Politics

It’s arguably a waste of time to read Donald Trump’s books. In the first place, he didn’t write them; they weren’t even written by the same ghostwriter. His first three books, 1987’s The Art of the Deal, 1990’s Surviving at the Top (republished a year later as The Art of Survival, when Trump’s position could no longer be described as “at the top”), and 1997’s The Art of the Comeback, have three different authors standing in for the Donald: Tony Schwartz, Charles Leerhsen, and Kate Bohner.

Trump is also an inveterate liar, so there’s not much point in parsing the details of some triumphant deal as he recounts them: They have inevitably been altered to reflect favorably on him, so to try to figure out where he’s fudging is to engage in a useless and tedious fact-checking exercise. His Art of… books are works of advertisement—or, as we should say now with the benefit of hindsight, works of propaganda, the production of which is perhaps his main gift. And although these books are all nominally memoirs, Trump is not one for introspection, so we can’t hope to learn much about his inner depths, mostly because he has none: He’s a self-admittedly shallow person.