If Donald Trump's ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal could go back and do it all again, he'd write a very different book. One, perhaps, titled The Sociopath, which is exactly what Tony Schwartz thinks Trump is, according to a tell-all in The New Yorker published Monday.
During the 18 months he spent investigating and interviewing Trump for the book, Schwartz wrote in his journal that Trump displayed a "willingness to run over people" and an "absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money." "He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it," Schwartz told The New Yorker, noting that Trump reaped a "strange advantage" from not being "constrained by the truth," as most people are.
Schwartz says Trump is so good at lying that he is even able to talk himself into believing his own lies to be fact. "More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true," Schwartz said.
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More than anything, Schwartz seems to feel a deep sense of regret over his decision to ghostwrite The Art of the Deal. "I put lipstick on a pig," he says. "I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is. I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization."
Read the entire fascinating interview over at The New Yorker.
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