The Slatest

Art of the Deal Ghostwriter Says Trump Is a Sociopath Who May Cause Nuclear War

Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate Mike Pence in New York on Saturday.

Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has written an unsettling piece about Tony Schwartz, the former journalist who ghostwrote Donald Trump’s 1987 book, The Art of the Deal. It’s well worth reading the article in full, but a few lines are worth pulling out in particular. For example:

… The prospect of President Trump terrified him. It wasn’t because of Trump’s ideology—Schwartz doubted that he had one. The problem was Trump’s personality, which he considered pathologically impulsive and self-centered.

Great!

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “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.” He went on, “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.”

Ha ha ha! Oh boy.

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

Welp. Schwartz goes on to say that Trump cannot concentrate on any subject besides “his own self-aggrandizement” for longer than a few minutes, that he lies constantly, and that he may never have read a book start to finish as an adult.

Trump trails Hillary Clinton by just 3.6 points in HuffPo’s national polling tracker.