Donald Trump and The Art of the Deal with Ghostwriters

Donald Trump is the author of about twenty books. Some U.S. presidents have written more, but none have had as many public conflicts with their ghostwriters. Tony Schwartz, Trump’s first ghostwriter, turned into his harshest critic. Charles Leerhsen said things about his client that are typically not spoken. Dave Shiflett also expressed mostly negative views. Each of them could have cited a conflict of interest and stayed silent. Among Trump’s writers who drew media attention, only Meredith McIver never said anything bad about her client, and she was the only one with reason to do so. All that remains for us is to learn lessons from these public stories.

Contents:
Part 1. The Betrayal of Schwartz
Part 2. The Indulgence of Leerhsen
Part 3. The Candor of Shiflett
Part 4. The Loyalty of McIver
Part 5. The Ambiguity of Trump

Part 1. The Betrayal of Schwartz

In 1985, Donald Trump made two pivotal decisions: he purchased the Mar-a-Lago estate and met Tony Schwartz. 

For about a decade, Mar-a-Lago served as the winter residence for U.S. presidents. When it became clear that the estate was too expensive to maintain, the government decided to sell it. There wasn’t much interest from buyers, but when Donald Trump, a successful New York developer, offered $28 million, the government declined, believing it could fetch a much higher price. Then, through intermediaries, Trump purchased a narrow beachfront lot in front of the estate and announced plans to build a tall, unsightly building that would block Mar-a-Lago’s ocean view. The estate’s price immediately dropped. Trump acquired it for $5 million, spent another $3 million on antique furniture, and paid $2 million for the beach. 1 Thrilled with his purchase, Trump transformed Mar-a-Lago into a private club and began hosting extravagant parties, much to the neighbors’ annoyance.

It was at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, that Donald Trump worked with Tony Schwartz on his first book, The Art of the Deal — at least, at first.

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Trump met Schwartz when he was writing an article about him for New York Magazine. The piece, titled "A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story," didn’t portray him as a successful developer achieving every ambitious goal, but as a buyer struggling unsuccessfully to evict tenants from the residential building at 100 Central Park South.

Trump bought the building along with the Barbizon Plaza Hotel with the intention of demolishing them and constructing a new complex. Instead of compensating the tenants, he hired a company that tried — legally, but often unethically — to evict them. Several years of legal battles ended with the tenants staying put, and, as Schwartz ironically noted in the article, Trump was upset only because he had gained a reputation as a “heartless man,” even though the property’s value had increased during the litigation, leaving him with a profit.

The article, illustrated with an image of Trump exuding a mafia-like vibe, offered readers “the story of a gang that couldn’t shoot straight, a fugue of failure, a farce of fumbling and bumbling.” 2 Trump was thrilled: he printed out the magazine cover and hung it in his office, and he also wrote Tony Schwartz a thank-you letter for an article that “everybody seems to have read.” 3

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A few months later, Trump met Tony Schwartz again. Schwartz came to conduct another interview and noticed that the usually talkative Trump was now dodging questions. Word by word, Schwartz discovered that Trump had signed a book deal and was saving the best stories for his literary debut, considering an autobiography. Schwartz reminded him of his age, saying that at 38, no one really writes an autobiography, and suggested doing something more in the style of The Art of the Deal. Trump immediately agreed: “Great idea. You want to write it?”. 4

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According to Schwartz, he spent several months thinking over Trump’s offer, believing it was a deal with the devil. A committed liberal, Schwartz disapproved of Trump’s obsession with profit above all else, but he took on the book because he wanted to make a lot of money quickly. His wife was pregnant, and they were living in a small apartment. He feared that ghostwriting for Trump would ruin his reputation as a serious journalist, so he said he would agree to the job only if he received half of the advance and half of the book’s royalties.

Like a true spawn of the devil, Trump said “yes” without negotiation — and slyly made Schwartz rich. Schwartz first received a payment that, adjusted for inflation, exceeds $700,000 today, and later earned several million dollars more in royalties as the book became a bestseller 5.

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To gather material for the book, Tony Schwartz visited Mar-a-Lago on weekends. It quickly became clear that Trump couldn’t sit for hours answering the writer’s questions — he was bursting with energy, juggling several things at once, and easily lost interest in any single topic. Schwartz was already considering quitting the project when he found another way to get it done.

He stopped going to Mar-a-Lago and began showing up daily at the Trump Tower office, where he listened to hundreds of hours of Trump’s conversations with various people — none of whom had any idea there was another pair of ears on the parallel line. 6 According to Schwartz, that’s how he realized there was no difference between the private and public Trump — he was always the same, interpreting every event to his own advantage 7 8.

When the work on the book was finished, Trump set out to promote it, while Schwartz started his own consulting business. Deeply exhausted by Trump, he founded a company called The Energy Project, which focused on energy management, helping people like Trump use their energy more effectively.

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The Art of the Deal was published in November 1987 and remained on The New York Times bestseller list for 48 weeks, 13 of them at number one. Trump promoted the book as if he were running a presidential campaign. Full pages in top newspapers were devoted to his calls for a tougher foreign policy. He handed out bumper stickers saying “I Love Donald Trump” and spoke at a Republican gathering in New Hampshire, giving a speech that was taken as a bid for the presidential primaries, although that never actually happened 9 10.

In the first months after the book’s release, Trump called Schwartz three times a day to discuss profits, reviews, and the sale of rights in other countries. Later, as sales declined, Trump forgot about Schwartz. But Schwartz did not forget about Trump.

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In June 2015, Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States, saying, “We need a leader who wrote The Art of the Deal.” Tony Schwartz responded with a tweet: «Many thanks Donald Trump for suggesting I run for president, based on fact that I wrote The Art of the Deal. No plan to accept a draft». 11 At the time, it seemed like a failed joke.

As Schwartz later explained, he had hoped Trump wouldn’t last long among the candidates, but when things turned out differently, he decided to speak out to save the world. “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,” he said, adding that if he were writing a book about Trump in 2016, he would have titled it The Sociopath. 12 Schwartz’s interview in The New Yorker was published under the headline “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” but that wasn’t all.

In another interview, Schwartz said that Trum “he certainly strikes me as someone without much of a soul or a conscience or emotional range”. 13 A little later, Schwartz reached out to Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the presidential race, and offered advice on how to beat him in the debates. 14 It’s unknown whether he told Clinton anything new, since she also knew Trump personally, but he explained his actions again as motivated by a desire to “save the country and the world.” 15 It seems that speaking in hyperboles is loved not only by Mr. President.

In 2017, Schwartz wrote a chapter for the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, in which 27 mental health professionals publicly assessed the president’s behavior. That is, 27 mental health professionals and Tony Schwartz.

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It seems someone may be overestimating their role. According to Schwartz, he created Trump’s appealing public image: instead of a man interested only in power and money, Trump appeared to the world as a dealmaker for whom deals were an art. However, long before meeting Schwartz, Trump was already positioning himself in the media as a top-level dealmaker. For example, in a 1984 interview with The Washington Post, Trump said he wanted to negotiate with the USSR on nuclear arms reduction on behalf of the United States. He believed he could handle it better than previous American representatives. “Some people have an ability to negotiate,” he said. “It's an art you're basically born with. You either have it or you don't.” 16

The idea to write a book came from Saul Newhouse, the owner of Random House, who noticed that magazines featuring Trump on the cover sold better. 17 The Art of the Deal gave Trump wider recognition beyond New York. Later, he published several more bestsellers. Critics mocked his books for self-praise and calling others losers, so every subsequent Trump ghostwriter also captured the author’s voice well. 18 Trump became a nationwide figure thanks to the reality show for entrepreneurs The Apprentice, which he hosted until he announced his candidacy for president in 2015.

Sometimes Schwartz contradicts himself. In one interview, he said that when Trump’s casinos went bankrupt and he was losing millions every day, “No, I don’t think Donald Trump spent one minute worrying about debt,” 19 while in another, he said that Trump “have been terrified.” 20 Schwartz doesn’t consider the purchase of Mar-a-Lago particularly profitable, because Trump overpaid for the hundred-meter beachfront lot, as if the price of the beach had value on its own.

Schwartz announced that he would donate all royalties from the 2016 sales of The Art of the Deal to several charities. Presumably, he kept the royalties from previous and subsequent years for himself. This kind of contrition somehow recalls “a farce of fumbling and bumbling.”

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Professional ghostwriters criticized Tony Schwartz because he kept claiming that he had written the book himself and even spoke poorly about his client in public. He was reminded of the obvious: you shouldn’t ghostwrite if you don’t understand that the client will consider the book their own. 21 Additionally, Schwartz admitted that part of The Art of the Deal was fiction, which didn’t sit well with many people either. 22

Did Schwartz reveal anything new about Trump when he decided to speak out after thirty years of quietly collecting royalties from a book he considered partly fictional? No. Trump — his character, actions, books, business practices, and authorial voice — had already been discussed publicly thousands of times. But, without a doubt, Schwartz added more fuel to the fire.

The Washington Post published a commentary in which Larry Gondelman mocked Trump’s negotiating skills. According to Gondelman, a good dealmaker wouldn’t hire as a ghostwriter someone who had written a sarcastic article about him, wouldn’t give them half the fee and royalties, and if he did hire them, he would have signed a non-disclosure agreement. Thus, the deal with Schwartz is the best evidence that Trump does not possess the art of making deals. 23

But hiring your critics is a common practice in business and politics, and a non-disclosure agreement won’t help if people have issues with professional ethics. In the book Trump Revealed, The Washington Post journalists thank the people who spoke to them confidentially, despite having signed non-disclosure agreements with Trump. Trump’s niece, psychologist Mary Trump, broke a similar agreement by writing Too Much and Never Enough, and the court sided with her. Mary accused her uncle of being toxic and greedy, but she wrote the book after receiving an advance of several million dollars.

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As Schwartz said, after the first 2016 interview, Trump called him, called him very disloyal, spent a few minutes insulting and threatening him, and then said, “Have a nice life,” and hung up. 24

A few days later, a lawyer for the Trump Organization contacted Schwartz, demanding that he return the money he had received for the book and provide written assurances that he would not spread false information about Trump. Schwartz’s lawyer responded that the demands were unfounded, 25 and Trump once again forgot about Schwartz.

Part 2. The Indulgence of Leerhsen

If Trump wrote his first book to glorify his negotiating skills, then the second one — Surviving at the Top — was meant to restore his reputation after bankruptcy. Believing that the signs of success are media presence, street recognition, a yacht, a list of businesses, clever naming, and connections with celebrities, Trump devoted an entire book to showing that he had all of these. Some critics suggested placing this work in the “humor” category. 26

The book was published in 1990. Trump wrote it together with Charles Leerhsen, who at the time was an editor at Newsweek and had experience in ghostwriting.

“‘Well, what was that like?’ people often ask me, at a cocktail or dinner party, if it somehow comes up that I was once a ghostwriter for Donald Trump. The question puts me in a tight spot. If my first word back isn’t extravagantly negative, I fear they’ll take me for a Trumpster, turn on their heel, and leave me conversing with my canapé.

But the truth is that the year or so I spent in his pre-carroty-orange presence circa 1990, writing a sequel to The Art of the Deal, was at times a hoot and often highly educational.” — This is how Charles Lirsen describes his experience working with Trump. 27

One could stop there, but Leerhsen goes further. According to him, in 1990 the 44-year-old Trump had no friends, no manners, and not even a basic school-level education. He was socially awkward, often invented incredible stories, and sometimes erupted into shouting and empty threats. He valued flattery and loyalty. His lack of friends and naivety in relationships with women evoked sympathy. And he paid Leerhsen a six-figure sum for working on the book — enough to send three children to college.

Part 3. The Candor of Shiflett

The first ghostwriter to speak publicly about his experience working with Trump was Dave Shiflett. In the late 1990s, Trump was considering a presidential campaign and hired Shiflett to write the political book Trump: The America We Deserve, which was published in 2000.

“Mr. Trump and I made a pretty good team. He needed words, I needed money, and together we explored what he would do if he became president. I have long considered the resulting book my first published work of fiction,” 28 Shiflett said in a 2015 interview.

As Shiflett said, Trump didn’t drink alcohol or coffee, didn’t smoke, and if he weren’t so attracted to beautiful women, he would have resembled a closet Mormon. He had a good sense of humor, spoke modestly about his parents, judged himself harshly for failed marriages, and was a strong supporter of diversity, inclusivity, and civility. His political views were progressive: he supported abortion, a huge tax on the rich, and national healthcare. 29 When talking about running for president in 2000, Trump was merely trying to draw attention to himself.

Trump, who ran for president in 2015, behaved differently. Out of fear of terrorists and the establishment, he began speaking radically. Shiflett considered the biggest problem to be that, at the moment that should have been his finest hour, he “acts as if he had been raised in a barn.” 30 Trump doesn’t adhere to a clear ideology, and his campaign behavior shows no class. 31

Before working with Trump, Shiflett had worked with demanding clients who carefully checked every word. According to Shiflett, Trump didn’t even read his own book. After writing a single speech for Trump, Shiflett concluded that he was an improvisational speaker. “Being a speechwriter for Trump would be an odd job. It would be like doing musical scores for the Grateful Dead because they never stick to the score,” Shiflett said. 32

Part 4. The Loyalty of McIver

Meredith McIver worked for the Trump Organization for a decade and co-wrote five books with Trump. In particular, they created How to Get Rich (2004) and Trump 101: The Way to Success (2006) together. McIver’s reputation suffered when Trump decided to sue over someone else’s book.

In 2005, writer Timothy L. O'Brien stated in his book that Trump’s fortune was in the millions, not billions. Trump filed a lawsuit, claiming damage to his reputation as a billionaire, and demanded five billion dollars from O'Brien. Under oath in court, Trump said that the $9.2 billion figure of debt in his books was a mistake made by writer Meredith McIver. 33

"I owed billions upon billions of dollars, $9.2 billion to be exact," — the attorney quoted from Trump’s book How to Get Rich. — In the midst of the crash, I passed a beggar [on] the street and realized he was worth $9.2 billion more than I was."

"Yes," Trump said.

"Was that an accurate number?"

"No, that is a mistake," Trump said. "And I don't know it got in there." 34

He added that he didn’t know the exact amount, so he preferred to just say “billions,” and he noticed the mistake when the book was published, which he pointed out to the writer.

The attorney cited another book, Trump 101: The Way to Success, co-written with McIver, where the same figure was also mentioned.

"I told the book writer about it, and she obviously put it in again. She probably forgot," Trump said, when asked why he had listed a debt of about $9 billion. "I would love you to question her about it." 35

McIver probably would not have loved that. Hopefully, Trump was more generous with her than with Leerhsen and Shiflett, because unlike them, she showed patience until the end and even years later did not give a scandalous interview. Especially since the situation repeated itself.

At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Melania Trump delivered a speech that included passages copied from Michelle Obama’s 2008 address. This sparked a wave of criticism. McIver took responsibility, explaining that Melania had read her excerpts from Obama’s speech as examples, and McIver mistakenly included them in the text without checking. 36

Trump did not publicly criticize McIver and only praised Melania’s speech. According to McIver, she wanted to resign out of guilt, but Trump did not accept her resignation. “She is terrific, she’s a terrific woman,” he said in an interview. “She’s been with us a long time and she just made a mistake.” 37

Part 5. The Ambiguity of Trump

In one thing, Tony Schwartz was right: at 38, it was too early for Donald Trump to write a biography, because his greatest achievements and failures were still ahead.

Michael Kranish, a journalist at The Washington Post and co-author of Trump Revealed, wrote in 2017 that the real story of Trump began only after he entered the White House, because no other role of his reaches the level of the President of the United States. 38 Probably, someday at Mar-a-Lago, Trump will sit by the fireplace with another ghostwriter and write a bestseller about his presidency.

Someday, books about Trump’s work with ghostwriters in the White House will appear, and they will also break sales records. According to publishers, books about politicians usually sell poorly, except for those about Trump’s political activities. 39

He has long been the U.S. president about whom the most books have been written — over 3,000 — and among them, an exceptionally high percentage are bestsellers. Memoirs by staffers, investigative journalism, and even a collection of essays by “mental health professionals” are just a small sample of the genres in which new books about Trump continue to appear. It seems he alone could keep the book market from collapsing. In 2020, a book about books on Trump even came out. Carlos Lozada, a critic for The Washington Post, read 150 bestsellers and wrote a book titled What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.

Directly or indirectly, for decades Trump has created a lot of well-paid work for authors and ghostwriters, who, together with him, become part of history. Whether that’s good or bad remains to be seen. But there’s no doubt that scathing reviews about clients do no favors for ghostwriters.

References

  1. Michael Kranish, Marc Fisher. Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President. January 10, 2017. Scribner; Reprint edition (January 10, 2017).
  2. A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story by Tony Schwartz New York Magazine, February 11, 1985, pp. 34-41. Available online on Google Books.
  3. Tony Schwartz. Co-Author, Trump: The Art of the Deal. This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore conducted on July 12, 2016. It has been edited for clarity and length. URL: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/tony-schwartz/.
  4. Ibіd.
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  11. Tony Schwartz. "Many thanks Donald Trump for suggesting I run for president, based on fact that I wrote The Art of the Deal. No plan to accept a draft." Twitter, 17 червня 2015. https://x.com/tonyschwartz/status/610963819276443648.
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  21. Emily Heil. In breaking silence, Donald Trump’s ghostwriter broke the genre’s code, July 22, 2016. URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2016/07/22/in-breaking-silence-donald-trumps-ghostwriter-broke-the-genres-code/.
  22. (1) Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig. Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses, May 8, 2019. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/07/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html. (2) Eileen Sullivan. Trump Defends $1.17 Billion in Losses as Just for ‘Tax Purposes’, May 8, 2019. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/us/politics/trump-tax-investigation.html. (3) Tony Schwartz. May 8, 2019 URL: https://x.com/tonyschwartz/status/1126233571696492544.
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  26. John Rothchild. The Taj Mahal of Debt: TRUMP Surviving at the Top by Donald J. Trump with Charles Leerhsen, Sept. 2, 1990. URL: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-09-02-bk-1954-story.html.
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  29. Andrew Kaczynski. Trump Co-Author: I Won't Vote For "No Class" Trump, December 30, 2015. URL: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/andrewkaczynski/trump-co-author-i-wont-vote-for-no-class-trump#.cm0ROEEqk.
  30. Dave Shiflett. Another Time, Another Trump, Dave Shiflett, Dec. 21, 2015. URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-time-another-trump-1450742675.
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  33. David A. Fahrenthold. Melania Trump’s speechwriter was also blamed for inserting errors in Donald Trump’s books, July 20, 2016. Robert O'Harrow Jr. contributed to this report. URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07/20/melania-trumps-speechwriter-was-also-blamed-for-inserting-errors-in-donald-trumps-books/.
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  35. Ibіd.
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  37. Ibіd.
  38. Michael Kranish. A fierce will to win pushed Donald Trump to the top, January 19, 2017. URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-fierce-will-to-win-pushed-donald-trump-to-the-top/2017/01/17/6b36c2ce-c628-11e6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html.
  39. Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter. Trump Books Keep Coming, and Readers Can’t Stop Buying, 2020. Updated Sept. 10, 2021. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/books/trump-books.html?searchResultPosition=3.

Change: Oct. 6, 2025, 5:11 p.m.