Hello, I'm indi.ca and welcome to the first edition of Literal Book Talks, where I use demonic AI to talk to books. Today we're going to interview Donald Trump from 1987, as published in the book Art Of The Deal. But before we get to the unholy ghost, let's talk to his ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz.

indi.ca: So Tony, how much of this book did Donald write?

Schwartz: I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.

indi.ca: So how much of this is Trump? How much is ‘true’? How much can we read into a book by a man who doesn't read?

Schwartz: I put lipstick on a pig. More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.

Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood. It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then...

indi.ca: Lol, OK. So understand that we're talking to a facsimile of a liar, not the actual spirit of Donald Trump, which was hocked to the devil long ago. So let's bring on our main guest and start the show.

Hello, Donald Trump 1987, as published in The Art Of The Deal and reincarnated through demonic AI. How's it hanging Ghost Trump?

Trump: You’re the greatest!

indi.ca: Thank you. Now, you're President of the United States. Who saw that coming? Well, maybe you did. For reference, here's you talking to Larry King in 1987.

Now here you are, the proverbial dog who caught the car. In order to interrogate you further, I've actually used this clip to clone your voice.

So, zombie Trump, now that your disensouled body has become President twice, what do you think of your predecessors?

Trump: I think of Jimmy Carter. After he lost the election to Ronald Reagan, Carter came to see me in my office. He told me he was seeking contributions to the Jimmy Carter Library. I asked how much he had in mind. And he said, “Donald, I would be very appreciative if you contributed five million dollars.”

I was dumbfounded. I didn’t even answer him.

But that experience also taught me something. Until then, I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president. But then, of course, the American people caught on pretty quickly that Carter couldn’t do the job, and he lost in a landslide when he ran for reelection.

Ronald Reagan is another example. He is so smooth and so effective a performer that he completely won over the American people. Only now, nearly seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.

indi.ca: How long do you think you'll get away with it?

Trump: You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.

indi.ca: Why are you even doing this? Someone in the comments said their dog actually caught a car once, it was a convertible and they jumped in. But then, of course, it had no idea what to do. I guess it was just exciting? Is it the same feeling for you?

Trump: The real excitement is playing the game. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what I should have done differently, or what’s going to happen next. If you ask me exactly what the deals I’m about to describe all add up to in the end, I’m not sure I have a very good answer. Except that I’ve had a very good time making them.

Why, everyone said to me, would I even consider this deal? For one reason only: I believed that, managed well, it had the potential to earn a ton of money.

indi.ca: Reading your book, it sounds like you have some obvious daddy issues. I remember when you first won the Presidency, you thanked your parents like it was a prize you won, like they'd approve of you from hell. For reference, I'd like to briefly introduce the ghost of Philip Larkin here, reading his famous poem, which I think applies to White people, but not cross-culturally.

Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

indi.ca: So, how fucked up is you Donald? How was your relationship with your father?

Trump: We had a relationship that was almost businesslike. I sometimes wonder if we’d have gotten along so well if I hadn’t been as business-oriented as I am.

indi.ca: But your father basically drove your brother to drink and death right? What happened to Fredo Trumpeon?

Trump: My older brother, Freddy, the first son, had perhaps the hardest time in our family. My father is a wonderful man, but he is also very much a business guy and strong and tough as hell. My brother was just the opposite. Handsome as could be, he loved parties and had a great, warm personality and a real zest for life. He didn’t have an enemy in the world. Naturally, my father very much wanted his oldest son in the business, but unfortunately, business just wasn’t for Freddy. He went to work with my father reluctantly, and he never had a feel for real estate. He wasn’t the kind of guy who could stand up to a killer contractor or negotiate with a rough supplier. Because my father was so strong, there were inevitably confrontations between the two of them. In most cases, Freddy came out on the short end.

indi.ca: Yeah, so Fredo quit to become an airline pilot which he seemed to enjoy, but your dad made fun of him and the working class in general by calling him a bus driver, dismissively. Fred's daughter Mary was largely cut out of the will. And, incidentally, before your current national fraud, the amount you inherited, if invested in index funds would have made you as wealthy as all your running around. Anyways, Mary, who said your dad, whose name was actually Frederick Christ Trump, was a real piece of work. She said that this anti-Christ “dismantled [her dad] by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality.” What did you do while this was going on?

Trump: I can remember saying to him, even though I was eight years younger, “Come on, Freddy, what are you doing? You’re wasting your time.” I regret now that I ever said that.

indi.ca: OK, spare me the psychoanalysis, actually. That actually seems to benefit psychos. I'm sure your dad would be proud. You're both dicks. What do you even know about the world to try running it?

Trump: When I’m in another city and I take a cab, I’ll always make it a point to ask the cabdriver questions. I ask and I ask and I ask, until I begin to get a gut feeling about something. And that’s when I make a decision. I have learned much more from conducting my own random surveys than I could ever have learned from the greatest of consulting firms.

I also had a good time when I went out at night, I was working. I met a lot of very successful, very wealthy men at Le Club. I was learning how the New York scene operates and I was meeting the sort of people with whom I’d eventually work on deals. I also met the sort of wealthy people, particularly Europeans and South Americans, who eventually bought the most expensive apartments in Trump Tower and Trump Plaza.

indi.ca: So are these rich people your point of reference for the international economy?

Trump: The cycles of buyers at Trump Tower became something of a barometer of what was going on in the international economy. At first, the big buyers were the Arabs, when oil prices were going through the roof. Then, of course, oil prices fell and the Arabs went home. In 1981, we got a sudden wave of buyers from France. I wasn’t sure why, but then I realized the reason was that François Mitterrand had been elected president, and anyone smart and wealthy realized immediately that Mitterrand was going to hurt the French economy. It wasn’t just that he was a socialist.

After the European cycle, we got the South Americans and the Mexicans, when the dollar was weak and their economies still seemed fairly strong. Then, when inflation set in, their currencies were devalued, and their governments tried to restrict the outflow of cash, that cycle ended.

indi.ca: So what you're doing now is ending what Ray Dalio would call a supercycle, which affects American finance bros. In the 1980s, did you see those guys coming up?

Trump: During the past several years, we’ve had two new groups buying. One is American—specifically, Wall Street types, brokers and investment bankers who’ve made instant fortunes during the bull market frenzy.

indi.ca: As a real estate guy, what do you think of these finance guys?

It’s ridiculous, when you think about it. You get stockbrokers, barely twenty-five years old, who suddenly earn $600,000 a year because clients they’ve never met call up and say, “I’ll take fifty thousand shares of General Motors.” The broker pushes a button on a computer and, presto, he’s got a huge commission. As soon as the stock market falls out—which it will, because it too runs in cycles—most of these guys will be out on the street looking for work.

indi.ca: As a politician you're complaining about China cheating America, but this has always been your basic idea of foreign policy. Your policy has always been that foreigners are ripping America off. So what did you have to say in the 80s, about other Asians?

Trump: I have great respect for what the Japanese have done with their economy, but for my money they are often very difficult to do business with. For starters, they come in to see you in groups of six or eight or even twelve, and so you’ve got to convince all of them to make any given deal. You may succeed with one or two or three, but it’s far harder to convince all twelve. In addition, they rarely smile and they are so serious that they don’t make doing business fun. Fortunately, they have a lot of money to spend, and they seem to like real estate. What’s unfortunate is that for decades now they have become wealthier in large measure by screwing the United States with a self-serving trade policy that our political leaders have never been able to fully understand or counteract.

indi.ca: Yes, so this is the same thing you blame the Chinese for now. As Pink Floyd said, all in all, it's just another chink in the wall.

Anyways, with decelerating trade and accelerating genocide you're really changing the face of the world. Reading your old stuff it's surprising how much your beliefs and practices are actually very consistent, I think people are just surprised that you're actually doing it. Can you explain your plan?

Trump: I never had a master plan. I just got fed up one day and decided to do something about it. The most important influence on me growing up was my father. I learned, get in, get it done, get it done right, and get out.

indi.ca: So what does getting out mean? From the outside, it looks like you're dump-and-pumping the whole US economy. Aren't you running the country like a casino?

Trump: I like the casino business. I like the scale, which is huge, I like the glamour, and most of all, I like the cash flow. If you know what you are doing and you run your operation reasonably well, you can make a very nice profit. If you run it very well, you can make a ton of money.

I’ve never had any great moral problems with gambling because most of the objections seem hypocritical to me. The New York Stock Exchange happens to be the biggest casino in the world. The only thing that makes it different from the average casino is that the players dress in blue pinstripe suits and carry leather briefcases. If you allow people to gamble in the stock market, where more money is made and lost than in all the casinos of the world put together, I see nothing terribly different about permitting people to bet on blackjack or craps or roulette.

indi.ca: What about all the lawyer politicians and politcal committees and political consultants trying to stop you?

Trump: I don’t like lawyers. I think all they do is delay deals, instead of making deals, and every answer they give you is no, and they are always looking to settle instead of fight. Roy Cohn said he agreed with me. I liked that and so then I said, “I’m just not built that way. I’d rather fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once, you get the reputation of being a folder.”

To me, committees are what insecure people create in order to put off making hard decisions. I like consultants even less than 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.

indi.ca: What about your sinking approval ratings?

Trump: You can probably guess how much stock I put in polls.

indi.ca: Aren't you making things more complicated? For example, you're trying to negotiate over 180 trade deals separately, including with penguins, who are notoriously fishy. However, the World Trade Organization exists, and gave America plenty of control for decades. Why are you over-complicating things?

Trump: I have an almost perverse attraction to complicated deals, partly because they tend to be more interesting, but also because it is more likely you can get a good price on a difficult deal. That’s just my makeup. I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky.

indi.ca: Who are people even supposed to be negotiating with?

If you’re going to make a deal of any significance, you have to go to the top. You’re better off dealing with a total killer with real passion. When he says no, sometimes you can talk him out of it. You rant and you rave, and he rants and raves back, and you end up making a deal. But when a machine says no, it’s very tough.

indi.ca: Besides trade, you're also continuing the American genocide of Palestine. How is that a good deal?

My original plan was very straightforward. We’d let the tenants know that we intended to eventually demolish the building. Then we’d offer them help in finding suitable new apartments, as well as cash incentives to move.

indi.ca: So Hamas, being heroes, actually refused huge cash offers to give up their land and people. How would describe 'Israel's' terror campaign in response?

It happens to be very easy to vacate a building if, like so many landlords, you don’t mind being a bad guy. When these landlords buy buildings they intend to vacate, they use corporate names that are difficult to trace. Then they hire thugs to come in with sledgehammers and smash up the boiler, rip out the stairways, and create floods by cutting holes in pipes. They import truckloads of junkies, prostitutes, and thieves and move them into vacant apartments to terrorize holdout tenants.
That’s what I call harassment.

indi.ca: Despite all the child killing and mass starvation, you're losing. As Henry Kissinger said, the guerrilla army wins by not losing, and Hamas and Ansarallah and Hezbollah have taken massive damage, but they have not lost. Same for the one free state in the region, Iran. Meanwhile conventional armies in Russia are winning by winning, and China, as the meme goes, does nothing and wins. Everywhere people stand up to you, you fold. How does that work?

Trump: Bullies may act tough, but they’re really closet cowards. The only people bullies push around are the ones they know they can beat. Confront a strong, competent person, and he’ll fight back harder than ever. Confront a bully, and in most cases he’ll fold like a deck of cards.

indi.ca: What are you even doing in Ukraine? You seem to be cutting them down and then expecting them to negotiate with even less leverage?

Trump: I know from my own experience that the only way to get even the best contractor to finish a job on time and on budget is to lean on him very, very hard. You can get any job done through sheer force of will.

indi.ca: You're also shitting on erstwhile allies like occupied Europe? Why?

Trump: Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.

indi.ca: Yes, this comes up in Art Of The Deal a lot, you seem to negotiate by trashing the thing you want to buy, or making it worse. Like when you were trying to buy the land for Trump Tower, or the Commodore Hotel, you seemed to publicly push existing projects to failure before buying them.

Trump: If you want to buy something, it’s obviously in your best interest to convince the seller that what he’s got isn’t worth very much.

indi.ca: In terms of press, your attitude also doesn't seem to have changed. I mean, why fix it if it's not broken.

Trump: I’m a businessman, and I learned a lesson from experience: good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all. Controversy, in short, sells.

One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better. It’s in the nature of the job, and I understand that. The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.

I’m not saying that they necessarily like me. Sometimes they write positively, and sometimes they write negatively. But from a pure business point of view, the benefits of being written about have far outweighed the drawbacks.

indi.ca: So, before we put this genie back in the bottle, what's next for the world?

Trump: Fortunately, I don’t know the answer, because if I did, that would take half the fun out of it. This much I do know: it won’t be the same.

indi.ca: And finally, finally, what does it profit you to do all this and lose your own soul?

Trump: I enjoy Mar-a-Lago almost in spite of myself. It may be as close to paradise as I’m going to get.