In an appearance Thursday on MSNBC’s The Beat , Donald Trump biographer Tony Schwartz opened up about the president and his negotiation skills, commenting that a lot of the deals he had once covered — as well as other deals that followed — weren’t as successful as they were once hyped up to be.
As quoted by Mediaite , Schwartz looked back at Trump: The Art of the Deal , the 1987 bestseller he co-wrote with the president. He revealed to The Beat host Ari Melber that it was “unfortunate” how he ended up writing about a number of deals Trump was involved in, due to how they ultimately ended up as “failures.”
“The number of deals he’s made over the years since then have overwhelmingly been failures,” Schwartz added.
“It’s [an] accident of history that he is president. But as a deal-maker, he is really one of the worst I’ve ever come across.”
In addition, Schwartz elaborated on the character traits required to be a successful deal-maker and opined that Trump doesn’t have a lot of them in place.
“[Deal-making] requires understanding the other side — so it requires empathy. It requires humility. It requires courage. These are qualities Donald Trump doesn’t have in spades.”
Per Raw Story , Melber agreed with Schwartz’s points about the necessary skills for deal-making, opining that Trump’s perceived shortcomings in this area could be a reason why he hasn’t successfully convinced anyone to agree to his request for border wall funding. As of this writing, the partial government shutdown that resulted from the stalemate over wall funding is on its 21st day, with about 800,000 federal workers still on unpaid furlough, as noted by CNBC .
Trump presidency an ‘accident of history’ and deals he bragged about in ‘Art of the Deal’ later flopped: co-author https://t.co/3OstNMsR1U
— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 11, 2019
Reacting to Melber’s comments that Trump’s “lies” about the reasons for his border wall funding demands are the “fundamental con” in light of the shutdown, Schwartz agreed, saying that these justifications represented the president’s “most fraudulent” attempt at a deal.
“He’s got a claim about what’s going on at the border that is transparently not true.”
Tony Schwartz’s critical assessment of Donald Trump’s lack of deal-making skills — and handling of the border wall situation — came just a few months after a similar appearance on MSNBC’s The Beat , where he called the president out for his character. As previously reported by the Inquisitr , Schwartz told Melber in October that he sees Trump as a “black hole” who has “every reason” to feel like a fraud. These remarks were made in the aftermath of a New York Times report that alleged the president utilized blatantly fraudulent tactics to avoid paying taxes on most of the fortune he had inherited from his father, real estate developer Fred Trump.
