Mr. Trump never spent any of his money (or the banks' money) on petty extravagances such as tipping the help. But he spent more than $1 million to alter every sign, logo, decal and fixture in order to change the name Trump's Castle to Trump Castle.

Mr. O'Donnell tells how crude Mr. Trump is. He once said to him about Ms. Maples: "God, I wish you could see her body! . . . If you could take one look at it, just one look, you wouldn't believe it. It's unbelievable. Better than a ten." (According to Mr. O'Donnell, he also used four-letter words all the time.) Mr. Trump also said that the publicity from his liaison with Ms. Maples and his divorce would be good for business.

Indeed, according to the author, Mr. Trump was not above exploiting the publicity surrounding the 1989 helicopter crash that killed three of his top executives. Although there was never any possibility that he would have been aboard the helicopter, for weeks after the tragedy Mr. Trump went around implying that he had had a brush with death.

Not bad as far as dish. But Mr. O'Donnell impugns Mr. Trump's business acumen as well. Take, for example, his purchase of the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Anybody with expertise in construction, the author contends, would have understood that during the years the Taj Mahal stood unfinished, the salt air and cold weather had deteriorated its structure, requiring millions of dollars in rehabilitation.

Nor did Mr. Trump understand that operating the Taj Mahal would be self-defeating because, as his third casino in Atlantic City, it would attract a large number of preferred customers from the other two.

Mr. O'Donnell outlines a bunch of bad deals that Mr. Trump insisted on. And he tells how, when they went sour, Mr. Trump always blamed somebody else -- often his dead executives.

Mr. O'Donnell also implies that Mr. Trump is a racist and a touch anti-Semitic. Speaking about a black accountant at Trump Plaza, Mr. Trump, according to the author, opined that "laziness is a trait in blacks" and said to Mr. O'Donnell: "I've got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day." It isn't any wonder that, according to Mr. O'Donnell, when Mr. Trump heard that he was writing this book he tried to intimidate him into abandoning the project.

Okay. What you know about Donald Trump won't enable you to survive alone in the wilderness. But if you always suspected that beneath his crude, callow, shallow exterior lay a crude, callow, shallow interior, read "Trumped!" It will give you the pleasure of knowing that you were right.