Trump: The Art of the Deal is a 1987 book ghostwritten by journalist Tony Schwartz with businessman Donald J. Trump. Part memoir and part business-advice book, it was the first book credited to Trump, and it helped to make him a household name. It reached number 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list, stayed there for 13 weeks, and altogether held a position on the list for 48 weeks.
Trump has cited it as one of his proudest accomplishments and his second-favorite book (after the Bible). Schwartz called ghost-writing the book his "greatest regret in life, without question," and both he and the book's publisher, Howard Kaminsky, have said that Trump had played no role in its writing. Trump has given conflicting accounts on the question of authorship.Alt URL
Synopsis
The book talks about Trump's early childhood in Jamaica Estates, Queens. It describes his early work in Brooklyn prior to moving to Manhattan and building the Trump Organization, his actions and thoughts in developing the Grand Hyatt Hotel and Trump Tower, in renovating Wollman Rink, and regarding various other projects. Its opening chapter, "Dealing: A Week in the Life", follows a week of Trump's calls and meetings; the next, "Trump Cards: The Elements of the Deal", sets out eleven principles that recur through the project-based chapters that follow. Trump talks about business strategies and tactics he uses in 'dealmaking', often giving one-liners suggesting simple philosophies to follow in business. The book also contains an 11-step formula for business success, inspired by Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking.
Development Trump was persuaded to produce the book by Condé Nast owner Si Newhouse after the May 1984 issue of his magazine GQ—with Trump appearing on the cover—sold well.GQ. May 1984. Success Issue. Donald Trump, Sandra Bernhard, Bobby Short. Journalist Tony Schwartz was recruited directly by Trump after he read Schwartz's extremely negative 1985 New York article, "A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story", about Trump's unsuccessful efforts to evict rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants from a building he had bought on Central Park South in 1982 and tactics Schwartz portrayed as coercive. To Schwartz's amazement, Trump loved the article and even had the cover, which had an unflattering portrait of him, autographed by Schwartz and hung in his office. Schwartz was hired to write the book for $250,000 upfront; Trump assigned him half of the royalties. Schwartz later said that his motivation was financial and that he needed the money to support his new family.
According to Schwartz in July 2016, Trump did not write any of the book, choosing only to remove a few critical mentions of business colleagues at the end of the process. Trump responded with conflicting stories, saying "I had a lot of choice of who to have write the book, and I chose Schwartz", but then said "Schwartz didn't write the book. I wrote the book." Former Random House head Howard Kaminsky, the original publisher, said "Trump didn't write a postcard for us!" The book was published with the authorship given as "Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz". In 2019, Schwartz suggested that the work be "recategorized as fiction".
To inform the content and style, Schwartz drew on the already-substantial archive of news, profiles and books about Trump as well as interviews with Trump associates. When interviews with Trump himself proved unproductive, the two struck on an unusual alternative: Schwartz listened in on Trump's office phone calls for several months to witness him in action. The experience was condensed into chapter one, "Dealing: A Week in the Life", which introduces the reader to numerous prominent figures and events. The chapter was excerpted in New York Magazine to promote the book and served as a blueprint for future autobiographies.
Schwartz was the subject of a July 2016 article in The New Yorker in which he describes Trump unfavorably and relates how he came to regret writing The Art of the Deal. He also stated that if it were to be written today it would be very different and titled The Sociopath. Schwartz repeated his self-criticism on Good Morning America, saying he had "put lipstick on a pig". In response, Trump's attorneys demanded that Schwartz cede his royalties to Trump.
The cover photo was taken by photographer Michele Singer, who would later become film director and actor Rob Reiner's second wife.
Publication and promotion The Art of the Deal was published in November 1987 by Random House. A promotional campaign was undertaken in conjunction with its release. This included Trump holding a release party at Trump Tower, hosted by Jackie Mason, featuring a celebrity-filled guest list. Trump made a series of appearances on television talk shows and was pictured on a number of magazine covers. Contemporary coverage in the Los Angeles Times reported that the book sold 54,000 copies in one week during the promotion.
Two months before publication, in a bid to promote the book, Trump waded into national politics. On September 2, 1987, working with his publicist, Dan Klores, and long-running political interlocutor, Roger Stone, Trump ran full-page ads in major newspapers criticizing Washington for the cost of defending U.S. allies. On October 22, he spoke to a New Hampshire crowd under the aegis of a "Draft Trump" movement. Of the speech, Trump said in early 2016, "I wasn't even thinking about [running for president] ... It was a lot to do with my book." Klores said, "He didn't run but it was probably the greatest book promotion of all time." Excerpts were published in New York Magazine. The book has been translated into over a dozen languages.
Royalties Trump and Schwartz had an agreement to split royalties from the sale of the book on a 50–50 basis. In 1987, Trump set up the Donald J. Trump Foundation in connection with his stated plan to give away the royalties, promising four or five million dollars "to the homeless, to Vietnam veterans, for AIDS, multiple sclerosis". A Washington Post investigation found that Trump gave $1.9 million of his own money through the foundation from 1987 through 1991, but $143,700 went to the four categories highlighted in the book's promotion: $101,000 to veterans, $26,000 to the homeless, $12,450 to AIDS charities and $4,250 to multiple-sclerosis research. The paper contrasted those amounts with, among other recipients, $16,750 given to the School of American Ballet, which Ivanka Trump attended. The Washington Post asked Trump's 2016 presidential campaign if he had donated the $55,000 of royalties he had earned from the book in the first six months of 2016 to charity, as he promised in the 1980s, and it did not respond.
By 2016, Schwartz said he had received some $1.6 million in royalty payments. Schwartz said he would be donating six months of royalties (worth $55,000) to the National Immigration Law Center, which assists low-income immigrants and advocates for policies allowing more undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States legally. Schwartz had earlier donated royalties he received in the second half of 2015, worth $25,000, to a number of charities including the National Immigration Forum. Schwartz said he wanted to help the people Trump was attacking.
Trump's 2018 financial disclosure reported royalties from The Art of the Deal in the $100,001 to $1 million range, while most of his other books reported little or no royalty income. Trump's disclosure covering 2019 again reported royalties in the $100,001 to $1 million range. His 2025 annual disclosure reported $50,001 to $100,000 in royalties from the book.
Book sales Precise figures of the number of copies sold of The Art of the Deal are unavailable because its publication preceded the Nielsen BookScan era. Accounts differ on the size of the initial printing. Publishers Weekly listed 135,000 copies before publication, while Random House editor Peter Osnos later recalled a first printing of about 125,000; the figure has also been reported as 150,000 copies. Several magazine and book accounts state that it sold over one million hardcover copies or one million copies. A 2016 CBS News investigation reported that an unnamed source familiar with the book's sales placed the figure at 1.1 million copies sold.
Trump said in his 2016 presidential campaign that The Art of the Deal is "the No. 1 selling business book of all time". An analysis by PolitiFact found that other business books had sold many more copies than The Art of the Deal. While it is impossible to find exact sales figures, a range of possibilities based on known claims and facts were given. When compared to six other famous business books, The Art of the Deal ranked in fifth place according to the analysis; the top-selling book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, outsold it by a factor of 15 times.
Reception and legacy At the time of publication, Publishers Weekly called it a "boastful, boyishly disarming, thoroughly engaging personal history". People magazine gave it a mixed review.
John Kenneth Galbraith's 1988 book review in The New York Review of Books said that the book reveals very little about the planning and construction of Trump's projects and hardly mentions the construction companies he had hired to do the work. Instead, the book emphasizes "the deals, including the deals that depend on winning the acquiescence of New York City or New Jersey authorities—righteous, well-intentioned, or mostly, it here seems, otherwise". It also presents "failures, misjudgments, and disasters", such as the unsuccessful venture at 100 Central Park South as an "exercise of great entrepreneurial skill and acceptable public behavior", and the demise of the New Jersey Generals and the USFL, as a success.
Fortune'''s 1988 book review called Trump "master of hype in the communications capital of the world" and said that the book would "not be of much use in business schools or to anyone with a real job. What it delivers is everything you always suspected about the makeup of Donald Trump: the pomposity, the shallowness, and above all, the need for more money, more toys, and more attention". The review also noted that Trump was the 27th-largest developer in the U.S. and "not even the biggest in New York", having "built only three buildings in Manhattan".
In 1991, journalist John Tierney noted Trump "appears to have ignored some of his own advice" in the book due to "well-publicized problems with his banks". 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". John Paul Rollert, an ethicist writing about the book in The Atlantic in 2016, says Trump sees capitalism not as an economic system but a morality play. The book has also been examined in academic literature. Economist Kevin W. Capehart used it in a 2015 article on Hyman Minsky's analysis of Trump's financing, while a 2019 issue of Negotiation Journal included analyses of Trump's negotiation strategy that treated the book as a primary source. A 2026 article in the Quarterly Journal of Speech analyzed the book's construction of wealth, ethos and dealmaking rhetoric.