The Art of the Deal: A Review of Donald J. Trump’s Book

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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Random House printed 150,000 copies of Trump: The Art of the Deal in November 1987. The book went on to hold the No. 1 spot on The New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks and stayed on the list for 48, according to Wikipedia’s account of its sales. Few business memoirs from the 1980s still draw this much argument, and nearly all of it comes back to two questions: who wrote it, and how much of it can be believed.

The book is part memoir and part manual. It follows a New York real estate developer through the deals that built his name, and it distills his method into eleven rules for readers who want to copy him. A review written now has to judge it three ways: as a story, as advice, and as a document with a disputed paper trail.

Who Wrote It, and How It Was Made

The cover credit reads “Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz,” and it was the first book published under Trump’s name. Schwartz was a magazine journalist who had worked at New York and Newsweek. He began interviewing Trump in 1985 and, per Wikipedia, was paid $250,000 up front with half the royalties.

Schwartz told NPR in 2016 that the project took 18 months, including eight or nine months of sitting in Trump’s office nearly every morning. The same Wikipedia account says he also listened in on Trump’s office calls for several months, and that material became the opening chapter, “Dealing: A Week in the Life.” Later chapters take up individual projects, among them the Grand Hyatt and Trump Tower.

The rules arrive inside the stories rather than as a separate manual. The book contains an 11-step formula for business success that Wikipedia says was inspired by Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking.

Eleven Rules, Graded by a Chicago Professor

George Wu, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, went through the rules one at a time in an August 2016 piece for Chicago Booth Review. His list: think big, protect the downside, maximize the options, know your market, use your leverage, enhance your location, get the word out, fight back, deliver the goods, contain the costs, have fun.

His verdict was mixed. Wu agreed that many negotiators aim too low, then added that inflated expectations can lead people to turn down good deals. He treated “maximize the options” as standard negotiation theory, since outside alternatives are a negotiator’s main source of leverage. “Use your leverage” struck him as correct but vague, because it never says how to find any. Two of the eleven, delivering the goods and containing costs, read to him as management advice more than negotiating advice.

Walking into a negotiation shouldn’t be like going to the dentist.

George Wu, Chicago Booth Review, 2016, on the rule “have fun”

Wu named two ideas as the most useful in the set: building outside options and guarding against overconfidence. That is a respectable result for a 1987 business memoir, and a modest one for a book sold as a method.

Truthful Hyperbole

The phrase that outlived the rest of the book is “truthful hyperbole.” As FactCheck.org quoted the passage in 2019, Trump calls it “an innocent form of exaggeration” and presents it as a tool of promotion. A line from the same stretch of the book caught the attention of a Christian Science Monitor reviewer in 2015:

A quiet 1980s New York office at dawn with a typewriter, interview tapes and a rotary phone

I play to people’s fantasies.

Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal, as quoted by The Christian Science Monitor

The same review notes that the book says promotion only works if the product delivers, and that Trump describes himself as generous to people who treat him well and relentless toward anyone who does not. Not everything attributed to the book is in it, though. A meme that circulated for years claimed the book advises telling people a lie three times so they will believe anything. FactCheck.org found no such passage in December 2019, and Snopes had reached the same conclusion in 2016.

Some of the book’s stories have been challenged by people who were in the room. George Ross, one of Trump’s lawyers on Trump Tower, wrote that he was the one who explained the zoning rules and air rights to Trump, and that the Tiffany deal was legitimate and owed to Fred Trump’s connections, which is not how the book tells it. That account comes by way of Wikipedia’s summary of Ross’s writing, so the original deserves a look before anyone leans on it.

The Ghostwriter Changes His Mind

By 2016 Schwartz had turned on the book. He told The New Yorker that Trump wrote none of it beyond striking a few critical mentions of colleagues, and that a book written today would be called The Sociopath, as Wikipedia summarizes the interview. CBS Los Angeles carried the line that traveled furthest:

I put lipstick on a pig.

Tony Schwartz, as reported by CBS Los Angeles, July 18, 2016

Days later, on NPR, he said “I did it for the money” and that the decision had weighed on him over the years. Trump has said he wrote the book himself. After Schwartz went public, Trump’s attorneys demanded that Schwartz give up his royalties, and in 2019 Schwartz suggested the book be recategorized as fiction, citing the tax losses Trump reported from 1985 to 1994. Both details come from Wikipedia’s entry on the book.

Sales, Reviews and the Bestseller Claim

The No. 1 run is documented. The larger claim is not. In July 2015 Trump called the book the best-selling business book of all time on CNN, and PolitiFact rated that False. Some reports put its sales near one million copies, a figure PolitiFact could not verify. The Nielsen BookScan tally of print sales at major booksellers since 2001 came in under 200,000, against more than two million each for How to Win Friends and Influence People and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

A chessboard mid-game on a boardroom table with one side arranged as a skyline of towers

Critics split at publication. Publishers Weekly welcomed it as a disarming, engaging personal history, and John Kenneth Galbraith, reviewing it in New York in 1988, objected that it said little about construction and leaned on the deal itself; both reactions are relayed by Wikipedia. Gary Belis of Fortune was the harshest. In the January 4, 1988 issue he judged the book of little use in business schools and the eleven guidelines mostly obvious or doubtful, and he likened it to a “Christmas newsletter about somebody you don’t even know.” He still singled out the account of Walter Hoving and the Tiffany handshake as insightful.

A fair summary of the record: the rules hold up where they overlap with standard negotiation advice, as Wu found, and the contested ground is the book’s portrait of Trump himself and its versions of individual deals. Readers who treat it as a primary source on either will want to check it against the reporting above.

On Screen: A Dropped TV Film and a Depp Parody

In 1988 Trump and Ted Turner announced plans for a television film based on the book. Those plans were largely abandoned by 1991, according to Wikipedia, which also reports that producer Mark Burnett credited the book with steering him into television and, later, toward the idea of a show starring Trump.

The best-known screen version is a parody. Funny or Die released Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie on February 10, 2016, a roughly 50-minute film written by Joe Randa and directed by Jeremy Konner, with Johnny Depp as Trump. The trailer is on Funny Or Die’s official YouTube channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote The Art of the Deal?
The credit reads “Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz.” Schwartz says he wrote it. Trump has said he wrote it himself.

When was it published, and how did it sell?
Random House published it in November 1987 with a first printing of 150,000 copies. It reached No. 1 on The New York Times list and stayed there 13 weeks.

What are the eleven rules?
Think big, protect the downside, maximize the options, know your market, use your leverage, enhance your location, get the word out, fight back, deliver the goods, contain the costs and have fun, in the order George Wu lists them.

What does “truthful hyperbole” mean?
It is Trump’s term for exaggeration used to promote something. He calls it an innocent form of exaggeration and an effective form of promotion.

Is it the best-selling business book ever?
No. PolitiFact rated the claim False in 2015, finding that several other business books have sold far more copies.

Is there a movie?
A 1988 plan for a television film was largely abandoned by 1991. The 2016 Funny or Die parody starring Johnny Depp is the best-known screen treatment.

Where to Read It

Trump: The Art of the Deal (affiliate link). This is the listing the buy button at the top of the page points to.

A vintage 1980s television glowing in a dark living room beside a stack of paperbacks

Further Reading

Plaintiff Trial Lawyer Tips, a WordPress blog by trial lawyer Paul Luvera, ran the eleven rules past the courtroom in January 2017 and endorsed several of them, adding cautions about ethics and expert advice. His complaint about his own profession fits the book’s “think big” rule: “Too often plaintiff lawyers take the easy and comfortable deal.” For the academic grading, George Wu’s Chicago Booth Review piece is the best companion to the book itself.

Sources

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