At the time of publication,
Publishers Weekly called it a "boastful, boyishly disarming, thoroughly engaging personal history".
People magazine gave it a mixed review. Trump's self-promotion, best-selling book and media celebrity status led one commentator in 2006 to call him "a poster-child for the '
greed is good' 1980s". (The phrase "Greed is good" is from the movie
Wall Street, which was released a month after
The Art of the Deal.)
Jim Geraghty in the
National Review said in 2015 that the book showed "a much softer, warmer, and probably happier figure than the man dominating the airwaves today". The book coined the phrase "truthful hyperbole" describing "an innocent form of exaggeration—and... a very effective form of promotion". Schwartz said Trump loved the phrase. In January 2017, the phrase was noted for its similarity to the phrase "
alternative facts" coined by
Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway when she defended
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's widely derided statements about the attendance at
Trump's inauguration as
President of the United States. Schwartz described Trump's lying: In 2021,
Yuri Shvets, an ex-
KGB agent, claimed that Trump had been cultivated by the KGB for 40 years, starting in the 1980s as tensions between the United States and
Soviet Union were thawing. In
The Art of the Deal, Trump acknowledges the potential business opportunities arising from the positive turn in the relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union which includes the possibility of building "a large luxury hotel across the street from the
Kremlin in partnership with the Soviet government." It was during this period that the ex-KGB agent alleges to have discussed with Trump going into politics and were "stunned" when he returned to the US and took out a full-page ad parroting anti-Western Russian talking points.
Questions of veracity Biographers, associates and fact-checkers have cast doubt on the book's version of events. To those with detailed knowledge of the projects, the singular hero of the book appeared instead as a fictional composite of the many power-brokers, doers and domain experts who actually made things happen. This omniscient persona faced exaggerated odds and won overstated profits. As biographer Gwenda Blair wrote in 2000, "In
The Art of the Deal, [Trump] claims that business deals are what distinguish him ... but his most original creation is the continuous self-inflation." Still, those tracing out Trump's life could not discern the more limited reality all at once. Speaking 20 years later, Blair bemoaned her failure, as a biographer, to have "understood how fabricated [the book] was ... how that founding myth was so riddled with at best exaggeration." Chapter four, "The Cincinnati Kid", tells the story of Trump's "first big deal". According to the book, Trump came up with the idea of buying Swifton Village, a struggling apartment complex in Cincinnati. He partnered with his father
Fred to turn Swifton around; then, just as the neighborhood headed irretrievably downhill, tricked a buyer into overpaying: "The price was $12 million—or approximately a $6 million profit for us. It was a huge return on a short-term investment." Roy Knight, part of the Village's maintenance crew, told reporters that the project was actually Fred Trump's "baby"; biographers generally agree. Donald was cloistered at
New York Military Academy when his father boarded a plane to Ohio and won the property at auction. He attended college while Fred turned things around. The younger Trump did visit on occasion, but only to do "yard work and cleaning". Finally, the sale price was $6.75 million, $1 million more than the purchase price, representing little if any profit after eight years of expenses (estimated at $500,000) and interest. Chapter six, "
Grand Hyatt", tells the story of Trump's true first big deal. Without it, the book opined, "I'd probably be back in Brooklyn today, collecting rents." In his 1992 biography of Trump, journalist
Wayne Barrett, who had covered the project in detail, took issue with many of the book's claims. In particular, he noted the absence of nearly all the key players—from New York governor
Hugh Carey, a longtime
Trump family associate, to city planners betting their careers on the novel private-public partnership, to
Louise Sunshine, Carey's former chief fundraiser. "In
The Art of the Deal," Barrett wrote, "it was as if Donald walked out onstage alone." Chapter seven, "
Trump Tower," opens with a fully hatched plan. "In order to put up the building I had in mind, I was going to have to assemble several ... adjacent pieces—and then seek numerous zoning variances."
George Ross, one of Trump's lawyers on the project and later his lieutenant on
The Apprentice, seasons 1–5, recalled the process differently. Where Trump depicted himself expertly poring over his "
air-rights contract" and "discover[ing] an unexpected bonus," Ross wrote: "I enlightened Donald about the zoning laws that permitted one owner to sell and transfer unused building rights (commonly called air rights)." One key step involved the adjacent
Tiffany's store. "Unfortunately, I didn't know anyone at Tiffany," Trump wrote, "and the owner, Walter Hoving, was known not only as a legendary retailer but also as a difficult, demanding, mercurial guy." Trump claimed that he
cold-called Hoving and tricked him into a one-sided deal. Per Ross, however, the transaction was aboveboard and owed entirely to Fred Trump's business connections: "Donald's father and Walter Hoving had done some business together and Donald's father suggested to Donald that he could work out a fair deal with Hoving in a short period of time." Based on
Trump's tax returns between 1985 and 1994 which showed a loss greater than "nearly any other individual American taxpayer" during that period, co-author Schwartz suggested that the book might be "recategorized as fiction".
Film and television In 1988, Trump and
Ted Turner announced plans for a television film based on the book. The plans had been largely abandoned by 1991.
Mark Burnett, creator of
The Apprentice, credited the book for inspiring "his leap from selling T-shirts off racks on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles to producing television shows," and later, after success with
Survivor, the idea of a show starring Trump himself. Trump's monologue opened the long-running show: "I've mastered the art of the deal ... And as the master I want to pass my knowledge along to somebody else. I'm looking for... The Apprentice." Aspects of the book were used as the basis for the 2016
parody film ''
Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal: The Movie''. ==See also==