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 here have to go by the case is sure to pan the art of the deal says its success carved out a path for donald trump of 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 the art of the deal which you recount in this new order will book dealing with the devil you you compare dumbed down great gatsby. I was a journal withstand the. 1980 s. Working for the new yorker magazine writing long pieces and you couldnt avoid being aware of truck 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 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 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 he 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. Then so he let it all lets go back a little to the medium 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 just sketch out how the media were working at that time because i mean when you just mentioned 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 buffoonery that they were unaware or they were and they were uncritical about the implications of his accruing column 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 and 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 its all imagining a party cost 100200000 you know some enormous. 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 knee on top well arguably thats the out of the day of in any case and in fact i know your top youre a top gossip columnist for the new york seem it in schrager Norman MailerMichael Douglas jackie mason theyre not c. List as you recount in the book but there were 400 people here and at that event and you know youve youve picked out 4 of the 10 who really were better know 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 being the new choice me critical of the Trump Presidency you single out sign you have. A 100 percent. 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 game 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 then returned and 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 up to 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 padds effectively he himself says he did 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 200000 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 i just say you should take more credit given that you are 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 of my presidency will fight for a cleaner environment and a better quality of life for every one of our great citizens 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 we 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 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 us and now every other week ahead of the november election presumably were getting new socalled revelations as one of Sexual Assault actually that came out in the guardian i mean would you believe and its 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 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 lee theyre losers and suckers he thinks in part because they take seriously what he said which had some fundamental level he knows is not sense is 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 donald trump feels is 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 dont transform a ghostwriter after this short break. Join me every day on the alex simon show and ill be speaking to get a. Picture. Im sure. Ill see you then. Yes thank you kate and to. My social class Law School Class people also a copy of a 1st class if youre born into a poor family if youre born into a minority family if youre born into a family that only has a single parent that really constrains your life chances people that i am a states long years old a 0. 2 generational poverty. Its a tough fight every day i see you youll meet your needs and the needs of your family. Welcome back im still here with author of dealing with the devil Tony Schwartz you say in this new order will book that 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 good level both ornish Real Estate Developer and you know it was an 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 a 24 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 a bit 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 my life 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 and varied of the responses to the term presidency journalists opponents political opponents of said hes a russian 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 opponent who knows the idea its a fantasy the phrase for lying or deceit truthful i probably there is no such thing as truthful i burble which i personally by its definition is it creating something that is not so but trauma was telling somebody lives today and i was learning from the people i would talk to a ground him 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 you must have come across 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 then all these geopolitical dimensions that i mean 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 in 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 thats still sustainable 103100 years from now but tony the problem areas 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 masking it in elegant 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 is 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. He says that you know it was other people who are responsible for the fact that their 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 hell lot 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 the group of 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 noma 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. 00 the into wall street journal asked people whether they would buy the art of the deal book in the 1st place and the would 3 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 order will book and its about people lying to themselves sometime is that why people say to the posters of course an organ of a trumpet theyre embarrassed to admit that they w