contained and sometimes uncontained rage

that just he is fueled by now.

And the rage is almost entirely about the prospect that he will be defeated.

Because for Trump, any situation in which he does not dominate is one in which he feels he has submitted.

And there's nothing Trump fears more

than failure.

The risk for him right now is the biggest risk he's ever faced.

You know, it's like he flew too close to the sun, and now he has a good chance of burning up.

And that's the way he will perceive it if he does.

Yeah, it strikes me in just looking at how he was going about things this time four years ago versus these last couple of weeks is that in 2016, he was campaigning like he had nothing to lose.

Like no matter what, like either, hey, maybe I could end up being president.

One way or the other, he was going to be more famous.

He's probably going to start a TV network or something.

He's going to be part of the political conversation, you know, and then he was surprised that he won.

But now he's gone from not having anything to lose to being very worried about losing.

He's clearly worried about losing to the point where he's talking about it all the time, whether or not he will.

So he believes he's going to lose.

I think he probably believes it even more than he did four years ago, when I think he had no real expectation of winning.

And that's why he is doing so many self-destructive things, because what he's trying to do right now is to prove in this moment his continued ability to be dominant.

You see it now in having posted the interview with that he did on 60 Minutes for 60 Minutes with Leslie Stahl, where what he wants to show is I can outshine her.

I can be tougher than her.

I can be bigger than her.

So it's that I'm winning mentality in this moment, not even able to see that this doesn't serve him well and that his posting this will actually undermine him and certainly won't help him.

But that's not where he's living.

He's living in that place of terror.

And you see that, that's what you're saying.

That's when you say he knows he's going to lose.

I see it in the rage.

It's directly proportional to the level of insecurity he's feeling.

More rage, more insecure, more rage.

So in 2016, you said that if you were writing The Art of the Deal today, it'd be a different book.

There'd be a different title.

You said it would be The sociopath so you have uh not been on the trump train as it were for for some time now uh after four years of president trump uh in the white house what would the title of the book be the sociopath

it still would be because i didn't realize i said that off the cuff to Jane Mayer, the New Yorker.

You know, she asked me like you just asked me the question, and I just answered spontaneously.

And I know that I didn't really think deeply about it or metabolize it.

And then three and a half years went by during which everybody referred to Trump primarily as a narcissist.

So let's put aside the diagnosis for a minute.

They referred to him as someone who was driven above all by the need for praise and love and admiration and then the self-centeredness that came from that.

To understand Trump is to know that that's not his primary motivation.

His primary motivation is dominance.

And the primary reason that he is so driven by that is because he is without conscience.

So he doesn't really care about other people or about the consequences of his actions.

He just cares that he's on top.

And to know that, if you are to understand Trump, you have to recognize he isn't like us.

We have shame if we do things that we think violate our own precepts.

We have guilt.

We

care if we hurt other people.

Like, you know, 95%, 97% of the population has at least some of that capacity.

He has none of it.

And so he has a unique advantage over everybody else that he's trying to dominate.

And that unique advantage is that he's perfectly comfortable running outside the lines.

Well, that's an advantage in a perverse way.

So is this dominance thing that you're talking about,

is that

when people look at some of the decisions that the president has made that are

irrational, except if you filter them through the politics, maybe or through the dominance idea of attacking Anthony Fauci, of

not wearing a mask, getting COVID, and then making fun of wearing a mask

and doing things like that,

that he needs to be smarter than the scientists and he needs to have a better idea of what's happening.

All of those things you just mentioned are entirely of a piece.

It's in the moment, I want to make sure you know I'm bigger than that other person.

So I'm going to attack Fauci and I'm going to attack the scientists.

You know, what he essentially said about COVID, this is what I think went on inside Trump about COVID.

COVID's not going to tell me what to do.

I don't let anybody tell me what to do.

So I'm not going to wear a mask.

That's for sissies.

And what's this stuff with social distancing?

You know, most of the time I don't like people touching me, but I'm not going to purposely keep six feet because somebody told me to.

And I'm going to attack the person who's got the greatest level of respect in Fauci because I'm tougher than he is.

That's the lens you have to look through.

Who is he trying to dominate in any given self-destructive act?

And the only thing he knows to do when he's under pressure and it feels like it's not going well is to double down on what he's already done.

Well, I'd say the debate bore that out.

Trump started out calm, but wasn't able to contain himself.

And he doubled down on the same kind of corruption claims that worked in 2016.

We're going to take a short break, but when we come back, I asked Schwartz about Trump's dealmaking.

The art of the deal cast Trump as a master dealmaker, but with his presidency on the line, he hasn't been able to get an agreement on COVID relief in Congress.

Stay with us.

Hey there, I'm Claudina Bade, and I lead the audio team here at The Atlantic.

I think a lot about what makes great audio journalism.

It commands your attention, but isn't noisy.

It brings you closer to the subject, but leaves room for you to make up your own mind.

And when you hear someone tell their story in their own voice, you understand it in a deeper way.

When you subscribe to The Atlantic, you'll be supporting this kind of journalism.

You'll also enjoy new benefits just for Atlantic subscribers on Apple Podcasts.

Think ad-free episodes of our shows and subscriber-only audio articles.

To join us, go to theatlantic.com/slash listener.

That's theatlantic.com/slash listener.

If you're already a subscriber, thanks.

You can head to the Atlantic's channel page on Apple Podcasts and start listening right now.

As all this is going on with the election, we have months and months that have gone by without a deal on COVID relief.

The book you wrote was titled The Art of the Deal.

The president has proven over and over again unable to be the person who can close the deal in Washington.

Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday that she is wondering where the president will be, that it depends on the day.

He's all over the place, I think was the quote that she said.

And that's certainly part of this.

And the president saying that he wants a deal bigger than either the House Democrats or the Senate Republicans.

And the House Democrats want a lot of money.

The Senate Republicans don't want to get anywhere near the amount of money that the House Democrats do.

And Trump says he wants more than that.

Was he ever good at making deals?

No, he honestly was not.

Except

in those instances where doing illegal or unethical things gave him sufficient advantage that he could make the deal.

So he

lied and deceived to make his first big deal to build the Grand High-Ed Hotel.

But in The Art of the Deal, which is a book about approximately a dozen deals that he made,

half of them were failures, not failures five years later or 10 years later.

They were failures as I wrote about them.

And in some cases, I knew I was having to massage

the facts.

And in other cases, I just didn't know.

I'll give you an example.

All three of his casinos eventually went bankrupt, which bankrupted him.

I never knew that while it was going on, because I don't think he even admitted to himself what was happening with those casinos.

It looked to him like a damn lot of money was coming into his hotels every day.

And he could not believe that he couldn't make money gambling so he lost it hand over fists not gambling

right

well gambling with real estate i guess i i mean does that mean that the art of the deal is it science fiction as a book national

plain fiction

you know i've said that i wish it would be reclassified as fiction in which case i'd feel less embarrassed by it But no,

this is a man of, and Mary Trump has been very, very, I think, insightful in capturing this.

He's a man who's lived in a bubble his whole life.

You know, how would it be to inherit $400 million?

Do you think that you could turn that $400 million into at least a little more?

If you really look at what the outcome after about 35 years since he inherited that money, he surely would have done better putting it in treasury bills.

He is this just just very strange presence as like the master businessman who doesn't have a master business anywhere, right?

Like, and

that he came in trying to run government like a business in people's minds, but

he never ran his business like a business.

He ran it like a family organization, which is actually more like how he's run.

the White House for better or worse, right?

I know where you stand on that question, better or worse.

He's the Wizard of Oz.

I mean, he's been operating behind a curtain and inside that body of his,

you know, he's a blend of all the Wizard of Oz characters, you know, no courage, no heart, no soul.

He was always operating,

you know,

designing a fake life.

There's no more fake news in this world than Donald Trump himself.

The story of who he says he is.

has almost nothing to do with reality.

And, you know, the problem is because he's had so much, he's been able to take so much advantage of his lack of conscience and empathy, the problem is that we as a country, and I would even include his supporters in this, we've gone through a trauma, a collective trauma together.

We have a healing that needs to take place that is very daunting.

Trump's dysregulation, the fact that he is in a high intensity state all the time, has been passed passed on to us.

I was just thinking today about my own experience of looking at the news, looking at the latest headlines, you know, 15 times a day and realizing that this is literally insane for me to do this.

Because every time I do it, I feel worse.

Even if the news I come across is good, it's not good enough.

And I'm talking about the news about Trump.

And so he's done this thing to us where

he owns our attention.

And that i think is true both for his supporters and for his resistors or opponents

but what does it say about us as a country

his supporters the republican party that i know you say we've all gone through a trauma now but that that the the level of susceptibility was there to what you say was so terrible and so and so

obvious in a way, right?

Like the Wizard of Oz

is unmasked by Toto pulling the curtain, right?

Like in the end, it's not very hard for people to figure it out once a little dog walks up.

Yeah, and isn't that the case now?

I mean, I mean, it took a long time, as it did in the Wizard of Oz, but it didn't take much for over the last four to eight weeks for anybody who was on the fence about this to recognize that this guy was the Wizard of Oz.

I mean, that's my hope and belief, yet to be seen in the election results.

But he doesn't say, Isaac, something good about this country, that's for sure.

What it says is that you've got 40 to 47 percent of this country who are members of a cult, who have been brainwashed, who are susceptible to brainwashing, who are so

disconnected from the feeling of power and control in their own lives that they've invested in this mythical fake version of someone like the good father, you know, someone, and the evangelicals say it, you know, he's been sent by God.

Well, this is a reflection of the fact that we are an incredibly unintrospective country.

We need an evolutionary leap.

You know, there's an inner life that each of us have, whether we're aware of it or not.

And we're moved by things we don't even realize, by habit and by assumptions and by beliefs and by fears, and we choose not to pay much attention to them.

And no surprise that we get pushed into reacting emotionally rather than rationally and reflectively and in a more compassionate way, because it's all emotion.

And it's all, in this case, the emotion of survival.

It's the emotion that comes up automatically when one feels a sense of threat or danger.

We all feel a sense of threat or danger right now, even the people who are most supportive of Trump.

Yeah, it's a funny thing that I think everybody agrees that we're not happy.

We can't agree with why we're not happy or what we're going to do about it.

But nobody's happy right now.

Nobody thinks this is going well.

And for Trump supporters, that is an argument for why you need to re-elect him so that he can make it better.

And for the people who want Trump gone, that's an argument for why you need to get him out of there.

But there is no disagreement on people aren't happy.

And it does strike me that he

reveals something about

everybody.

He's like a catalyst, right?

Like he shows what we all are, each of us individually and as a group in a lot of ways, even though he himself is often a creation, whether it's about his hair or his politics or whatever else.

Yes.

And this is one of the things that I think could advance the healing, that could create a growth in the country as a whole.

The biggest shift that happened to me in my own life, and I am someone who spent a lot of time looking at why I was so unhappy,

and that's what I describe in this book, and I'm not that person today.

The reason is that there came a moment in my life where I realized that every the worst things that people said about me and the ones I quietly said about myself when I was in situations where I felt that way were all true,

but they weren't all that was true.

Just like Trump, I thought I was either good or I was bad.

I was either right or I was wrong.

And instead, what I discovered is, Yes, there are qualities that arise in me when I feel a sense of threat or danger, or when that part of me that is very young and helpless feels that sense of danger that are capable of bad acts and that are not admirable or likable.

But that's only a part.

And when you can embrace that, this is what the irony is.

If Trump could embrace the worst aspects of who he was,

then he wouldn't have to, he would have nothing left to defend.

Instead, he's consumed by defending himself.

That's what many, many Americans

invest huge energy in, is trying to demonstrate their value.

And it's a zero-sum game.

The more energy you spend defending and asserting your value, the less energy you have to invest in creating value for others and in the world.

It is the difference between defense spending and growth spending.

Tony, let's close with this.

We don't know how the election is going to turn out, and let's just table the idea that the transition might be complicated.

If there's a transition, that the vote count could go on for a long time.

Those are all big questions.

Let's just, if we can see that there's a winner and a loser, whether it's on election night or a week later when more votes are counted, if Trump wins, what do you think he does in the next couple of years?

And if Trump loses, what do you think he does in response to it over the next few years?

I think if he loses, he takes his soon to be dead friend rush limbaugh's place and does that show because it'll give him a place from which to continue to blow viate and have an impact and it also isn't that much work

if he wins i think it is the end of democracy for sure

i think you're going to see in his second term if he has one I think you're going to see martial law.

I think you're going to see the rounding up of enemies under fake pretexts.

I think you're going to see a world in which violence escalates enormously.

It's a really genuinely terrifying possibility.

And I don't know personally, partly because I would fear his wrath personally.

but also because I can't imagine what it'll be like to live in a country like that.

I can't imagine

being an American if Trump is re-elected, staying an American.

Do you think you'd go to Joe Biden's inauguration if Joe Biden has an inauguration?

No.

Well, I feel like we should end it.

That was a very simple, direct answer.

So, Tony Schwartz, thank you for being here on the ticket and helping us sort some of this out.

Thank you.

I know you wrote one book and it's defined your life, but I think at this moment.

Yeah, right.

I'm stuck with that in whatever obituary I get.

You know, look, I've got 30 years of penance to remind myself, but that is not all of who I am.

That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

If you have thoughts on the show or ideas for guests, email me at isaac at theatlantic.com.

Thanks for listening.

Stay safe.