After outrage erupted over his decision to award a federal contract to host the 2020 G7 summit meeting to himself, Donald Trump suddenly reversed his decision on Saturday night, announcing via tweet that he would now order a search for a different location, as The Inquisitr reported. It was announced on Thursday that the G7 summit would be held at his Trump National Doral resort just outside of Miami, Florida.
Trump, in his Twitter posts, blamed “the Hostile Media & their Democrat Partners” for his sudden change of heart. The announcement was a rare instance in which the president appeared to at least come close to admitting a mistake — something that he “never” does, according to the writer who spent months with Trump ghostwriting his 1987 bestselling book The Art of the Deal.
And according to that writer, Tony Schwartz, the fact that Trump gave in to pressure and changed his mind about taking the G7 contract for himself shows that Trump is feeling the heat from the current impeachment proceedings against him, and other scandals. Congressional Democrats and other experts said that Trump taking the G7 contract would be a clear violation of the Constitution’s ban on federal officials taking payments from foreign governments.
“One more sign that he is feeling threatened and running scared,” Schwartz wrote on Saturday evening on his Twitter account.
The Art of the Deal became a runaway bestseller and continues to earn royalties for both Trump and Schwartz today, more than three decades after its initial publication. According to Trump’s own most recent financial disclosure forms, cited by NBC News , the president collected as much as $1 million in royalties from the book in 2018 alone.
But despite the financial rewards, Schwartz has described collaborating with Trump, even back in 1987, as “deeply dispiriting.”
Writing in a Washington Post op-ed on Friday, Schwartz said his experience with the then-41-year-old real estate mogul demoralized him, due to Trump’s “almost complete self-absorption, the shortness of his attention span and the fact that he lied as a matter of course, without apparent guilt.”
Schwartz now works as a motivational speaker and corporate consultant who helps business executives and employees lead “healthier, happier, more productive and more meaningful lives.” But key to the personal development required to achieve that goal, Schwartz said, is one quality Trump simply does not possess — “humility.”
“Trump confuses humility with humiliation and defaults instead to hubris and grandiosity,” wrote Schwartz in the op-ed, in which he also said that in 18 months of close collaboration, Trump never once asked Schwartz a question about his life, and never even paid attention to his then-young three children “for more than a cursory couple of minutes.”
