Last week, Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Donald Trump’s “Art of the Deal”, joined a long list of people who have worked with Trump and concluded that he is not fit to be President. Schwartz’s memoir is perhaps the most damning.
“A lack of conscience can be a huge advantage when it comes to accruing power, attention and wealth in a society where most other human beings abide by a social contract,” he writes in the New York Times. And Trump is “Exhibit A”.
American voters should take heed. They do not want to be in a position that the German people found themselves in in the 1940s and 1950s – being asked the question: How did you – decent Germans – let this happen?
I know the saying goes that when you invoke Hitler you lose the argument. But we are not comparing Hitler in the bunker in 1945 with Trump but rather the eerie similarities between Trump’s words now and Hitler’s in the early 1930s on his rise to power and immediately thereafter – when newspapers referred to him as Mr Hitler and world leaders engaged in diplomacy with him seriously.
Those similarities include:
Narcissism: Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in 1925. Trump published The Art of the Deal in 1987. Two very self-centered books.
Playing on resentment of mainly nationalist white men who lost work because of outsiders (for Hitler the Allies; for Trump the Chinese; for both the Jews and the communists).
The acts of treason: Hitler in the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch and Trump in 2021.
Assertions that the country is in ruins and only they can fix it.
The rallies in Nuremberg and Maddison Square Garden.
The concentration camps – in Trump’s case for rounded-up illegal immigrants.
Violence and intimidation by followers being condoned and encouraged.
Contempt for the rule of law; the desire to abuse legal process to harass opponents; and a determination to rule by individual edict. Demanding that the courts execute their will.
Demanding office-holders give them personal loyalty.
Replacing the truth with lies and exaggerations.
The similarities are all there. The trend is similar. As is the failure to decisively call it out and stop it. The trajectory extremely worrying. Fascist and autocratic tendencies are easily identified. It is only a question of degree. And that degree is largely determined by what the autocrat is allowed to get away with: storming the Capitol or burning the Reichstag.
American voters might think they are voting for tariffs that will save their jobs; someone who will stand up to foreigners taking advantage of America; or a better economy. But that is not what they will get.
Schwartz worked very closely with Trump for a long time ghostwriting the Art of the Deal. Since then, he has “studied and researched leaders and other high achievers on how their early childhood experiences have influenced their adult lives – mostly unconsciously – and on exploring the often-vast gulf between how they present themselves on the outside and how they feel on the inside”.
“It’s long been deeply unsettling to me how many behaviours associated with psychopathy Mr Trump exemplifies. There are seven characteristics associated with ‘antisocial personality disorder’, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: deceitfulness, impulsivity, failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours, irritability and aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of self or others, consistent irresponsibility, and lack of remorse. I’ve observed all seven in Mr. Trump over the years, and watched them get progressively worse. It’s the last one – lack of remorse – that gives him licence to freely exercise the other six.”
As Trump has said, he is the same person today that he was as a child.
As a politician he receives no sincere declarations of friendship, love, affection, or warm anecdotes, just the sycophancy he demands. Every relationship is transactional. When Roy Cohn, his longtime lawyer who did so much for Trump and his businesses, contracted AIDS, Trump deserted him, as he has done to many others. Without remorse.
The Republican Party should have weeded him out a decade ago and certainly should not have given him a second nomination. His four years in power resulted in a long list of people who resigned because they could not work with him or were fired by him because they refused to bend to his personal will.
Many of them cited one or more of the seven classic characteristics of anti-social personality disorder that Schwartz identified. That should be enough, but they could be dismissed as cases of sour grapes. Schwartz, however, was not fired by Trump. To the contrary he did well. More importantly, he has spent his professional life studying the character of high achievers.
To many Australians the support Trump gets despite his flawed character is mystifying.
One explanation is that nearly 90 per cent of US voters either identify as or lean to one or other of the major parties, leaving only just over 10 per cent as independents.
In short, the major parties could put up a white rabbit and still get 45 per cent of the vote. One party has now put up a candidate with antisocial personality disorder and is still polling 45 per cent of the vote.
Americans can’t say they weren’t warned. Australians, too, have been warned. In the past both Coalition and Labor Governments and Oppositions have expressed willingness to always work with both Democrat or Republican Administrations. But this is different – because you cannot “work with” a transactional sociopath.
Former Australian Labor Prime Minister now Ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, has said Australians should “chill out” at the prospect of a second Trump presidency. To the contrary, we should regard the prospect of a second Trump presidency as chilling.
Crispin Hull
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 15 October 2024.