Trump: The Art of the Deal

Trump: The Art of the Deal is part memoir and part business-advice book, built around Donald Trump's account of the real estate deals that built his reputation in New York and Atlantic City through the mid-1980s. It opens with a chapter following a single week of Trump's business activity in 1987, juggling several deals and negotiations at once, before moving to a chapter that lays out an explicit eleven-point personal framework for dealmaking — among them thinking big, protecting the downside, maximizing options, using leverage, and treating publicity as a business asset in its own right. The rest of the book alternates between biography and deal-by-deal narrative: Trump's account of growing up in Queens as the son of developer Fred Trump, an early apprenticeship on a modest apartment complex in Cincinnati, the calculated move into higher-profile Manhattan real estate, and then the string of projects — the Commodore Hotel's conversion into the Grand Hyatt, the site assembly and design ambitions behind Trump Tower, entry into the Atlantic City casino business, and a contested Central Park South redevelopment — that the book presents as the direct application of the framework laid out earlier.

Two chapters late in the book depart from clean success stories. One covers Trump's ownership of the New Jersey Generals in the United States Football League and the league's ultimately hollow antitrust victory over the NFL, which the book treats candidly as a bet made without the fallback position its own framework calls for. Another covers the long-running effort to develop Manhattan's West Side rail yards into a project branded Television City, presented as unresolved business at the time of publication rather than a finished win. A shorter, publicity-friendly chapter recounts Trump privately financing and completing a stalled city renovation of Central Park's Wollman Rink faster and more cheaply than the city itself had managed over several years, offered as proof of the book's cost-and-schedule-discipline claims. The book closes by returning to the opening week-in-the-life chapter and reporting how its various open threads were ultimately resolved.

An important fact about how the book came to exist shapes how it should be read: while credited to Trump, it was substantially written by journalist Tony Schwartz, who spent roughly eighteen months observing Trump's office, meetings, and phone calls to produce the manuscript, and received a joint cover credit and half of the book's advance and royalties under the agreement that produced it. Both Schwartz and the book's original publisher have said Trump's direct role in drafting the text was minimal. Schwartz has spoken at length in later years, including in a widely read 2016 New Yorker profile, about his own view of the book and his role in producing it.

Commercially, the book was a significant success on publication in November 1987, reaching number one on the New York Times bestseller list and remaining on it for nearly a year, and it played a large role in establishing Trump's public reputation as a dealmaker well beyond the New York real estate industry that had previously known him. It has remained in print and widely read in the decades since, cited by admirers as a distillation of aggressive, publicity-conscious dealmaking and examined by biographers and journalists for how its account of specific deals compares with the more contested historical record around them.