Trump didn't get a great deal on The Art of the Deal


President Trump considers himself a master deal-maker and often made his bargaining prowess a selling point of his campaign. But negotiation experts and people who have negotiated with and against Trump who were interviewed for a Friday Politico report on Trump's deal-making skills aren't so sure.
They describe the president as a "confident, competitive, aggressive, impulsive, zero-sum, win-at-all-costs, transactional, unpredictable, often underinformed and ill-prepared, gut-following, ego-driven, want-it-and-want-it-now negotiator" whose actual record of deals is pretty mixed. (For example, he paid "$60 million more than even a high-end" appraisal value when he purchased New York's Plaza Hotel in 1988.)
"Is he truly a masterful negotiator?" said negotiation expert Marty Latz. "I would say not — in business, and certainly not to date as president."
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Particularly telling is the arrangement Trump made with Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal. "Most writers for hire receive a flat fee, or a relatively modest percentage of any money the book earns," Schwartz said, but he got fully 50 percent of the $500,000 advance plus half of all royalties and nearly equal billing on the cover, with his name listed second but in the same size font.
"What should have been a great deal on a book about negotiation actually is one of the most interesting pieces of evidence that [Trump is] not a good negotiator," Harvard Business School negotiating professor Deepak Malhotra told Politico. "I don't think there's a better ghostwriting deal out there."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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