By all means share with me everything horrible that you know about Donald Trump. But don’t overdo it.
After many years during which he could have done a Mea Culpa, the guy who ghostwrote The Art of the Deal suddenly, on the very verge of the Republican convention, announces he’s all torn up about it.
He has launched his Remorse Tour with a New Yorker interview.
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The magazine refers to Tony Schwartz, in one of the article’s headlines, as Trump’s Boswell. The cutesy ironic reference means to flatter the magazine’s readers’ sense of themselves as highly educated and all, but really what’s the point? Does anyone think Trump was ever a wise kind literary genius for whom someone like Schwartz would act as a Boswell? Did Schwartz think that?
He must have thought something like that, since he describes himself (before remorse set in) as shocked and disappointed by Trump’s lack of a discernible inner life.
Really? And why did this guy, who describes himself as at one point in the distant past a legitimate writer, pen a book full of Trump-aggrandizing lies?
He knew that he would be making a Faustian bargain. A lifelong liberal, he was hardly an admirer of Trump’s ruthless and single-minded pursuit of profit. “It was one of a number of times in my life when I was divided between the Devil and the higher side,” he told me. He had grown up in a bourgeois, intellectual family in Manhattan, and had attended élite private schools, but he was not as wealthy as some of his classmates — and, unlike many of them, he had no trust fund. “I grew up privileged,” he said. “But my parents made it clear: ‘You’re on your own.’ ” Around the time Trump made his offer, Schwartz’s wife, Deborah Pines, became pregnant with their second daughter, and he worried that the family wouldn’t fit into their Manhattan apartment…
There are sob stories, and there are New Yorker sob stories. (And Atlantic sob stories.) How could he resist doing one of the scummiest things a writer could do? He was desperate. Although his parents paid for elite private schools, he was somehow “on your own.” While his classmates at these schools came from, let’s say, billionaire houses (like Trump’s), he came, let’s say, merely from millions.
Plus no trust fund!
Yes, he was able to live in Manhattan… but would his girls have to share a bedroom?
Given the success of their first outing, Trump approached Schwartz about a second writing project.
Feeling deeply alienated, [Schwartz said no, and] instead wrote a book called “What Really Matters,” about the search for meaning in life. After working with Trump, Schwartz writes, he felt a “gnawing emptiness” and became a “seeker,” longing to “be connected to something timeless and essential, more real.”
There’s so much bullshit here that at this point it’s tipping over into something good about Trump – an encounter with him is guaranteed to launch you on your journey of Awakening.
Tony Schwartz cashed in on Trump once; he’s cashing in again, enabled by a media culture that’ll use anything.
July 18th, 2016 at 4:16PM
yeah, absolutely nothing about this makes Tony Schwartz remotely admirable.
July 18th, 2016 at 4:25PM
john: I’d have to agree. He’s making the best of a bad situation. Silence would have been more becoming.
July 18th, 2016 at 5:36PM
And here was I thinking all along that Trump wrote The Art of the Deal. Silly me!
July 18th, 2016 at 5:56PM
adam: We all thought he wrote it himself.
July 23rd, 2016 at 9:01AM
http://www.wnyc.org/story/episode-40-donald-trumps-ghostwriter-and-poet-fighting-cancer/