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A Ghost Writer for Donald Trump

when is ghost writing no longer ghost writing… apparently when you did all the work but get upset because somebody puts their name on your ideas…

Let’s start at the grand beginning of all of this… a semi-arrogantly written article in The New Yorker

Schwartz thought about publishing an article describing his reservations about Trump, but he hesitated, knowing that, since he’d cashed in on the flattering “Art of the Deal,” his credibility and his motives would be seen as suspect. Yet watching the campaign was excruciating. Schwartz decided that if he kept mum and Trump was elected he’d never forgive himself. In June, he agreed to break his silence and give his first candid interview about the Trump he got to know while acting as his Boswell.

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all

Bolding added by me…

So Trump’s ghost writer has decided to speak out because his morality just couldn’t let the issue go on any longer… The lipsticked pig has escaped from his pen and is now wreaking havoc on the townspeople.

Well… it now seems that a lawyer of Donald Trump’s has been sicced on Schwartz the ghost writer! It seems somebody at Donald Trump and company did not like the fact that Schwartz claims he wrote the book. Or maybe it’s not really about the claims and they just want to try to punish Schwartz for saying things they don’t like (something trump and peter thiel have in common). I don’t know.
Here’s a bit from TechDirt on the lawyer’s letter…

Trump apparently found the time to have his lawyer dash off a ridiculously stupid cease and desist letter. It’s the kind of cease and desist letter that we tend to see from complete cranks, rather than serious businessmen, let alone the official nominee for President from a major political party. Everything about the letter is flat out ridiculous (and at points, contradictory). Throughout it, Trump’s Chief Legal Officer, Jason Greenblatt, keeps saying that Schwartz’s statements are defamatory, but fails to name a single one. As has been pointed out many times, if you’re screaming “defamation” but fail to point to a factual statement that is defamatory, you’re just making noise.

The letter also claims that Schwartz is attempting to “rewrite history” and even starts out suggesting that Schwartz’s claim of writing the book is an exaggeration, because the contract was merely to “provide certain services.” But, rather than actually follow through on that line of argument, Greenblatt then more or less admits it, while arguing something totally different: that the book was successful because of Trump’s association with it, not because of Schwartz. But Schwartz never argued otherwise, and that’s completely besides the point.

“Mr. Trump hired you to provide certain services in connection with the preparation of the Book. Although it has long-suited you to dramatically overstate your work on the Book in order to further your own career, (for example, telling George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America that, “I wrote every word of [the Book], Donald Trump made a few red marks when I handed him the manuscript, but that was it.”), let me set the record straight about the origin of the Book: Mr. Trump was the source of all of the material in the Book and the inspiration for every word in the Book. You would not have had access to any of the information that appeared in the Book without Mr. Trump. He was the mastermind behind the deals described in the Book, and he provided you with the facts and facets of each of these deals in order for you to write them down. What’s more, Mr. Trump is wholly responsible for the great success of the Book, not you. It was his ingenuity that made the deals described in the Book happen, and it was his promotion of the Book that made it a runaway success.”

Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160721/00504135025/donald-trump-threatens-art-deal-ghostwriter-claiming-his-disloyalty-somehow-amounts-to-defamation.shtml

The Truth

So we have the actual writer of the book admitting to us, and providing some verification through his old journal, that he was very selective in his editing and in essence wrote a book of fiction that’s been marketed as non-fiction… which of course is being dismissed as a pot of lies by Trump and company. Which is all very bothersome.

We’ve seemingly been presented with two contradictory tales concerning the same book… which means we now have to go ‘who’s the liar here, why are they lying, and what’s the proof‘. And that’s pretty problematic because while we’re trying to enlighten ourselves and find that truth… a huge amount of time is going to be eaten up. By the time we find that truth, everybody else will have moved on and simply won’t care that their trust was abused.
Making the truth meaningless.
Even when you remind people that ‘hey you were deceived and here’s the proof‘… they will merely shout you down.

But the writers out there… well they don’t exactly forget do they. This is their world and I would think non-fiction writers would be raising some very loud ethical concerns over this whole affair and would be demanding answers. Because you know, I’m pretty sure selling a book as truthful when apparently it was anything but is somewhat immoral and makes all non-fiction writers look bad…

To Sum Up

Donald Trump and his ghost writer have contradictory claims. People are either going to blindly believe one or the other. Nobody will invest the time to actually get to the truth of the matter. My writing on it will be irrelevant.

You will then become exasperated because life just doesn’t make sense and deep down you hoped you lived in a rational world with good people and instead you live in a world where people constantly dismiss the truths they don’t like and embrace the lies they do like. (E.g. Donald Trump is a good business person.)

 

An Aside

What’s funny is I wrote about one of Donald Trump’s other books a few weeks ago!

While looking for those Amazon Prime day deals that apparently don’t really exist… I stumbled across a gem! Donald Trump’s and Robert T. Kiyosaki’s wrote one of those books people get you as a gift but that you never read and just leave on the bottom shelf of your bookcase hoping it’ll disappear!
And nobody showed up to buy it…
One hour left and ZERO PERCENT of the books have been bought…

 

Honestly, Donald Trump’s forays into literature (which really just seems to involve putting his name on stuff) has gone so poorly. If I had my name on either of the books I mentioned above I would be wildly embarrassed. I mean think about it… here’s one book that seems to be wildly facetious (The Art of the Deal) and here’s another book that can’t sell jack shit (Midas Touch)!

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