The truth about Trump
Tony Schwartz is standing in a sidestreet in Oxford making a call on his mobile when I first spot him. I go over and shake him by the hand. He looks a little perplexed, and seems to think I am a well-wisher, but then realises I’ve come to interview him ahead of a talk he’s giving that evening at the Oxford Union.
The talk, like everything in Schwartz’s life over the past few months, concerns Donald Trump, and its title is an intriguing one: “Into the Belly of the Beast – How Donald Trump led me on the path to dharma.” He may have thought I was a well-wisher because he’s spent those months spilling the beans on the Trump he knows, and right now there are a lot of anxious people looking for ammunition to use against The Donald. Schwartz, a journalist turned management consultant, is suddenly a player.
We talk in the peaceful garden of the Oxford Union. Except today, thanks to Schwartz, it isn’t very peaceful. The 64-year-old Schwartz – tall, with grizzled grey hair and wearing a T-shirt with blue stripes under his jacket – is clearly used to public speaking, and has one of those buzz-saw New York voices that really carries. Everyone in the garden on this unseasonally warm autumn afternoon is going to have to listen to this disquisition on Trump.
Thirty years ago Schwartz was a hotshot feature writer. He had written a far from flattering profile of Trump for a magazine. But Trump had liked the fact it portrayed him as hard-boiled, wheeler-dealing property developer, and Schwartz was welcomed back to write another article on him for Playboy. This time, though, Schwartz found Trump uncommunicative, and asked him why he was giving monosyllabic answers. Trump said it was because he’d signed a contract to write an autobiography. Schwartz told Trump, who was then in his late 30s, that he was too young to write a memoir, and should write a book called The Art of the Deal instead – a business primer cum self-portrait. Trump loved the idea and signed Schwartz up on the spot to write it. The young journalist’s life would never be quite the same again.
Schwartz spent 18 months with Trump to research the bestseller that was published under both their names in 1987, and reckons he got to know him as well as anyone ever has. Now, terrified by the prospect of Trump becoming president, he is on a mission to tell the world what he knows – what life in the belly of the beast is really like.
“I want to do two things,” he says. “I want to share the journey that I went through with him, and to help people understand who this man actually is.” He has already shared that journey with others – notably with New Yorker magazine writer Jane Mayer, who in July published a warts-and-all portrait of Schwartz’s relationship with Trump. The article kicked up a sandstorm that has enveloped Schwartz ever since.
Why did he feel the need to get involved in the most acrimonious presidential race of all time? “From the moment he started to run I was concerned,” says Schwartz. “But that concern grew into alarm once it was clear he was going to win the [Republican] nomination. I didn’t want to be Neville Chamberlain – the person who knew and chose to appease. I wanted to do everything possible to shout out what I knew and not feel, if he were to win, ‘Oh my God, if only.’ “
He rehearses the case he’s been making for months against Trump. “He’s a compulsive liar. The very first thing he said when he came down those stairs at Trump Tower to announce for president was ‘America needs a president who wrote The Art of the Deal’.” Schwartz insists that he, as Trump’s ghostwriter, produced every word in the book. “That was the first moment of alarm for me, because it’s a very transparent lie [that Trump wrote the book], easily refuted, and here he is on the very day he announces saying it. Trump’s an inventor of his own myth in every moment. He has no conscience. There just isn’t any governor inside him that’s influenced by values or shame, so a lie is no different to the truth. A lie is just what you say to get what you want.”
Even more important than Trump’s hazy relationship with the truth, in Schwartz’s view, is his short attention span. “He really doesn’t know anything, because he can’t sit still long enough to retain information. That’s the reason he speaks in this tiny little vocabulary and repeats himself over and over.” Ironically, the rhetorical power of relentless repetition comes from his limitation to absorb complexity.
“His addiction is attention,” says Schwartz. “In my view he ran for president because he needed to keep upping the ante, to get sufficient attention to fill a very leaky internal machine that needed that attention to feel worthy. And the only way to get even more attention than he’d gotten, say on television [in The Apprentice], was to run for president. I don’t believe he expected to win; I don’t think he even expected to do particularly well.”
In the New Yorker article, Schwartz argued emphatically against giving Trump control of the nuclear codes, and for that he was mocked, but he reckons the mockery has now noticeably lessened. “When I said back in July that putting him next to that capability was terrifying, a lot of people said ‘OK Tony, it’s fine for you to say he’s a dangerous man, he’s unqualified to be president, but it’s going way over the edge to say that.’ But now, watching him in the debates [with Clinton], it’s easy to see how easily triggered he is and what a thin skin he has.”
Schwartz raises the prospect not just of armageddon but of the imposition of martial law. “I don’t think there’s any limit in terms of extremity that he would go to. There are a variety of ways in which he’s said ‘I’d like to end a free press’. He’d like to suppress the media and bring it under his own control. That helps to explain why he’s attracted to Putin, because he’d much rather be a dictator than he would a democratically elected president.”
The article in the New Yorker explored Schwartz’s guilt at having produced The Art of the Deal. The book raised Trump’s profile, burnished the legend and helped make everything that has happened since possible. “I put lipstick on a pig,” is how Schwartz expresses it. One former colleague called Schwartz “Dr Frankenstein” , arguing that by writing the book he created Trump.
“There was part of me that was very drawn to the power, the money, the celebrity, the lifestyle,” says Schwartz. “It was fun to be around – fly in his helicopter or his plane, be in Trump Tower. I was vulnerable to finding that appealing.” Schwartz suppressed some of his deepest journalistic instincts. He had originally met Trump to write about the alleged harassment of rent-controlled tenants in a building next to Central Park that Trump wanted to dislodge so he could redevelop the site. But in the book, Schwartz supplies a spirited defence of Trump’s tactics. “I had to rewrite the story from his perspective,” he admits. “It was like living Rashoman.”
Schwartz accepts he played a part in creating the myth of Trump as an all-conquering entrepreneur. “I consider myself a co-conspirator with a number of other people. Mark Burnett, the producer of The Apprentice, had a huge hand in making Trump who he is. It was a relay race, and I handed the baton to him. So yes I have no doubt that I had a significant role in creating the public role of Donald Trump. But it never in a million years occurred to me that he would do anything in his life but build buildings. If I had imagined he could run for president and win, I would not have done the book.”
In the months since the New Yorker piece appeared, Schwartz has become a ubiquitous anti-Trump voice and adviser to the Clinton campaign. The mission has largely taken over his life, and he admits “it’s very hard for me not to be thinking about this a good part of the day”. But he has also had to carry on running his consultancy, the Energy Project, which he launched in 2003 to advise companies on how to get the best out of their workforce and that now employs 50 people with offices in three countries.
This is where the post-Trump dharma – enlightenment and a sense of oneness with the world – comes in. Schwartz tells me that after The Art of the Deal was published, he did not feel disgruntled with Trump – the line being taken by the latter’s supporters to dismiss his former ghostwriter’s critique – but did feel disgruntled with himself. He had done the book for the money – it made him around $2m – and to show his well-heeled liberal parents that he could sup with the devil if he chose to. But the supping had left him dispirited, and it was time to find a new direction.
“I came out of the experience thinking ‘What am I going to do next?’,” says Schwartz. “I was looking for a next book, and wanted to do something more meaningful.” The book that emerged was What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America. “It couldn’t have been a greater contrast to the Trump experience,” says Schwartz. “The book begins in Trump Tower the night of the publication party, and what I’m saying is ‘At this moment I should have been feeling like I own the world’. But I didn’t feel very good, and it was out of that experience of emptiness in spite of an awful lot of external success that I started asking myself the question ‘Is this all there is?’ Did I really think this was going to deliver the promised land?”
Researching What Really Matters took five years, and for Schwartz the process proved to be life-changing. “It was my introduction to the notion of dharma, of coming to a place of greater peace, understanding and happiness,” he says. The book led directly to the setting up of the Energy Project, which attempts to marry staff well-being and self-realisation with corporate success. “For the past 30 years,” he says, “I’ve been pursuing a path influenced in reverse by Donald Trump.”
Trump rang Schwartz when he heard the New Yorker was running the piece, and started “barking” at him. “I was in the car,” says Schwartz, “and the only thing I was thinking was ‘Dammit, I can’t figure out how to get the recorder on my phone working. How am I going to remember all this?’ “ What he did remember was that Trump accused him of disloyalty and wished him a “nice life”. The hint of menace was sufficient for Schwartz to say he and his family will feel obliged to leave the US for their own protection if Trump becomes president.
The two also had a meeting of sorts a fortnight ago. “I was at two of the three [Trump-Clinton] debates, sitting very close to the front,” says Schwartz, “and at the end of the last debate I went up to the ropeline where the candidates were walking by because I wanted, if I could, to be able to taunt Trump by my presence. He’s walking with his family and stopping briefly with each person, putting out his hand and saying ‘How are you?’ ‘How are you?’ It’s automatic, and Trump finally gets to me and puts out his hand. Then he looks up, sees who it is, and says ‘Oh God, it’s you!’ And he pulls his hand back and keeps walking. I got such a pure jolt of pleasure from that.”
Schwartz has also been dreaming about Trump a lot over the past few months. Surprisingly, they really are dreams rather than nightmares. “They always go the same way,” says Schwartz. “I walk into Trump’s office, and go ‘Hi Donald’. He looks at me with maybe a little bit of hostility, and then says ‘Can you believe it? Can you BELIEVE it? Bigger than ever!’ Which is what he always used to say to me when I talked to him.” Exactly what this means may only become clear on 9 November.
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