Transcripts For RT Going Underground 20240712

A lot of the its going to go away and if were not going to see it again hopefully after a period of time you may have some simpler upson i guess you would expect that some for us have maybe maybe done oh youre doing debt as a proportion of cases im talking about debt as a proportion of population thats where the u. S. Is really bad much worse than south korea or germany and you cant you cant do that you have are going to have to go by you have to go by where we look here is the United States who have to go by the cases shorts who penned the art of the deal says its success carved out a path for donald trump the straight to the white house but for him the experience led him down a path in search of the most unappealing parts of himself in so doing recognizing the trumping themself investigates this process of self healing in his new order will book dealing with the devil my mother trump and me and he joins me now from new york tony thanks so much for coming on so just tell me how you came to write. Otta the deal which you recount in this new automobile dealing with the devil you you compare it to a dumbed down great get me. I was a journalist in the 980 s. Working for the new yorker magazine writing long pieces and you couldnt avoid being aware of trouble and i actually wrote a piece about him in 1985 that was incredibly critical. He was on the cover the picture of him made him look like a thug and i thought it was probably going to be the last time he would ever talk to me and instead he loved d the piece and he loved it because and now we understand this better because thinking of itself as a thug made him feel good bad and so the attention by itself was enough for him to be interested in continuing to talk with me and it was while talking with him for it for an interview that followed that i was doing with him that he mentioned to me d he had signed a deal to do a book and i said well whats the book and he said well its my autobiography and i said well you dont have an autobiography yet youre only 37 years old they said yeah i know but theyre paying me a lot of money and i said well if i were you and i was going to read a book i read a book called the art of the deal just popped out of my head and. It could have of influence the fate of history. That 2nd leg of it all lets go back a little to the media 1000000 that you sketch out in this sort of a book because some people find it disturbing those who opposed from those who wont be voting trump in november to sketch out how the media were working at that time because i mean when we just mentioned the New York Times situation you looked through the articles and it was as if all the journalists was an ogre fiz believing in hype around on trump without ever actually investigating whether anything he was saying was true back then. This is been part of trumps success and arguably his whatever intuitive genius he adds. Is reflected in his recognition that what journalists want is something new and exciting and controversial and he was always willing to say the unsayable he was always willing to be there even he would have said this but it was true the buffoon if it got him attention and journalists were so taken with his before terry that they were unaware or they were and they were uncritical about the implications of his accruing power and thats something that i would say all journalists who read about trump in the eightys maybe even into the ninetys. Ought to reckon with i certainly have reckoned with it and i hope the hopefully there are a few honorable exceptions but then when he agrees to split the advance for the art of the deal the book i understand a party if their own you could come here about what he said after the party and ill get to the party afterwards events. He wanted the money for the party. Yeah so he held the book party the you know the launch party for the book in trump tower all 5 floors you know hundreds and hundreds of people that he invited sort of they see list celebrities because thats the ones he was capable of attracting but it was a big crowd and it was a very expensive that and the day after it we he called me to kind of brief about what the experience of been like and he said and by the way tony i expect you to share the cost of the party saw imagining a party cost 100200000 you know some enormous up. More than i would ordinarily have earned in a year and i said what are you talking about and he said well were splitting the advance we should split the cost of the party doubtless trump quintessentially being trucked he always needs to win he always needs to dominate and even though he made it possible for him to have a number one bestseller what he wanted to make sure is that he still came out relative to me on top well arguably thats the art of the day a in any case and in fact i know your top youre a top gossip columnist for the new york seem it in schrager Norman Mailer Michael Douglas jackie mason theyre not c. List as you recount in the book but there were 400 people here and it died of that ok but the deeper question here is this facilitation of the rise of trump i mean the idea that some a great literary person like Norman Mailer would you say these people are all part of this facilitation let alone and i mean vanity fair magazine is mean the new choice me critical of the Trump Presidency you think of that sign you have. A 100 percent so. I dont know if you want to call it conspiracy but the agreement not to notice the parts of trump that we turned out to be so dangerous was widespread and included people like Norman Mailer included Hillary Clinton i mean trump invited her to its 3rd wedding and did she come yes she did with dell with bill clinton and you know she had said herself it seemed like a fun thing to do so yeah but theres a theres a way in which trial manages to drag people down to his level even. Against their better instincts you see when you mention the clintons there and there is a picture famous picture of them together Beary Clinton said she would have a declared war on syria there would have been mass bombardment of syria for instance in her presidency you say its an eternal shame that you facilitated trump there may be perhaps millions around the global south of who are glad that its not Hillary Clinton in the white house and the United States would have become even more warlike and you have actually helped piece. Nonsense no i dont accept that at all. I think trump has effectively he himself says hes been a wartime d president. The equivalent of a wartime president because of corona and his treatment of corona his way of or of ignoring it. Has led here in this country to join 2000 deaths. Thats more people than died in vietnam. When he knew as he mad for the United States but around the world he didnt like obama destroy africas richest per capita country libya im just saying you should take more credit given the us saying that in your book its a source of shame and regret that will never escape you actually may have done the service for some people in this world well yes look i mean every decision is going to be good for some people and bad for others but the net effect of trump is a. Negative one on status proportions for most of the world and particularly by the way as we see it youre playing out through events of the us over the last few days around Climate Change the fact that he denies Climate Change in spite of the fact that hes so incredibly obvious its occurring is contributing to our demise because we must be fighting not just the us but the world we must be fighting to turn back Climate Change if we are to have any chance of surviving well according to trump and those of the september every day my presidency will fight for a cleaner environment and a better quality of life for every one of our great sivans when you a fitting with him by the way thats one of the 2600 lies hes been installed since it began proudly would dispute that but when you is sitting with him this thing that what he was telling you has you in formulating the book as you have it did could you ever imagine him having to deal with 200000 dead americans. You know i couldnt imagine him having province over to americans as a leader i didnt imagine for a moment that he could ever read political office. So no i i did not. And how do you think hes managed the Coronavirus Crisis that i should say you have a better death rate than that here in britain capita i think that the number of deaths if he had the obvious and logical things to a bit to have done even if hed done them a little bit late would have dramatically diminished the number of people whove died from corona and certainly the number of people who got around it here in the u. S. And now every other week ahead of the november election presumably were getting new socalled revelations as one of a Sexual Assault actually that came out in the guardian i mean would you believe and it strenuously denied by trump the atlantic magazine accusations that. The trump called dead us soldiers losers and somehow that works with the aura we were accusation in this new book saying that trump was influenced by a father who said youre either a winner or loser. Anybody who spent any time with trump knows that thats the way he talks and thats the way he feels he disparages 2 almost everyone he thinks of them not just not just veterans and members of the armed forces but people of all stripes colors types are losers and suckers to him and interesting only theyre losers and suckers he thinks in part because they take seriously what he says which at some fundamental level he knows is not sets its a series of lies hes telling in order to aggrandize himself even at the expense of the very people who support him there is nobody that trump feels as more of a loser and a sucker than the members of his base these are people generally generally with much less power and influence who havent done great materially in their lives who are who are angry about it and who he. Wouldnt dismiss if he had to spend time with any of them thats one of the great unsolved mysteries of this presidency of trump which is why would people he so clearly despise revere him turn out something that more from Tony Schwartz told transform a ghostwriter after this short break. But the damage no certainly no borders and is blind to another tease. Is a little over 30 we dont look like the world petes sake. We can do better we should be. Everyone is contributing way but we also know that this crisis will not go on forever the challenges created the response has been so many good people are helping us. It makes us feel very proud that we are in it together. Americans are divided in the bidens only white men use into shouldnt designed to unite citizens or challenge ideology to become exclusionary and intolerant the Supreme Court does now in the realm of partisan politics and worst of all political opponents are indeed the enemy is there a way out of this downward spiral. Welcome back im still here with author of dealing with the devil Tony Schwartz and you say in this new order will book that to you and edge that he was a dangerous slum lord and you knew of that fact before you took up the assignment with donald trump how do you square that how do you get out of the i cant and so when i say that the shame i feel is not something thats gone away its also not something i think should go away i mean i have spent the 30 years since i wrote the art of the deal in an attempt to atone for that decision it turned out it needed much more atonement once he ran for president but look i was 33 years old im not going to justify that i did it for the money i thought i was just working with a midlevel both ornish Real Estate Developer and you know it wasnt admirable but it wasnt a big deal and yet how do i stopped and said do i know who this man is. Do i know that hes capable of doing terrible things the answer would have been yes and thats what im atoning for and you know what. Its i am deeply ashamed of the impact of that decision to whatever extent it helped to elect him but it had the opposite effect on me its turned my life around it caused me to transform you know trump has built his life on a web of lots what i discovered after reading the art of the deal and really rich can in with myself was that the more and this is ironic this is paradoxical the more i keep the more of myself i could accept the more i could accept all of who i am both best and worst the freer i became and the less i had to defend and that experience of really making the shift to accepting this. Complicated self that i was that we all are. Really transform our lives it allowed me to use it in a way that has been i believe adding value to people ever since i finished the truck yet and half of this book is devoted to some useful methods of being able to selfheal ugly ill get on to that but many unvaried of the responses to the term presidency journalists opponents political opponents of cities are rushing for by you talk about a concept called truthful hyperbole to take us through what that is maybe something that can be useful to his opponents who knows yet its a fantasy the phrase for lying or deceit truthful i probably there is no such thing as truthful adverb which hyperbole by its definition is it creating something that is not. But trauma with telling somebody lies to me. And i was learning from the people i would talk to a ground here that things he was saying to me werent true that i needed to come up with a way of making this ok and truthful hyperbole was the phrase i came up with to justify when he would Say Something that wasnt true he loved that phrase because it gave credence it gave credibility to something that you know otherwise would have been disparaged was disparaged over the years its i told you of i mean even if theyre going to cross the discredited things like the british spy dossier saying he was blackmailed about russia and so on wow did you react to the way the opponents were responding to the drum presidency when arguably its a simpler theres a simpler explanation for who trump is than all these geopolitical dimensions etc i think thats a good point that really. I was from day one and all through the a 2015 campaign that he eventually won i was focused on his character i think one of the things hes managed to do is to. Is to diminish the importance of character through his presidency by his absence of character but this what this world so desperately needs right now is a move away from particularly here in the us the obsession with. With individuality and with personal gain and it needs to move from me to we trump is the quintessential me person its all about him all of the time no matter what the cost or consequences to other people and the world theres a great article was written by a guy named gary hart and 50 years ago called the tragedy of the comments and the basic idea of that piece is that when all people try to use a finite resource. It may serve them individually well in the short term but it destroys the commons over the long term so we need to widen our perspective to take into account that what we do is not all of what we should consider if we want to live in a world that still sustainable 103100 years from now but tony the problem there is that that elegant statement you made there is redolent of the elegant rhetoric weve heard from but arguably one of reagan from obama from so many different president s isnt the point about trump that you are actually getting what the president thinks we know that your previous president s have done some terrible things arguably my asking it inelegant rhetoric of the kind you just you just said trump is transparent at last the world can see what u. S. Policy is and americans can see one of her perhaps but that mechanism by which hes transparent its deceit so hes transparently deceitful he says things that are plainly not. True and that for example he says that it is important to m. S. To see says that you know it was other people who are responsible for the fact that the government didnt do a better job with corona these things are not true and we know now all of us even his enemies mostly know this that. Its 2nd nature it just is what he does automatically he lies more frequently than he tells the truth so thats transparent but hes not trying to be transparent ever about the truth hes never trying to say never willing to say what is actually so. What are the people around him like that because it just takes us in the room when youre writing the book because you do say in this new book. You couldnt really get head nor tail from him half the time what about the coterie around him and their reactions to it was it a kind of alloy listen to ation. Interesting because its the same group of people who are i mean people do good to people who are around him at the same experience that i suspect the ones who are been around him over the last 4 years of that which is trump is relentless in getting what he wants and his method is to simply say i want it over and over and over again until you finally throw up your hands in a gun no muss im not going to fight this anymore she has a greater willingness to say and do anything to get what he wants than almost anybody else and he has no conscience and no empathy those are the characteristics of a psychopath or a sociopath and that has been an enormous advantage to him in his presidency its as if you go on a football field and one team is playing by the rules and the other says were not going to serve any rules who has the advantage he doubts the team that wants to. Cheap thats well in the book you also say in a memo 97 the into wall street journal asked people whether they would buy the art of the deal book in the 1st place and the wolf street journal the model caper said i think it was murdoch and im not sure they just went they just went no no one will buy this book that hugos written with with dont trump and of course it became a bestseller. Do you fear that the polling that were getting about biden trumpery meant like the art of the deal the predictions for a book sales its certainly a possibility it was true in 2016 that in you know particularly in 4 or 5 states he fits the far out out did in the votes he got the not the what the polls that he would get. It is as i said earlier an enduring mystery to me why anybody would support him right now but i dont believe that we know no one who says they know what the outcome of this election is going to be has any real clue it will i suspect it will be close and. I dont know what to expect but i do know that if he is reelected. Its. Its an enormous challenge to the future of this country and honestly of the planet im just thinking that since its such a psychological book this new would have a book and its about the people lying to themselves sometimes is that why people say to the posters of course an organ of a trumpet theyre embarrassed to admit that they will be because theyre just a hangry about how the United States treats them their families and their loved ones white the 1st well yes there are there are great number of disaffected people in this country there are you know White Working Class people who feel that way and certainly there are vast numbers of people of color who dont support trump who feel that way so yes there is a tremendous amount of trend of this trance number of people who feel aggrieved and in many cases justifiably so. Like i dont i dont know whether like 2016 those people will choose this time not to admit theyre for drop the cult of china and trump isnt is vastly bigger now it is not embarrassing to say that youre for trump if you live in a red state and i believe that the likelihood is that people are going to be more willing to say that to pollsters this time and therefore that the polls are likely to be more accurate but theyll certainly be volatile moving into the election finally i better us care about some of the psychology because people are all stressed out by a coronavirus regardless of plus at least you can just quickly tell us what the in rhythm is maybe you can help of your of your oh yeah so so the work ive done is a lot about how to help people build better and more more sustainable lives through my company to Energy Project where we work with corporations to do that one of the Core Principles of our work is which we learned from our work with professional athletes is that the recovery the renewal the refuelling of energy of your own energy is important to your effectiveness. At the ways in which you spend it in other words renewal and rest serve higher and more sustainable performance as the corporations who mean accused of exploiting their workers who then go on to vote for trump and the rust belt no. Listen i mean corporations big corporations write out a lot to answer for themselves we need a evolutionary leap that would go back to what i said earlier which is this self interest that characterizes so many corporations and so many individuals particularly those with the greatest wealth and privilege needs to be challenged in a dramatic way if were to find our way Forward Together Tony Schwartz thank you and tonys book is out now dealing with the devil my mother trump and me its out on audubon thats it for the show will be back on saturday 20 has up to thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in prague to protest tens of capitalization join the i. M. F. And World Bank Summit until then keep safe join the underground huge interest on time to instagram facebook. Is an amazing country with were so many friends in russia and im very excited to be here. I love that idea i think i can do the. Different nice to make a lot of money with the millions and hundreds of me. Here is there not. A great one and nobody feels a lot better than me believe me and ill build a very inexpensive like a great great wall. d just in case youre worried about whos going to pay for it mexico will pay for. So well see what happens who knows i always say who knows what well see out of philly will be a success. If youre born into a poor family. Family if youre born into a family that has a single parent that really constrains your life chances people die. Every day so you meet your needs and the needs of your family. Opposition rallies break out in belarus after president lukashenko is sworn in for a 6th term dozens of people have been arrested. The Foreign Ministry accuses western powers of launching an Information Campaign over the alleged poisoning of. The opposition activist has been discharged from a hospital in berlin also this hour. Ready to provide you with. Invites United Nations to try a new russian covert vaccine free of charge there have already been requests from u. N. Colleagues. And an r. T. Correspond to become one of the 1st to get