Art of the Deal Author Notes Trump Doesnt Own Any Books

The Art of the Bargain, Donald Trump's bizarre 1987 book, wants you to call back it'southward a guide to, well, "the art of the deal." That if you lot read it, you will learn the secrets of Trump's success.

The reality is pretty different. The volume spends most 20 pages explaining Trump'due south principles of dealmaking; the other 364 pages are devoted to a sort of autobiography of Trump'south self-described greatest "deals." You don't learn a whole lot about how to succeed in business — but yous do learn a lot about Donald Trump.

Of all the books Trump has published — a surprising number for a man who says he doesn't have the fourth dimension to read books —The Art of the Bargain is the most famous for a reason. In it, Trump reveals a lot nearly how he thinks about the world. At times, it feels about similar a Trump Rosetta stone: a guide for deciphering fifty-fifty the weirdest things Trump has done in this campaign bicycle.

What yous learn well-nigh Trump from reading The Art of the Deal is that he doesn't come across deals equally business transactions then much as measures of 1'due south success at life. If that's the case, then you're justified in doing annihilation — anything — to make sure yous come up out on top.

This all stems from a fundamental Trump belief: Life is a competition for status, which y'all win by having the best stuff and the best people admiring you. Money helps, to be sure, but getting a lot of cash isn't enough. You need to be recognized as one of the greatest at what you do, with the greatest things and all-time life, to have actually succeeded.

Some people will detest you, and that's fine, if it's the "losers" doing the hating. Some detest, in fact, is even desirable — so long equally it helps you lot make deals that help you climb the world'due south status ladder.

And looking back on what he wrote then, we can see now that running for president isn't about credo or policy for Trump. It's well-nigh winning the ultimate status competition.

Life is a game, and deals are the scoreboard

Trump at an *Art of the Deal* book party.

The Art of the Deal was showtime published in 1987, and information technology covers the commencement phase of Trump's life, from birth his so-present. It walks you through his "humble" beginnings in Brooklyn, his "first deal" at Swifton Village in Cincinnati, and his greatest hits, similar the structure of Trump Belfry in Manhattan.

In Trump'south telling, his life is a history of unbroken successes. The feel of reading The Art of the Deal is a bit like that of reading North Korean propaganda, if Kim Jong-Un were obsessed with taxation abatements and casino profit margins.

The title, y'all speedily learn subsequently reading the book, is really intended to be read more than literally than a simple how-to guide: Trump sees deals as a kind of fine art. His life is a creative enterprise of dealmaking, almost joy and self-expression rather than making money. He makes that clear from the book's very first paragraph:

I don't exercise it for the money. I've got plenty, much more than than I'll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art grade. Other people pigment beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferable big deals. That'southward how I get my kicks.

His disinterest in accumulating coin for its ain sake actually seems genuine. What Trump is concerned about, it's clear, is condition.

While his father was a hard-knock guy from Brooklyn, he wants to be a powerful, respected Manhattan dealmaker — with the "best" of everything, from cars to apartments to wives. The signal of his business organization endeavors wasn't to brand money; it was, equally he puts it, to be known as "more Fred Trump's son." He's a child of privilege, who inherited assets worth roughly $xl meg from his father, merely he wanted to brand his own name.

"I learned very early on that I didn't want to be in the business organisation my begetter was in," Trump writes. "He did very well building rent-controlled and rent-stabilized housing in Queens and Brooklyn, merely it was a tough way to make a buck. I wanted to try something grander, more glamorous, and more exciting."

That, for Trump, was Manhattan. He sees the world equally full of hierarchies: Manhattan is the most important and famous place in the world, so he had to be there. Once he moved there, he virtually immediately tried to join Studio 54, because it was "the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive." Once ensconced in Manhattan social club, he tried to make certain it would never forget him — by building huge buildings and ownership the "classiest" stuff.

People are judged similarly, with their appearances and status symbols marker them as worthwhile. Studio 54 was so impressive because "information technology was the sort of place where y'all were likely to see a wealthy seventy-v-yr-old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden." To Trump, success is ever demonstrated outwardly — it's defined as the ability to bear witness off in a manner that marks you as one of life's victors.

"I wasn't satisfied only to earn a good living," he writes. "I was looking to make a statement. I was out to build something awe-inspiring — something worth a big effort."

Money, then, isn't important unless information technology helps buy status; it's a tangible fashion of showing that Trump is succeeding. "Money was never a big motivation for me, except for keeping score," he writes. "The real excitement is playing the game."

Hence why, in 1987, Trump bought a 727 colossal liner, a plane designed to fit 200 people, for his personal use. He admits it was an absurd thing to purchase — "it was a petty more aeroplane than I needed" — but it was showy ("I don't believe at that place is any other private aeroplane in the heaven comparable to this 1"). Moreover, the visitor that was selling it was having fiscal trouble, and so he could haggle for it and get a good cost. "I notice it difficult to resist a skilful bargain when the opportunity presents itself," Trump writes.

In that location's a crucial element of struggle to his thought of condition, as his metaphor of "playing the game" suggests. Condition isn't something that everyone can share; ultimately, someone gets to own the "best" property or the "almost beautiful" tower.

"In the stop, y'all're measured not by how much y'all undertake," Trump writes, "only what you accomplish."

Trump'due south presidential bid has e'er seemed kind of inexplainable to people. It's difficult to empathise why someone with seemingly no knowledge most public policy, or interest in politics, is trying so hard to obtain a job so historically drenched in those things.

Only after reading The Art of the Deal, I retrieve I get it. The presidential election is "the next battle" — at present that he's conquered real manor and television, the next way to make his marker is in politics.

I recollect Trump sees the presidency every bit the ultimate status symbol, and winning an American election the world's toughest deal to shut. And if he wins, in that location's a whole new set of challenges for him, an even bigger stage on which he can accrue the most stuff and thus prove himself to be the best.

How Trump rationalizes his human relationship with the truth

In one case you start seeing the presidency as Trump's biggest bargain, the most tangible proof of his success at life, a lot of the manner his campaign is run makes sense. Co-ordinate to PolitiFact editor Angie Holan, who assesses whether politicians are telling the truth for a living, Trump's "tape on truth and accuracy is astonishingly poor."

So why, precisely, does Trump lie so much? In The Art of the Deal, he tells u.s. he will do any he can to close a deal — the ends justify the half-truth means. Ethics kind of falls by the wayside; the purpose of life is winning, non post-obit the rules. "I'm the starting time to acknowledge that I'm very competitive and that I'll do well-nigh anything within legal bounds to win," he writes.

That includes dishonesty. "A little hyperbole never hurts," he writes. "People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the about spectacular. I phone call information technology truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent grade of exaggeration — and a very constructive form of promotion."

And going beyond "a little hyperbole" has served Trump well. In 1982, he describes how he was trying to get the Vacation Inn corporation to go in as his partner on his first Atlantic City casino. Before Vacation's board members would approve the deal, they wanted to run into the site where Trump planned to build it.

Trump was worried that the board would turn him down, as they "had yet to practise much piece of work" on building the casino. Then he asked his structure crew to circular upwardly "every bulldozer and dump truck he could peradventure find" and literally pretend to work for as long equally the board was on site:

I wanted him to transform my two acres of well-nigh vacant property into the most agile construction site in the history of the earth. What the bulldozers and dump trucks did wasn't important, I said, so long as they did a lot of it. If they got some actual piece of work achieved, all the better, but if necessary he should accept the bulldozers dig up dirt from one side of the site and dump it on the other.

Trump recalls one lath fellow member request why "that guy over at that place is merely filling up that hole, which he just dug."

In Trump'southward optics, information technology worked. "The lath walked abroad from the site absolutely convinced information technology was the perfect choice," he writes. "In reality, I wasn't that far along, but I did everything I could, short of going to work at the site myself, to assure them that my casino was practically finished. My leverage came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe."

This is why Trump lies so much nigh his policies. He doesn't listen misleading people if it helps him get what he wants — in fact, he believes convincing others that reality is what he says is a critical part of his success.

He's convincing the American public that "information technology's in their interest to make the deal" — even if his campaign doesn't actually have something they need.

How Trump manipulates the media for turn a profit

Many of the almost (in)famous moments of Trump's campaign — his feud with Megyn Kelly, his mocking of a disabled reporter, his former campaign director manhandling and so-Breitbart author Michelle Fields — involve Trump'due south relationship with the media. An analysis of Trump's Twitter account past my colleague Zachary Crockett constitute that Trump tweets nearly the media 3.v times equally much as he tweets about actual policy issues.

There's a reason for that. Throughout The Fine art of the Deal, Trump constantly talks nearly reporters and critics: the ones he like, the ones he hates, and the ones who helped his business. For him, media defines reality — and thus who has leverage. He literally attributes one of his most pregnant successes to the media's influence: New York's Trump Belfry.

In 1979, before construction began, the Donald's planned crown jewel in Manhattan was in trouble. He was in the midst of a tough boxing in the city planning commission, with anti-overbuilding activists deeply opposed to his plans to erect a new skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. Ultimately, Trump won — and he credits the New York Times.

"Looking back," he writes, "perhaps no one had a more than powerful influence than Ada Louise Huxtable, so the chief architecture critic of the New York Times."

During the fight, Trump courted Huxtable, giving her an exclusive early view of the Trump Belfry plans. The review ended up being a pretty negative review of New York zoning laws, with a few compliments thrown in. Just the headline — "A New York blockbuster of superior design" — was good enough to convince the committee to approve the plan, Trump believes. "That headline probably did more for my zoning than any single thing I e'er said or did," he writes.

The Times's subsequent coverage of Trump Belfry was far from positive. In 1980, during the edifice's construction, Trump ordered his crew to demolish some fine art deco sculptures that the site's previous owners had installed. The Times's editorial board responded with outrage: "Patently big buildings do not make big human beings, nor practise big deals make art experts."

According to Trump, the widespread anger about the sculpture demolitions didn't actually hurt him. "Even though the publicity was virtually entirely negative," he writes, it "drew a tremendous amount of attention to Trump Tower. Almost immediately nosotros saw an upsurge in the sales of apartments."

From this experience, Trump learned that controversy is practiced for business, equally he writes in one of The Art of the Deal's nigh revealing passages:

I'k not maxim that's a good matter, and in truth information technology probably says something perverse nearly the culture nosotros live in. But I'm a man of affairs, and I learned a lesson from that feel: proficient publicity is preferable to bad, simply from a lesser-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes amend than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

This, as you tin can see, has obvious application to his presidential campaign. Trump doesn't listen that the press savages him for wanting to ban Muslims from entering America or for calling Mexicans rapists. He uses the controversy to attract attention, and thus reach the audience that finds his message bonny. His entrada is an exercise in a lesson about media manipulation he learned more than 35 years ago.

"I'k going to suck all the oxygen out of the room," he reportedly told a political consultant before his campaign began. "I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me."

What you lot have to sympathise about Trump's religion in the power of the media is that it is about accented. Trump believes that perception makes reality, and that the media is what determines the world'southward perceptions today.

Take, for example, the idea of "location" in real manor. To about people, this ways your physical location — homes in desirable neighborhoods are worth more than than those in slums. But for Trump, location is socially constructed — a location is valuable if people see it as such, which may not have a lot to do with the physical reality of the location.

"You don't necessarily need the best location. What you demand is the all-time deal," he writes. "Simply as you can create leverage, you tin can raise a location, through promotion and through psychology."

In selling Trump Tower units, he explains, "we positioned ourselves equally the just place for a certain kind of very wealthy person to live — the hottest ticket in boondocks. We were selling fantasy." The heavy media coverage created that fantasy, the mere fact of the attention positioning Trump Tower as "something almost larger than life," an "event" equally much as an bodily building.

The idea is, in its ain Trumpish way, a chip like the i developed by the late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In a series of three essays called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Baudrillard argued that that the significance of the Gulf War was non principally determined by the physical furnishings of dropping bombs, but rather by the style warfare was represented in mass media. That's considering in a globe of 24/7 news coverage, the way things are represented is more important in shaping their effects than the reality of what actually happens.

"Our virtual has definitively overtaken the bodily," Baudrillard writes. "We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which idiot box is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real."

Trump has, in an instinctive way, taken Baudrillard's theory to heart. His entire entrada for the presidency is premised on the idea that he tin sell himself equally "larger than life," that asserting that he has the gravitas necessary to get president will really bestow it on him. And the press, he believes, are his unwitting accomplices — helping him even as they attack him.

Why Trump can't seem to talk about policy

Ane of Trump's strangest features as a candidate is that he doesn't seem to similar talking much about policy. His answers to policy questions often involve vague nonsense.

Read one way, this is just simple ignorance: Trump literally doesn't sympathize the issues in question. When he claims he has a "foolproof way of winning the war with ISIS" but claims he won't release information technology because "I won't tell them where and I won't tell them how" he'll trounce them, that's probably what it is. I seriously doubt he has a hole-and-corner plan that would defeat ISIS but he just won't tell anyone. Trump loves to brag.

But The Art of t he Deal suggests a different answer, rooted in what Trump means when he says he wants to hire "the all-time people." In the context of the book, that comes across not equally ignorance simply every bit part of a life philosophy. He sees his bid for the presidency as his life'southward biggest deal, and is simply executing on the strategy he'southward used to great success in business.

In the book, as in life, Trump is always talking about working with the "best" people. "I take a very unproblematic rule when information technology comes to management: hire the best people from your competitors," he writes. "That'south how you build a kickoff-form operation."

This approach has helped him gear up government projects in the by (or, at least, he thinks it has). In 1986, he took over construction on the Wollman Ice Rink in Central Park. The city had been building it for six years and had gone $12 meg over upkeep without really accomplishing anything.

The consequence, Trump writes, was bureaucracy and leadership. "You can become any chore done through sheer force of will — and knowing what you're talking about," he writes. "Virtually no one in the metropolis government knows anything about construction. Worst of all, no ane in the city government hierarchy is held accountable for failure."

Then when Trump swooped in, he pushed the authorities out of the way — and applied his patented direction strategy.

"Since I myself knew absolutely nothing most building rinks, I set out to find the all-time skating-rink builder I could," Trump writes. He looked to Canada, because "ice skating is to Canadians what baseball is to Americans." (Trump has a deep faith in stereotypes.) He phoned around and concluded up hiring Cimco, a Toronto-based company that had congenital the Montreal Canadiens' rink.

Cimco did the job well, and the rink was unveiled past Nov of that year. When it was done, the city asked Trump to manage it. How? "Again, I but looked for the best rink managers available," Trump writes. "The answer I came upward with was Ice Capades [and] they've washed an impeccable job with Wollman Rink."

This is a running theme throughout the book: When Trump gets sued, he hires the "all-time" lawyers. When his casinos are struggling, he hires the "best" managers from other companies.

The betoken is that he sees "hiring the best people" as a legitimate solution to problems with his deals. While most politicians think they themselves are supposed to come upwards with policy solutions to problems, Trump actually thinks that "hire the all-time people" is itself a policy solution.

This isn't an original observation. Scott Alexander, the fantabulous author behind SlateStarCodex, had a similar thought later on reading The Art of the Deal.

"This affair most hiring the best people, for example, seems almost similar an obsession in the book," Alexander writes. "When he says that he's going to solve Medicare by hiring bang-up managers and knowing all the right people, I don't think this is some vapid way of avoiding the question. I call back it'south the honest output of a mind that works very differently from mine."

But there'due south an important divergence between what Trump means when he says "the best people" and what most people think he means. For Trump, "all-time" doesn't necessarily mean the most qualified, talented, or honest: it means the person whose services virtually benefit Trump, and who volition exist the about loyal to him personally.

This approach dates all the way back to the beginning of his career, in 1964. Dorsum then, Trump was in college, helping his father manage a 1,200-apartment development called Swifton Hamlet in Cincinnati. Trump and his male parent were having problem finding someone to manage the unit, going through manager afterward manager — until they stumbled upon a human named Irving.

Irving, Trump admits openly, was a con man — and kind of an asshole. In one visit to a tenant'due south unit, Irving, according to Trump, instructed a 10-twelvemonth-old girl to "tell your father to pay his fucking rent or I'grand going to knock his ass off." Afterward, he shamelessly flirted with the girl's (married) mother.

When the incensed married man stormed into the management part, Irving threatened to fight him. "I'll kill y'all. I'll destroy you. These hands are lethal weapons, they're registered with the police department," he spat.

According to Irving's employees, he stole a pocket-sized fund they had all chipped in on together — designed to pay for funerals. Irving stole a lot more from Trump; $l,000 a year, Trump guesses.

A normal person would have fired Irving. Trump came to rely on him. Irving, according to Trump, was "a fabulous man," an "amazing manager," and "one of the greatest bullshit artists I've e'er met." Trump came to rely on the old man so much, in fact, that he "began spending less and less time" at Swifton Village "in one case Irving had information technology running so well."

Trump doesn't care at all that Irving was verbally abusive, or even that he stole from employees. He just cares that Irving helped him turn a profit. Trump doesn't hibernate this avariciousness — in fact, he brags about it. In his telling, his ability to look past a manager making unwanted sexual advances on a tenant is a sign of his ain bright business organisation instincts. All that matters to him is that he turn a profit — that Swifton Hamlet cease up being, in his parlance, a "good deal."

That's worth keeping in mind today, given that Trump seems to see his bid for the presidency every bit just another deal. He's got the same motivation — a hunt for status — and the same principles — manipulate perceptions, hire the "best" people — that he had during his ascent to prominence in real manor. This seems bizarre to us, considering we aren't used to politicians who act like garish existent estate moguls and engage apparently unqualified people equally their pinnacle lieutenants.

But if you read The Art of the Deal, the mystery around Trump collapses. He is exactly who he says he is.

The political science that predicted Trump'south rise

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2016/7/7/11700888/the-art-of-the-deal-trump

Andrew Thiseved