This is the strangest book. I would have been more than happy to have gone throughout my life without ever knowing who Trump was. I don’t watch TV and had never seen his show, which I believe truly was one of the greatest shows of all time, but I still don’t watch television, so I guess I’ll just have to take his word for that. And I’ve never been all that interested in business, and although he is the hotel and real estate visionary of the century (at least, according to the blurb at the back o

This is the strangest book. I would have been more than happy to have gone throughout my life without ever knowing who Trump was. I don’t watch TV and had never seen his show, which I believe truly was one of the greatest shows of all time, but I still don’t watch television, so I guess I’ll just have to take his word for that. And I’ve never been all that interested in business, and although he is the hotel and real estate visionary of the century (at least, according to the blurb at the back of this book) I would have remained unlikely to have read a book with this title. And even though he is clearly a fabulous deal maker, deal making has never really struck me as something I would particularly like to spend time reading about. So, if it wasn’t for his political career – one, I can only assume this book helped along, I would never have read this book at all.



This book is a hagiography, rather than an autobiography – the fact Trump himself didn’t write this book (the journalist and publisher say he played no part at all in writing it), he merely paid for it to be written, shifts it from one category into the other. Even with this being a hagiography, he doesn’t come out of it terribly well. He is singularly unlikeable, which is clearly his tragic flaw, since he is obviously dying to be loved. The problem is that he seems unable to quite understand that other people have feelings too.



This book is a series of triumphs that are almost invariably due to Trump’s very own ‘instinct’ for a ‘deal’. He doesn’t seem to notice that withholding information from people you are dealing with is effectively lying. That getting people to come see a building site where worker are being paid to ‘look busy’ is also lying. He presents himself as a constant winner, and this image is, unfortunately, undermined by our being told very early in this book that he believes he must think big and bullshit big to present an image – because exaggeration and excess play well in people’s dreams and that the only real promotion is self-promotion – again, even when based on lies. And so, given all that, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that just about everything we are going to be told in this book is, well, a lie. Even if it is called ‘marketing’ or ‘advertising’ or whatever else.



And so, there are things that are said repeatedly throughout this book, but I’ve no way to know if they are true. For instance, he invariably says that he finishes his projects on time and on budget, or ahead of time and under budget and so on, while everyone else finishes them over time and over budget. And perhaps this was always true, but I don’t know and I don’t feel I can trust this book to have not been anything other than a series of cherrypicked best examples.



He also comes across as a remarkable hater. I mean, this guy knows how to hold a grudge and it is clear that one of the reasons he had this book written was to put some of his enemies in their place. The Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, gets an extended hatchet job done on him, for instance. The thing is that even people he says nice things about are presented mostly by their flaws. For example, lawyers are often described as brilliant, but that they put off the jury by their excessively showy clothes. Or someone rich doesn’t have showy enough clothes. Or someone he doesn’t like is criticised for being overweight. He is a man who sees the fault in others and this could well be his defining characteristic – it is a repeated theme throughout this book, and like I said, true for friend and enemy alike.



I want to focus on his instincts. This is another repeated theme. Often, when he is about to make a deal, everyone on his side is telling him not to do it, but he just has a feeling about the deal that means he has to ignore everyone else’s ‘head’ and go with his ‘gut’. Naturally, this inevitably and invariably pays off. This works both ways, of course, so when he pulls out of deals too, it is because of his gut. As he says at one point when he missed a bullet, “That experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make”. Now, what is particularly odd about him saying stuff like this is that other than the gut lesson, he doesn’t particularly seem to follow any of the other bits of this advice. I mean, he is a real estate agent and building developer who gets into hotels, television shows, casinos, and American rules football.



So much of this book is based on his ‘instincts’ or ‘gut’, and that makes this book almost entirely useless for what I’d just assumed it was intended for. I sort of thought this was a kind of ‘I got rich – you can get rich too – let me show you how’ book. But repeatedly we are shown how other people stuff up because their instincts are just not up to the task of divining the right path in the same way Trump’s gut proves to be.



Trump has a clear and ongoing problem with democracy throughout this book too, something the US is learning nearly daily now. For instance, ‘committees are what insecure people create in order to put off making hard decisions’. Or later, ‘I like consultants even less that I like committees. When it comes to making a smart decision, the most distinguished planning committee working with the highest-priced consultants doesn’t hold a candle to a group of guys with a reasonable amount of common sense and their own money on the line.’ Repeatedly throughout this book Trump makes clear his disgust at the regulations that stop him from doing whatever it is he wants to do. Invariably, these regulations are presented as counter-productive, in that he is able to ‘prove’ they achieve the exact opposite of what they sought to achieve – but given he is clearly the one who was going to benefit from these regulations not existing, he can hardly be considered the most objective judge of that. This book is an exercise in explaining why he is a great man of history – and to do that everyone else is presented either as fools, flawed, obstacles or there to be manipulated so as to achieve the great man’s vision.



There is a long discussion here on the building of an ice-skating park. The short version is that the city had been trying to build this, and they constantly stuffed up. It was years behind schedule and massively over budget, and so Trump offered to build it on time and on budget basically as a gift to the city. Anyway, after a lot of toing and froing eventually he did build it. Not that the city was particularly grateful, still, he did. He then explains that this story is basically proof that a single capitalist working alone and with his own money on the line is much better at getting stuff done that horrible public servants who don’t understand the value of money because it isn’t theirs’ in the first place. You know the song well enough to hum along, I’m sure. But almost immediately after telling this story he then talks about some other businessman who stuffs up a project and causes, it seems, just as much trouble. Trump comes to the rescue, but, naturally enough, this time the other businessman’s mistakes aren’t presented as proof that individual capitalists can be just as stupid as evil bureaucracies. The question of why everyone should just have to live with the preferences of rich guys – even when they occasionally destroy art works (as he admits to doing himself on one of his buildings – it was ugly anyway) or build ugly buildings (as just about every developer other than Trump is accused of doing in this book) is something everyone else in the city has to put up with, because, well, capitalism…



This book is a bit like the Bible. It is clearly written for you to come away liking God (or Trump in this case) but somehow you never quite can. There is just something fundamentally unlikeable about them both. All the same, this was a best-selling book and was presented, in part at least, as a business advice book. As I’ve already said, this has virtually no advice anyone could actually use in running their own business – other than somehow acquiring Trump’s gut. You might think that would have been a problem in an advice book, but it seems not.