Donald Trump: Six Theses
Oxford University Press has decided to publish a second edition of The Reactionary Mind, which will come out some time around Labor Day. It’ll be completely reorganized: I’m going to overhaul the ordering structure of the chapters, I’m going to delete several chapters that I don’t think really worked, I’m going to add several new chapters. One of those new chapters will be on Trump, an assessment of his philosophy, the movement and party that produced him, and his first 100 days in office. It’ll be called The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.
In preparation for this new edition, I’ve been reading Trump’s The Art of the Deal. It was ghost-written by Tony Schwartz, who has disavowed the book as a literary Frankenstein that propelled Trump to the position he is in today. Which is odd: Schwartz seems to think the book created a fake image of Trump as a charming, brash, rakish entrepreneur, an image that Trump parlayed into a path to the White House. The truth is just the opposite: the book reveals Trump to be a cosmic bore, an epic blowhard who imagines himself to be more interesting than he is. As autobiographies go, I’d say it’s one of the more revealing ones.
Here’s what I’ve managed to glean so far:
1. Donald Trump talks on the phone a lot. Fifty to 100 times a day.
2. On page 2, Donald Trump tells you that he doesn’t take lunch. On page 7, he says it again. On page 8, Donald Trump goes out to lunch. On page 34, he does it again.
3. Donald Trump likes earth tones. He doesn’t like primary colors.
4. At 12:45 on a Friday, Donald Trump’s then wife Ivana asks him to join her on a tour of a possible private school for their daughter Ivanka. Trump says he’s too busy. She says, “You haven’t got anything else to do.” He snorts, “Sometimes I think she really believes it.” Four hours later, David Letterman shows up at Trump Tower, wanting to film a sequence between him, Trump, and two out-of-towners from Kentucky. Trump agrees.When the sequence is over, Letterman says: “It’s Friday afternoon, you get a call from us out of the blue, you tell us we can come up. Now you’re standing here talking to us. You must not have much to do.” Trump replies: “Truthfully, David, you’re right. Absolutely nothing to do.”
5. Donald Trump says that the key to entrepreneurial success is “total focus.” Successful tycoons like himself have “a controlled neurosis.” They are “obsessive, they’re driven, they’re single-minded.” (Schumpeter, incidentally, agrees.) On page 1, Donald Trump says that when it comes to work, “I play it very loose…I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.”
6. Donald Trump says, “What I’m doing is about as close as you’re going to get, in the twentieth century, to the quality of Versailles.”